Title: All The Wrong Reasons
Rating: R
Setting: late November/early December, sophomore year in high school.
Summary: He does it to make her happy. He does it because she begs him. Mostly, he does it to get his father off his back. Being a man meant ignoring your feelings and doing things you didn't necessarily want to do anyway.
Feedback: Feel free to review.
Story Notes: I wrote this story to give Chris more background. He's very much the mysterious stranger in many stories - not much is known about his past and he doesn't usually talk about his family life - for good reason. The subject matter gets a little graphic towards the end, but it's nothing too outrageous. It's a one-shot, though it's a little long.

Chris Mitchell dumped his bag on the floor of his room and walked into the bathroom to wash his hands. He didn’t even have time to unpack some of his stuff before dinner. He had already “delayed dinner an hour” by arriving home late, as his father had pointed out the moment he’d stepped in the door.

They’d gotten stuck on the turnpike – they being Chris, Anna, and Anthony, who were on their way home from their boarding high school for the weekend. Anna’s older brother, Shawn, had come to pick them up. They were at the school on a musical scholarship with some of their other friends but the three of them had to go back to the city for the weekend for various reasons.

The Jersey Turnpike on a Friday afternoon made this fairly difficult. Apparently everyone else was also going to the city for the weekend.

Chris walked back into the kitchen. His family was sitting at the table. He walked to the sink to wash his hands.

“Hurry up, Christopher, haven’t you made us wait long enough?” his father snapped. Chris rolled his eyes.

His father was a retired former officer in the Marines who had served in the Gulf War. Now, his new occupation included being a hard ass and driving his oldest son insane. While not doing that, he consulted for businesses and the government.

When Chris was in the fourth grade, he asked what type of consulting his father did and if his father would come into school and talk for five minutes for Career Day. His father had told Chris that his job wasn’t Chris’s concern. He also said that it wasn’t any of his classmates’ concern either, and so he’d be skipping Career Day. Then Chris got a lecture on something about liberals ruining America with things like “Career Day.”

Chris never bothered to ask his father about his job again.

“We hit traffic,” Chris explained again, drying his hands and sitting down at the table. Whenever he was home, he sat next to his younger brother Cody. His older sister, Amanda, sat across from him, and his parents sat at the ends of the rectangular table. “I’m sorry that it took so long but there wasn’t anything I could do.”

“You should have left earlier,” his father said sternly.

“It’s Anna’s brother’s car,” Chris said, trying not to sound annoyed, “I left when they left. And it’s not like I didn’t call ahead. You could have eaten without me and saved me a plate.”

“Or you could arrive on time and eat dinner with your family, but I suppose that’s asking too much,” his father snapped again.

Chris was going to reply but his mother cut in. “Peter, let’s just eat dinner, okay? It’s only an hour.”

“Susan, he’s got to learn discipline! Today it’s showing up late to dinner, tomorrow it’s illegal gambling and snorting cocaine and who knows what else!” Peter slammed his fist on the table. “He’s trouble waiting to happen at this rate –”

“Dad, he was stuck in traffic, not murdering a hooker,” Amanda interrupted, “You’re overreacting. Leave him alone.”

Cody then said he was hungry and asked if they could say grace and eat their meal. Their father always made them say grace before eating dinner. Fortunately this took the attention off Chris for a few minutes.

Chris shot Amanda a grateful look. They were a lot alike. Amanda was hippie-dippy. She wore tie-dye dresses and often had flowers in her long reddish brown hair. She was a free spirit and very into music, just like Chris. Amanda sang pretty well, but she was too busy being an artist to do much with her musical talent. As an art student, she was always sketching and drawing in a notepad. Amanda always had paint under her nails and on her hands. It stained her clothes. It drove their father mad.

Amanda didn’t have to endure the same abuse though; Amanda was a girl. It was okay for a girl to be artistically oriented. Chris, the first born son, was supposed to do “manly things” – not sing and play the guitar and work out pieces of music on a keyboard. He was not supposed to have an earring. Or a tattoo.

