Page 67 of Mine

“Oh.” He looked around, smiling sheepishly at the looks of absolute horror on everyone’s face. “Sorry.”

“But you know,” I said into the sudden awkward silence, “maybe me manhandling you and being rough with you isn’t such a good thing. I’ve been thinking that maybe I should start seeing someone about that. I don’t wanna ever hurt you.”

“You could never hurt me.” He was adamant.

“Yeah, but Margo, you know, Adele’s friend that works with her at the clinic, she said that she’s got a really great therapist, and I was thinking, when we got back, that I’d go and see this guy.”

He squinted at me before he got up off my lap, took hold of my bicep, and walked me over to the edge of the room. When he turned to face me, his eyes were narrowed with worry. “You don’t need to see anybody. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“Maybe not, but I should check it out.”

He was agitated, shaking his head, biting his bottom lip.

“Baby?”

His hands went to my chest, and he leaned close. “I don’t want you to go see some stranger by yourself. I wanna be there with you, okay?”

“If that’s what you want. But this guy might want to talk to me alone.”

He pressed his lips tight together. “Yeah, but I live with you, so he’ll probably wanna talk to me too.”

I shrugged. “Could be. You know more about that than me.”

His eyes flicked to mine. “You already talked to Adele?”

“Yeah, and you remember Margo; you liked her.”

He nodded.

“Yeah, so I figured when I got back, I’d call this guy up.”

“After you talk to Gabriel.”

“Yeah, that comes first,” I said, chuckling a little. “Obviously.”

“Okay,” he agreed and nodded, hands clutching at my sweater. “We’ll go together and talk to this guy ’cause I don’t know him, and you know I don’t like anyone I don’t know being around you.”

I knew that. I was counting on it. “Good, all settled,” I told him, leaning forward and kissing his forehead. “Now let’s go back and finish this.”

We returned, and all eyes were on Landry as I took my seat.

“So,” he went on, “after you guys”—he gestured at his parents—“were sure I was nuts and wanted to check me into that clinic in New York, I told you I was fine. I told you that being gay didn’t mean I was crazy. I might be crazy, but I’m a gay crazy man, not a crazy man because I’m gay. Does that make sense? You thought if you got me sane that I wouldn’t be gay anymore, and that’s ridiculous. So I left to save us all a lot of heartache. The fact that it took you getting sick, Mom, for you guys to want to talk to me pretty much tells me I was right.”

“No, Landry, you—”

“I can’t be fixed, Mom; my sexual orientation is homosexual, plain and simple. Maybe if you had come at me without saying that if I was sane, I wouldn’t be gay… maybe things between us would have been different.”

“But it doesn’t matter,” she told him.

“Now it doesn’t,” he replied. “But that wasn’t the case eight years ago.”

“Ohmygod,” Chris groaned, looking back and forth between his parents and Landry. “He was right. All this time and he was right? You cut him off because he was gay, not because of anything else.”

“It’s not that simple,” Neil told his son.

But it was.

“Christ,” Landry sighed, glancing at me. “Are you hungry? ’Cause I’m starving.” His smile was beautiful, making his blue-green eyes sparkle.