ONE.

Saturday

Lane McNeil knew he was gay a very long time before he started having sex with Angie Greenfield. The thing was, no one else knew, and this was the best way Lane could think of to keep his secret.

Angie made a throaty sound from beneath him, and only then did he really remember what he was doing.

It wasn’t difficult, having sex with a girl. All he had to do was think of something else—something that turned him on—and he was good as gold. Plus, he liked Angie. Just not in the way she thought.

“Harder,” she whispered, her voice husky. Lane smiled a little in spite of himself and followed her command with all the enthusiasm he could muster.

“Oh, baby,” he said, flinching at how forced it sounded to him. But she definitely wasn’t paying attention to his voice inflections right now, so it didn’t matter. “Oh, God, yeah.”

She was breathing harder and her body was tensing up by degrees; Lane knew what that meant. He positioned his hand on the small of her back; stroking the expanse of her perfect, porcelain skin, cursing himself a little for being such a fucking coward. He felt Angie go rigid and the muscles in her back and stomach contracted with pleasure and release. She let out a sigh and he rolled off of her.

“That was amazing,” she breathed, her naked body spread out on his bed like a sacrifice. He smiled at her and pressed his lips to hers, passing her a silent apology. Then he stood up and disappeared into the bathroom.

“Okay. I’m here. Now what’s so fucking important that it couldn’t wait ‘til tonight?” Brianna DiCastro was angry at a lot of things. She was angry at her father, for calling her out of work without offering an explanation. She was angry at the sun, which had decided to turn usually temperate Quincy, Massachusetts into a sauna. She was angry at her head for aching. “Well?” she demanded.

Affronted, Warren DiCastro stepped forward, albeit hesitantly, and lay a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “Bri,” he began, already regretting the hardship he was about to cause her. He heard the words in his head before he even said them and even to Warren, who had spent the last three hours letting them sink in, they sounded foreign. “I have cancer.”

“Again, I’m sorry about the wait. Dr. DiCastro was called out on a family emergency, but I don’t expect she’ll be out long.” Colin Riley looked up at the pretty, young, secretary and nodded. He’d been sitting in the waiting room of his psychiatrist’s office for about fifteen minutes, flipping through a tattered issue of US weekly dated February 2004. It was May, 2007. Anxious, he pulled out his cell phone and ran the pad of his thumb over the numbers. Once. Twice.

“Sorry! Sorry!” Dr. DiCastro blustered into the air-conditioned office on a stifling wave of heat that smelled like melting concrete and suntan lotion. She smiled sympathetically at Colin and he stood up. “I’m so sorry I’m late, Col,” she said, ushering him into her office at the end of the hall. “Let’s get started.”

Lane slid down to the floor, his back against the cool porcelain of the toilet. The black and white pattern of the floor tiles made his head spin; he felt like an asshole. He wasn’t doing this to hurt her, he was doing it to help him. But that, he decided, didn’t make it any more right. He had to tell her, he knew he had to tell her. But it wasn’t going to be easy.

Angie was sound asleep when Lane got back into bed, careful not to wake her. She had put on a pair of his boxers and one of his t-shirts and her face was pressed against his pillow, breathing in his scent. Her black hair had come loose from its neat ponytail, and strands of it stuck to her forehead and the nape of her neck. Her skin was glowing. Resigned, Lane nestled beside her, content to wait until later to make her hate him.

Colin was nineteen; old enough that he did not have to share his medical records—or any record, for that matter—with his parents. Well, parent, anyway. His mother had left when Colin was twelve and though she kept in touch with him, he guessed she would want nothing to do with this.

“How did this week go?” Dr. DiCastro asked, casually, her green eyes resting on his. Colin shrugged.

“Fine. We won our game on Monday,” he answered. This wasn’t what she cared about, and he knew it. She wanted him to tell her all about his little “episodes.” About how in the middle of that same lacrosse game, he had felt so sick he had to be subbed out. About how during his math test on Wednesday, he had felt like he was boiling from the inside out; how he had been shaking so badly he couldn’t keep the god damn pencil in his hand. But he wasn’t going to give her that.

“Oh, yeah? That’s great.”

Colin had been seeing Dr. DiCastro for a couple weeks now. Not because he wanted to, but because after his last trip to the Emergency Room, the doctor had recommended her. Not to mention she was covered by insurance and Colin only had to shell out a small co-pay for her services. So far, though, she hadn’t been able to tell him what was wrong with him.

“How about school? Everything going okay there?” Brianna didn’t know a whole lot about Colin Riley. She knew he’d been raised by a single father; not a far cry from normalcy these days. She knew that within the last four years he’d missed enough school to get him held back in the twelfth grade. She knew that every so often, he drove himself to the ER and not a single time had he been given anything stronger than Tylenol.

“School’s fine,” he replied, wringing his hands. Brianna sighed. She had been a psychiatrist for about four years, and she came across her fair share of teenagers who didn’t want to talk. But as far as she could tell, Colin was a fairly normal nineteen-year-old boy. Maybe he wasn’t talking about his psychiatric problems because he didn’t have any. But then what was wrong with him?

