where the expectation was that you be the best person you could be, no pretending to be perfect required.
Trey
“But where will you live?” Rebecca asked.
I’d taken advantage of being stuck here by trying one more time to talk some sense into my sister. “I don’t know yet. I would like to stay here, rent is much cheaper than in DC, but since I don’t have a job, I can’t say for sure. But it doesn’t matter where I go. You’re welcome there. You could go to school, figure out what you want to do.”
“Mother says—”
“Becca Bug, I don’t care what they say. Neither one of them. What I care about is you. You deserve a chance to find out who Rebecca is before you settle down with someone you don’t love.”
“I don’t know,” she said, picking at the stitching on the chair she sat in.
I scooted to the end of her bed so I could reach her and took her hands in mine. I wanted her to trust me, to go against everything we had ever been taught, and I understood I was asking a lot. If I expected that much trust from her, then I owed her some in return.
“I’m going to tell you something, Becca, but you can’t tell anyone.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it. No one.” She nodded her head. I wasn’t sure what she would do. She could take this straight to our parents. She could say that there was no way she would come with me. She could be repulsed and want nothing else to do with me. But I’d made up my mind it was time. “It’s not just that I want to leave. I have to leave.”
“What, why?”
“When they find out who I really am, I won’t be welcome here.”
“Who you really are? What do you mean who you really are?”
“I mean, who I love, Becca, or think I could love, anyway.”
She sat back a little straighter, looking at me. “Who could you possibly love that would cause them to make you leave? There are people they wouldn’t approve of sure, but make you leave? Why? They only way they would do that…” she trailed off.
I nodded my head. “Yeah, the only way they would make me leave was if I was gay.”
“You’re…”
“I am, always have been.” I watched her face, waiting to see which way this would go. Either she would be okay with it, or I’d made a terrible choice in telling her.
“Then why did you come back here at all?”
“I wasn’t going to, but then everything just kind of happened. I didn’t have a job, and because I didn’t work while I was in school, I didn’t have any money. I was trying to work out a plan. Then he offered to pay me to work on the campaign, and Mother said that you were going to marry Corey. I didn’t want you to do that without knowing you could come with me, but I couldn’t take you with me without any money. I figured my best bet was to take the job, save enough to leave, and hope you would come.”
She jerked back, pulling her hands out of mine to cover her mouth. Looking horrified, but before I could panic, she said, “That’s what the letters are about, isn’t it? All that talk about sin and purification by fire. Someone knows.”
“We think so,” I confirmed. “We still aren’t sure if the person actually wants to hurt me or if they just plan to out me.”
“Trey, they shot at you.”
“They shot out all the lights around the pool. Roman doesn’t think they were trying to hit me, or they would have. He said they were too good of a shot to miss.”
“So maybe if you quit the campaign and came out publicly, you would be safe. If they didn’t have anything to hold over your head, maybe they would leave you alone.”
“What if they didn’t, Becca? I didn’t hire Roman, and I don’t have the money to pay him. If I leave here, I can’t afford a bodyguard.” Not that I believed Roman would leave me to the stalker if I couldn’t pay him, but that was still something to consider. It wasn’t fair of me to ask him to put his entire life on hold for me, at least the way things were now, he was getting paid to be here.
“But how can you stand it? They’re both so hateful about gay people, and all those people at the rallies, holding signs