Give Me A Chance (boyxboy)

Two

"I'm sorry, Lyam," Liza says, and it's about the first time I hear it from her. "I know you wanted it to go well, and I know we never really expected it to go down this way."

"Maybe you didn't," I say darkly. "I never pictured it any other way."

"You knew your dad would flip out?"

I throw my hands into the air. "Of course I did!" I say, a little too loudly. I hear one of her parents in the next bedroom muffle a snore. "Remember my cousin Pauline? Of course not, because we don't talk to her anymore, because dad hates her now that she came out."

"Then why did you do it?" Liza asks me inquisitively.

I stare past her, out the window, into the growing darkness. It feels like that darkness is creeping in through the windows, threatening to engulf me as I force out the answer. "I didn't want to hide. I wanted to be able to be myself, wholly and wholeheartedly." I don't know if she'll understand.

Liza watches me carefully, her eyebrows drawing together curiously, like I'm used to them doing. "Oh, Lyam," she says. And then Liza, the girl who dislikes physical touch and affection, the girl who doesn't even like it when she bumps into someone on the sidewalk, pulls me into a hug. I'm surprised and don't respond for a second. Her chin is on my shoulder and I can smell her shampoo. I hesitantly wrap my arms around her and I can feel her chest heaving.

She's crying.

Crying for me.

"I'm so sorry," she says. "What can I do?"

I release her slowly. I drop my arms so she doesn't have to pry them off. "Please let me stay here for a while," I say. "I know it's a burden, but I have nowhere else to go. I'm not asking permanently or anything, just for like a week or two, until I find somewhere to live."

"By yourself?"

"What else am I gonna do?" I ask softly. Suddenly, the cherub pink walls don't seem so happy anymore, because I know that they're a temporary fixture now. I remember when she repainted and had me over the first night in her "new" room. We had spent the night hanging up her many movie posters and pieces of artwork. That was the night I had come out to her. The night I'd first come out to anyone. It was the night she became the most supportive, protective, caring friend I could ever have asked for.

I had felt like I was on a roll, so the next day I had told Quinn.

That hadn't gone so well.

But that night with Liza, that was the first time I truly felt like me. It was the first time I ever accepted myself for who I was, and who I wanted to be.

And now it's blown up in my face.

I feel the urge to give up.

And I tie it to a rock and sink it to the bottom of my mind.

"Of course," Liza says. "Of course you can stay a while. I won't say as long as you need, because I won't make mom and dad pay for another teenager and Killian's coming home from uni for his summer break, but at least for a while. Just know that it's temporary."

"Thank you," I say gratefully, shifting on Killian's mattress she's given me to sleep on. I look around the neat, decluttered room and I'm sad that it's not my room. I can picture Aydin walking past my room in the house I'm not in, stopping, and peering in. I can picture him crying.

I can picture me crying.

I send the tears away, off into the horizon.

Liza sits down on her bed, which seems miles above where I am on the floor. "Try and get some sleep," she says. "Tomorrow's a new day, a better day." She seems a little hesitant about that last part