The earring Chris had gotten when he was fourteen was solely to rebel. He knew his father would hate it and yet he’d let Anna take him to do it anyway. The tattoo was a little more meaningful. The small Smurf on his inner left calf down by his ankle was a tribute to his deceased grandfather. When Chris used to spend weekends with his grandparents, his grandfather would watch cartoons with him. The Smurfs was their favorite cartoon.

The grandfather Chris loved so much was his father’s father, ironically, who was a liberal political activist in the sixties and during the Vietnam War. Chris suspected that his father was embarrassed by his own father and that was why he was so staunchly conservative. He tried to crush all things remotely radical out of Chris – jewelry, tattoos, pot, rock music.

His father expected Chris to follow in his military footsteps and enroll at West Point or Annapolis. Chris had absolutely no intention of doing this. It was a constant source of tension between the two of them and became the subject of a fight whenever it was brought up. His father brought it up a lot. He was a man and he was going whether he liked it or not, because men did things whether they wanted to or not…at least according to his father.

Chris didn’t understand why military school was so important, particularly now – he had only just turned sixteen. He was a sophomore; he wasn’t even thinking about college yet…if he even went to college. He really hoped this rock band thing he had going with his friends panned out the way they wanted it to and he would go on tour instead of to college. But he wouldn’t be considering college until next year anyway. Why his father had been fighting about West Point and Annapolis with him since he turned fourteen was beyond him.

It was no surprise when his father asked which military academy he’d prefer to go to during dinner. And it was no surprise when Chris said he didn’t plan to go into the military that his father blew a gasket. And it was no surprise to Chris when he found himself leaving the table, still hungry, out of breath from shouting, and very angry.

He took comfort in the fact that his father was basically in the same state.

It infuriated him though; his father really didn’t like the way he’d turned out. And Chris knew somewhere in the back of his mind that he wasn’t actually that bad of a kid. In fact, he wasn’t a bad kid at all. At sixteen, he didn’t do any hardcore drugs, he went to his classes and got good grades in them, hadn’t knocked up any girls, and hardly drank. He’d been awarded a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school for God’s sake – Chris was miles ahead of other kids he’d grown up with.

He hated that his father questioned his sexuality because of his interests – or lack of the interests his father considered masculine. Chris didn’t understand how enjoying and making music somehow translated to a feminine quality, as plenty of guys enjoyed and made music. Chris liked sports as well; he just didn’t play them in any organized fashion. He played with his friends. He didn’t understand why not being on the football or the basketball team was such a disappointment to his father, even though he played for fun and watched them on TV.

He didn’t understand why his father wanted him to join something like the wrestling team, since he was so afraid that Chris would “turn out gay.” Wrestling looked like one of the gayest things a guy could do, at least from what Chris knew about it. Guys rolling around on the floor in tight spandex suits? That seemed more homoerotic than the electric guitar.

Chris slammed his bedroom door and lay down on his bed. He fell asleep and was awakened two hours later by someone knocking on his bedroom door.

“Chris,” his sister’s voice came floating in, “Your friend is here.”

“Which friend?” Chris mumbled mostly to himself. He pried himself off the bed and opened the door. Anna was standing there. “Hey,” he smiled. Anna didn’t smile back, she merely pushed her way by him and into his room. Rolling his eyes and sensing a problem, he shut the door. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” she folded her arms and paced around the room.

“Then why are you acting like there is?”

“I am not acting like there’s a problem!”

“Yeah okay.”

“I’m not!”

“Then why’d you show up without calling? And why are you pacing around with your arms folded? And why are you crying?” he asked nonchalantly. He did a double-take. “Anna, why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying,” Anna snapped defiantly and wiped her eyes, “Stop yelling at me!”

