Long Wait Till Morning

It was raining. It was dark, and raining, and very windy. The rain was invisible except for an orange cone under each streetlight, but you could hear it, like marbles falling on a tile floor.

He was wet, of course. His curly brown hair was darkened by it and pressed flat against his head. His shirt was black, so it couldn't get darker, but it hung heavy and dripping from his shoulders. I was dressed for bed, in a tee shirt and cloth shorts.

"Hi, Sean," he said. "I thought I'd come over to your house."

"Mark," I replied cautiously, "do you know what time it is?"

"About half an hour 'till midnight, I think." He said it casually, as if this were not a strange time to appear sopping wet at my door. "I thought I'd sleep at your house tonight. You don't mind?" For a moment, he looked desperate, pleading, before the casual smile returned. I wondered if all the water on his face was rain.

This would have to be done carefully, or he'd leave again, and I couldn't think of anywhere else he might go. "Sure, no problem. We're friends, right? You're always welcome to sleep over. Come in and get dry. I've got some stuff you can wear, so you can change out of those clothes."

"Hey, thanks, man. You think you can get me some hot chocolate, or something? It's kinda cold out."

"No problem. You know where my room is, and towels are in the bathroom if you want." I went and fixed the chocolate, though I knew why he'd asked for it. He was giving us both time to get in our shells, to prepare to pretend this was a normal sleepover. He was always like this. He had emotions, anyone who knew him well could see that. He just didn't let himself show them. If you tried to dig for them, he retreated, ending the conversation or leaving altogether. I was one of only three people who'd seen under that ever-present armor, and one of those was a girlfriend he'd broken up with immediately after.

I met him on the stairs with a mug of chocolate for each of us. He was wearing one of my old tee shirts and some sweatpants. His smile looked broken. I glanced at his eyes.

You don't see anything! Not a thing! Don't even look away!

"Hey, thanks, man. This looks great."

What could cause that? What could make his eyes so angry, so empty, so scared? "No prob. Here, we'll drink it in the living room."

"You're Mom'll kill you if we spill chocolate on the couch."

"So don't." Was he in some kind of trouble? But what would it be? Drugs? No way. Girls? He hadn't had a girlfriend in two years. Had he had a fight with someone? "How's Colleen?"

We sat down on the soft, expensive couch. "She's great. Her basketball team's in the state playoffs, she hasn't shut up about it."

Thank God. Trouble with his sister would have killed him. They were incredibly close. She might be the only person he was closer to than to me, including. . .

"Your parents?"

"Meh." He sniffed a little, trying to make it seem he was smelling his drink. "They're not too bad, I guess." His parents. Shit. Neither of them were quick to hear things they didn't want to hear. A fight between Mark and his parents would be hard to end. Shit shit shit. "Mmm. This is good."

The armor was always there. Holding everything in, not showing the slightest emotion unless you knew exactly what to look for. Except when it wasn't. Then. . . well, explosion was the best word for it. Mark became totally lost in himself, and all he could do was scream in rage, or weep uncontrollably, or however he needed to release his pressurized feelings. The explosions terrified him. I'd witnessed only one, but I'd seen the aftermaths of two more. Once it was over, he couldn't focus, could barely speak. After the last one, he'd spent two days staring at his bedroom ceiling.

"Were you gonnna stay tomorrow, too?" I asked. Tomorrow was a Tuesday, a school day. I didn't care.

"No, that's okay."

"Sure? You're welcome to, you know that."
"Nah. I think I should head home tomorrow morning." Whatever it was, he planned to go back and face it again in the morning. He always had been brave like that.

"Okay, cool. You wanna do somethin'?"

"Not really. How 'bout we just sit for a while." I wasn't sure what that meant. Did he want to talk some more? We finished our drinks in silence. He took a few deep breaths and let them out again, as if psyching himself up for something.

"Hey, Sean," he said finally, his voice shaking slightly. "Did you know I was gay?"

Oh. Oh. I thought back over things I'd seen Mark say and do. Many of them suddenly had new interpretations. Mark was gay. I should have seen it.

"No," I said finally. "You never mentioned it."

"I know. I just asked 'cause Colleen figured it out on her own."

She couldn't have. . . "Did she tell your parents?"

"Nope." Good. "I did." Crap. I could just picture that.

"Bet they didn't take it all that well."

"Pretty badly, actually." I knew Mark's parents. His father would have been absolutely furious. He would have loomed over his son, bellowing like a wounded bear. His mother would be worse. She would not have yelled, she would have spoken very quietly, using words like sin and twisted and perversion and sickness. And poor Mark would never be able to show his pain. He would just leave, or possibly be kicked out, and have to spend the night somewhere else.

"But you're going home tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Maybe they'll have cooled down in the morning. Where there's life, there's hope, and all that."

I knew he was lonely and hurt. I know him better than almost anyone in the world. So I let myself reach over and gently grasp his hand.

He looked down at our twined fingers, then up at my face. I smiled a little, and he returned it, though his eyes hadn't changed. And together we began the long wait till morning.

* * * * *

Author's Note

More coming-out-related angst. I can write other stuff, really I can! The other piece I'm working on is just fantasy and light fluff, no angst whatsoever. I don't even know where all this is coming from; as parental coming-out scenes go I did pretty good.

I wasn't entirely certain I wanted to post this. I'm not quite sure how well the story concept works out. Review, please -- especially if there was some problem or something you didn't like. If you guys decide it was good, I might move it to Romance and write more. I think Sean and Mark have started to grow on me, which has never happened for any of my previous angsty vignettes. But as I mentioned, I do have another long project going, so I'm not sure. We'll see what happens.