Warren sighed and slid a hand down his face. He had little to gain by feeling sorry for himself; this much he knew, but his daughter was a different story. Brianna was a psychiatrist, and that meant she was always trying to analyze the feelings of everybody around her. Sometimes it drove him crazy. Somehow, though, he had expected a different response from her when he told her about his…condition. But, as usual, she had sat him down and spoken to him in her low, soothing therapist voice.

“It’s gonna be okay, dad,” she had said. “There’s plenty of people whose job it is to get you healthy. And they caught it early, right? Of course they did. There’s no reason for you to get worked up. I know it’s scary, but there are people you can talk to if you need to ease your mind.”

He had snorted. “Doctors? Psychiatrists? What about you, Bri? Can I talk to you?” His daughter had then laid a hand on his knee, smiling evenly.

“Of course, Dad. But right now I have to get back to work.”

Warren stood up and walked to the other side of his daughter’s spacious living room. Then he walked back. Looking around, he noticed the décor. Everything was cream colored; the couch, the area rug, the walls. Three porcelain vases sat on the mantle, the biggest one front and center. Different colored flowers bloomed on the smooth white backdrop; a splash of color in an otherwise monochrome room. With one angry, fluid motion, Warren lifted his hand from his side and swept it across the mantle, knocking the three vases onto the hard wood below and shattering them into a thousand pieces.

At the end of his appointment with Dr. DiCastro, Colin was no closer to a solution to his problem. That didn’t surprise him, though, because it seemed to him that for all the self-proclaimed professionalism in this town, there was a serious lack of competency. Maybe it was easy for them to poke and prod around in the nooks and crannies of his personal life, but he was getting sick of sitting around waiting for it to happen again. It had gotten to the point where no matter what he was doing or where he was, there was always something at the back of his mind, afraid of the next time he would suddenly double over in pain; lose his breath; feel like he was going crazy.

“Hi there, Colin.” He found himself standing on the Ashburns’ front porch, and apparently he had already knocked. Olivia’s father, Greg Ashburn, was standing in the doorway, smiling.

“Hi, Mr. A. Is Liv home?” He nodded, letting Colin into the house. Inside, it smelled like Olivia; like flowers and Dove soap. Colin inhaled deeply and glanced up the stairs; the bathroom door was open and steam was billowing out into the hallway.

“Olivia! Colin’s here!” Her father called, probably to make sure he wasn’t sending his daughter’s boyfriend up to find her naked; fresh out of the shower.

“I’m up here!” she called down, and Greg motioned for Colin to go ahead up.

Olivia Ashburn was nothing short of an angel. Her auburn hair was wet and tangled, falling a bit below her shoulders and dripping water onto her sheets. She was sitting on her bed, a white towel wrapped around her slender body, smiling widely. Colin pushed the door closed.

“Hi, Col,” she said, standing up to hug him. He wrapped his arms around Olivia, her wet hair sticking to his cheek. “How’d it go?” He shook his head and, with a sigh, collapsed onto her bed.

“You know, they wanted references. Phone numbers and stuff. Some girl was filling out an application next to me—she must have been, like, fifteen. Every single line on her reference section was full.” He didn’t have to fake his frustration. He was substantially frustrated, even if it had nothing to do with the made up job interview he had told her he was going to this afternoon.

“Oh well. Small businesses love hiring the younger kids. It means they’ll be there longer before they go off to college,” Olivia told him, picking up a brush off her nightstand and pulling it through her hair. Droplets of excess water splashed him in the face.

“Yeah, well, at this rate they won’t have to worry about that if they hire me,” he said, picking at a loose thread on her comforter. Okay. Not all of this job stuff was bullshit. He really did need a job, and he really didn’t think he’d be going to college anytime soon. He was just being a little less proactive in the job hunt than he was letting his girlfriend believe. She scooted over beside him and leaned down to kiss his forehead.

“I’ll hire you,” she whispered, into his skin. He smiled.

“Oh, yeah? To do what?” Olivia’s eyes gleamed mischievously.

“I think we could figure something out…” she trailed off, and then all at once she was on top of him and he could barely breathe; this time for all the right reasons.

Angie wasn’t mad, as Lane had expected. She hadn’t slapped him (yet) or yelled or stormed out. Instead, she was sitting, cross-legged on his bed, twirling a piece of her hair between her fingers.

“So youre…” Lane stifled a smile; she couldn’t bring herself to say it. He knew the feeling.

“Gay,” he offered. Angie coughed.

“Right. Gay.” She studied him then, as if she was looking for something that had just appeared on his body with this new development. She studied the delicateness of his features, the color that had risen to his cheeks with the possibility of confrontation. “So when we…you didn’t…” Her clear blue eyes were a mess of confusion. She sighed, sort of frustrated.

“Don’t get me wrong, Ang,” Lane replied, reading her expression. “You’re great. I mean if I were…into that…you’d be my girl.” He ran a hand through his hair. He sounded like a fucking idiot. After all, coming out to the girl you’d been fucking was arguably worse—or at least on the same level—as coming out to your parents. She nodded, slowly, and pushed herself up off the bed.

“Well, gee, thanks,” she said. And then, as Lane watched, she stripped off the boxers and shirt she’d been wearing , threw them into his lap and stalked out of the room. Naked.

Lane watched her go, waiting until he heard the front door slam before he stripped the sheets from his bed and took them straight to the laundry room to be washed.