“I’m not yelling at you!” Chris shouted, then he lowered his voice, “Well, now I am. I’m sorry, I had a fight with my dad earlier and I’m just a little wound up…”

Anna stopped looking anxious to look sympathetic and concerned. “The usual?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t get why he’s so hung up on you going to one of the academies.”

“Me neither,” Chris shrugged, his feeling of frustration towards his father returning. He shook it off. “Enough about me. Why are you here?”

Anna became nervous again. She fidgeted with her hands and tapped her foot. Chris waited for her to say something. “You know how I’m going out with Evan?”

“Yes. I didn’t miss his hanging around and kissing you all the time,” Chris smiled.

Anna had been so excited when Evan had asked her out at the beginning of October. They’d flirted all through late August and early September. She had a huge crush on him. She hadn’t actually said that, but Chris knew. Chris always read people well, and Anna was a particularly easy read because she and Chris were so close; she was his best friend.

“Well, you know how we’ve been going out for two months?”

“Again, I didn’t miss the fact you were dating,” Chris nodded as Anna seemed to be putting off getting to the point. “Where are you going with this?”

She was quiet for so long that Chris’s mind started wandering back to the fight he’d had with his father earlier. “Do you think someone should stay a virgin until they get married?” she burst out randomly.

Chris snapped out of his daze. “Eh, what?”

“You know, virgin ‘til marriage and you save yourself for somebody special?” Anna asked, looking even more nervous than before. Anna was quite beautiful, and one of her more mesmerizing features was her big blue eyes. Right now, they were wide with anxiety. Chris was beginning to see where this was going.

“You’re only fifteen, you know,” Chris said gently, “You don’t have to sleep with him if you don’t want to.”

Chris was six months older than Anna; he’d only just turned sixteen himself. He hadn’t been with anyone yet either. He hadn’t found anybody worth sleeping with, and he was a little bit afraid that he wouldn’t be any good at it.

“But I do have to!” Anna exclaimed, very upset and pacing around the room. “Yes I do! If I don’t have sex with him, he’ll break up with me!”

“Then he isn’t worth it,” Chris said simply, “Honestly Anna, if you don’t want to do it –”

“But I do want to!” Anna interrupted. Her voice was higher pitched than it normally was and Chris was afraid she was going to become hysterical any second. “I do! But I’m scared! And I don’t want to be bad at it! What if I’m a huge disappointment and he breaks up with me anyway?”

“Well, then he’s kind of a jerk, isn’t he?” Chris asked. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to comfort Anna very much and she paced around the room again.

He didn’t like the way Anna was freaking out over this. Sex should be something she wanted to do, not she felt she had to do; and she was fifteen. Chris felt like he was all grown up too, but somehow knew he wasn’t, and neither was she. Fifteen sounded young, even if he thought about sex during all the time he wasn’t thinking about something else.

“He isn’t a jerk,” she answered finally, “He’s just eager. He says he loves me.”

Wow, that’s not manipulative at all, Chris thought as he refrained from rolling his eyes. “Do you love him?” he asked instead.

Anna blinked. “Of course I do,” she nodded. Chris didn’t really believe her.

“Well then do it,” he said, ignoring his doubt and laying down on the bed, “Just make sure it’s because you want to.”

“I do want to do it! I’m just scared,” Anna said quietly.

“I’m sure that’s natural, I bet most people are scared –”

“Will you sleep with me?” Anna interrupted him.

Chris sat up and stared at her. “Excuse me?”

“I want you to sleep with me,” Anna said quietly. She wasn’t looking him in the eyes.

Chris felt a little bit dizzy. He was beyond shocked. He didn’t understand at all. He looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I want you to sleep with me. You know, where you’re like…inside me,” Anna explained. “Please, Chris, it’s important.”

Chris shook his head in an effort to clear it. “Why?” was all he could think of to say.

“Because you’re my best friend! I’m scared and I don’t want my first time with Evan to be disappointing for him because I’m not good at it! And I know you’re a virgin too! We could be bad at it together!” Anna exclaimed quickly, still with a high voice.

