I laughed. “Hardly. My parents named me Rush because I was in such a rush to be born that my dad had to deliver me on the side of the road in the middle of the night.”
Christopher laughed. “I wish I could have met them,” he said softly.
“Me too. They would have loved you.”
“So you were out to them?”
I nodded. “I was fifteen when I decided to tell them. I’d heard all the horror stories about kids being kicked out after they came out, so I was terrified I’d be on the streets. I even went so far as to pack a suitcase with a few changes of clothes, some protein bars, and all the cash I’d saved.”
“What happened?”
“I kept chickening out for like three weeks. One Saturday afternoon when I got home after mowing a neighbor’s lawn, I went to my closet so I could put the money in the suitcase. But when I opened it, there was a piece of paper in it with my name on it. It said, ‘Is there any chance you can tell us what you need to tell us by next weekend? We want to borrow your suitcase for our cruise.’”
“Oh my God, what?” Christopher said in surprise.
I nodded. “My parents were like that. Straight to the point.”
“What did you do?”
“I emptied out the suitcase, took it downstairs to the kitchen where my parents were making dinner, and that was it. I told them I liked boys as much as I did girls. They hugged me, told me they loved me, and then started asking me questions about my love life,” I said.
“Wow, that’s amazing.”
I smiled. “They were amazing.”
Christopher reached across the table and took my hand in his. “Can I ask how you lost them?”
My gut automatically tightened like it always did when I thought about how my parents had lost their lives. “They were vacationing in the Big Sur area. They’d rented a really nice house where they were planning on hosting some of their friends from their college days. The place had to be worth around five million bucks or something, but apparently the rental company couldn’t be bothered to put up a few carbon dioxide detectors. My parents went to sleep that first night and never woke up again.”
“Rush,” Christopher whispered, then dropped his eyes and shook his head. His fingers were tight around mine.
I pulled his hand to me and dropped a kiss on his fingers. “They went together,” I said. “That brings me a lot of comfort.”
Christopher nodded. He wiped at his eyes before lifting them again. The waitress chose that moment to return with our dessert.
“Wow,” I said because the dish was huge. I handed Christopher a fork and said, “Would you do the honors?”
He smiled and took the fork, then proceeded to cut the cake until the hot chocolate filling began oozing out of it.
“Bon appétit,” Christopher said as he held up his fork. I touched my fork to his and then dug in. As delicious as the dessert was, seeing how much pleasure it brought Christopher was a thousand times more satisfying. I couldn’t help but wonder when the last time he’d indulged in anything was.
I waited until Christopher had seemingly finished before I took a chance and broached the topic I’d been thinking about ever since Christopher had told me what Peter had done to him.
“Christopher, why didn’t you call your uncle and Con when you found out about Peter? Why have you been going through all this alone?”
Christopher’s expression tensed as he leaned back in his chair. But to my surprise, he didn’t remain silent.
“At first I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t. So I just pretended it wasn’t even a thing. I went on with life as usual. It took a whole month for me to get up the nerve to get tested and then another two weeks to make the appointment to get the results. I didn’t tell anyone because I knew I was fine. I didn’t feel sick, so that meant I had to be fine. But I knew as soon as I sat down in that chair and looked at the lady on the other side of the desk that I wasn’t fine.”
Christopher paused, seemingly to collect himself. Unlike when he’d talked about his decision to isolate himself from the world after the attack in the club, this time around his voice broke here and there, proof he wasn’t disconnecting from his emotions.
“The clinic gave me a ton of information about the next steps, but everything was a blur. I didn’t cry, I didn’t tell them they’d made a mistake and they needed to test me again… it was like that night at the club… I had no control, no fight in me. As strange as it may sound, that actually helped. As a nurse, you have to learn to keep a certain level of detachment from your patients even as you’re giving them the best care you can. So I decided to do that. I detached from it.”