“Let me get this straight,” Chris said slowly, careful to ensure he wasn’t fantastically misunderstanding her in some way. “You want me to sleep with you so that you won’t disappoint your boyfriend? Because I haven’t had sex with anyone either? Because I’m your best friend? You realize that means you’re cheating on your boyfriend, right?”

Anna nodded her head to all his questions and ran a hand nervously through her dark hair. “I know it’s cheating but Evan will never know! We don’t feel that way about each other and we won’t do it more than once! I need you to help me, Chris, please!”

Chris looked between Anna’s very round, very big, very desperate blue eyes and a spot on the floor. The fog of shock in his mind began to disappear. “No,” he said finally.

“What? Why not? Chris…”

“Well, first, what makes you think that I want my first time to be with you? I love you, Anna, you know that, but I would like something real before sleeping with somebody. And second, you’re clearly not ready. If you were ready, you wouldn’t be here asking me for something so ridiculous.”

“But Chris, you have to!” Anna begged him, “You have to! I know it won’t be special for you, but I need you to help me! What if it hurts? I’m so afraid it will hurt and what if he won’t stop? You, I know you’ll stop, I know you won’t hurt me! You’re the only person I can ask, Chris, please…” her voice cracked and she buried her head in her hands.

It wasn’t until Anna started crying that Chris realized just how scared she actually was. Anna didn’t cry very often. “Anna, please stop crying. Please,” he begged, “This isn’t fair to either of us; you’re putting too much pressure on yourself and on me. Let’s sleep on it or something, we can figure out what to do in the morning, my dad’s already done enough damage today –” but he stopped suddenly. A thought struck him.

His father would get off his back about his sexuality if he slept with a girl, especially a pretty girl like Anna. Chris would do just about anything to keep his father off his back, including having sex before he was ready with a girl he didn’t love. Anna was his good friend and she was good-looking; it wouldn’t be the worst thing that ever happened to him.

Anna’s crying had turned to shuddering sobs. “Please,” she begged him quietly, “Please…”

“I’ll do it,” Chris said determinedly, pleased with this new idea that he’d be free of taunts about being gay. So what he didn’t really want to do it? This really couldn’t be that bad.

“You will?” Anna asked, wiping her eyes and looking up at him. “Really?”

“Yeah. When do you want to do it?”

“Now?”

Chris blinked. “Now?” he said uncertainly. Now seemed a little too soon.

Anna nodded. “I have to be able to do this before I go back to school Monday. Please, Chris!”

He ran his hand through his reddish brown hair. “Now?” he repeated. “I don’t even have condoms now…”

“I do!” Anna squealed, pulling a box out of her back pocket and thrusting them into his hand, “I thought you might not be prepared, because well, it’s kind of sudden…”

“Just a bit,” Chris nodded blankly, turning the box over a few times with his fingers. He quickly read the directions on the back of the package.

“Can we get started? Please? I just want this to be over with,” Anna sighed.

Chris resisted pointing out that this was her idea in the first place. He took a deep breath. “Yeah, okay,” he shrugged. “How do we start?”

A good bet was kissing, so they started with that. Chris didn’t know how Anna was feeling, but he felt strange. He felt okay, Anna touching him wasn’t a physically bad feeling; but he also felt awkward and clumsy, and while Anna was very pretty, Chris had trouble staying aroused. He told himself it was because he was nervous and not because he wasn’t ready. He figured it was a positive that it wasn’t because he was gay. Chris knew he wasn’t gay.

When they’d gotten all their clothes off they had to stop and just laugh nervously at each other. Chris didn’t think that was normal, but at that point it didn’t seem to matter, as he was pretty sure the situation itself wasn’t what one would call “normal.” He figured in a normal situation he would feel more love and less nausea.

Getting the condom on under pressure was more difficult than Chris would have ever believed previously. After the second attempt, they both started to laugh. They had to start over after that, but by the third try, Chris had finally figured out how to do it properly.

Under the covers of his bed, it took a few times for Chris to even find the right spot. When he did, he continued slowly because Anna, nervous about the pain, had to stop several times to calm down and relax. She gasped when Chris finally managed to push into her without having to stop, but when he asked if she was sure, she bit her lip and told him to keep going.

They were both very quiet, and Chris felt even more awkward and clumsy now. His biggest fear was that he’d hurt her, but every time he asked if she changed her mind, she told him to keep going. He had trouble focusing; his mind kept wandering between the nervous pangs he felt, agonizing over whether or not he was doing it right.

Finally, after what felt like forever to Chris, they were done. He got off her, pulling the condom off and throwing it in the trash. He lay down next to her and looked at her. Were they supposed to be cuddling or something? He wasn’t sure. That was what happened in movies, but those movie people always looked happy. Physically he was fine and even felt good, but he didn't feel happy. He felt empty, and she was staring blankly at the ceiling. He wished they loved each other more.

He didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. Finally, Anna pulled the blanket more tightly over herself. “Well, how was it?” she asked him timidly. “Was I a complete failure? Was it bad?”

Chris hesitated, not wanting to upset her. “It wasn’t terrible,” he said diplomatically, “It felt nice. It’s just…I dunno, was it good for you?”

Anna bit her lip. “Kind of. It was nice, but it wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t very good. Will it always be so difficult and uncomfortable?”

“I don’t think so, otherwise people wouldn’t do it so much. I had trouble concentrating.”

“It was bad,” Anna admitted finally, but looked embarrassed.

Chris actually chuckled with relief and wrapped an arm around her. “It was bad for me too. Not awful, but definitely not good.”

“Well it was just the first time, I guess we have to practice. I just wanted you to do it first because –”

“Anna, I know. It just wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t want to do it, but I had to…”

“Why’d you do it?” she asked quietly.

“I did it to prove to my dad that I wasn’t gay,” Chris admitted, feeling slightly ashamed of himself, but unsure why. “I’m not gay. I know I’m not. I think you’re pretty and I like girls. But he rips on me and it seemed like a good way to prove he was wrong.”

They didn’t say anything for a long time and lay still on the bed, under the covers. Chris stared at the ceiling, feeling slightly embarrassed, but knowing that Anna wouldn’t laugh at him or tell anyone how bad it was. He also felt confused. He’d proven his father wrong, but he didn’t feel very good about it. He wondered if he’d done the wrong thing; gone about dealing with his father’s taunting the wrong way.

Anna finally interrupted his thoughts. “Can I sleep here?” she asked him.

“Yeah, if you want to.”

“I want to. Is it going to be weird in the morning?”

“Probably. Let’s never talk about this again, okay?”

Anna nodded. “And let’s not tell the others,” she added. Chris knew he meant their best friends, who they were on the music scholarship with.

“Definitely not.”

“Chris?” she said quietly after another long silence.

“Yeah?”

“I think I can do it with Evan now. I’m not so afraid anymore, and it didn’t hurt too much.”

He kissed the side of her head. His feelings of inadequacy and disappointment weren’t important. He acted like a man and did what he had to do so that she would be okay. She was confident now, wasn’t that what mattered? Yes. Well that, and his father being wrong, of course. “That was the goal, wasn’t it? I’m glad.”

“Thanks for helping me.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You’re dad’s a jerk, you know. I love you whether you’re gay or not.”

“I’m not gay,” he said patiently.

“I know!” Anna exclaimed quickly. She grinned. “You just had sex with me, after all! I’m just saying…”

Chris laughed, knowing the awkwardness wouldn't be there in the morning if they could both make jokes about it. “I know. I love you too, but not enough to ever do this again. Next time you need a favor, do me a favor and ask Anthony.”

Anna gigged. “Deal.”