Blood Delights || bxb

Chapter 5

When dinner was done I had been escorted back to my room and left there. I tried the door some time after he left and found it locked again. With I sigh I turned to the bathroom instead and got ready for the night. I'm glad Tristan had at least allowed me to get my things, even if I didn't exactly have much choice in the matter, but it did mean I could shower with my own soap and do my skincare tonight. 

The bathroom was as big as my new wardrobe, bigger than my old room and very grand. There was a shower and a bath tub. I didn't have a bath tub in my old place and found myself called to it. My 'old place'? Was I really already thinking of myself as not living there? It hadn't even been a day and I seemed to have already succumbed to my circumstances. I keep telling myself I am just waiting to find a way out, and I am, but it worries me that I already consider myself living here. I can only pray I don't become complicit in this new life. For the most part, it is comfortable. I have lavish luxuries I could never have even dreamed of having before but is it worth my freedom? 

As I laid there in the water, I was brought back to memories of the past. I was once going to medical school. I wonder how my life would have turned out if I had. Maybe I could have become rich enough to afford even a tenth of something like this. 

It was never going to happen though. I knew I was smart and I could study hard but it was so taxing. I just wanted a stress free life with time that could be my own. I didn't want a life dedicated to my career and only my career and it was just eating away at me. Did I want to spend the rest of my life making my parents happy while I was miserable myself? For a time I thought I could do it but one day I woke up with the courage to finally put myself first. 

"What do you mean Leandor?" mum asked. She used my full name to emphasise how mad or disappointed she was, but I always preferred my actual name to 'Lee'. Though that was still one thing I wasn't good at correcting people on. "Why the sudden change of heart?" she asked. 

"It's not sudden," I replied. I'd been thinking about it a lot and for a long time. 

"Yesterday you wanted to be a doctor. Now today you don't. Of course it's sudden," she said. My father was silent but I'm sure he was just biding his time until it was his turn to speak. 

"Just because I didn't tell you this yesterday doesn't mean I still wanted to be a doctor yesterday," I contended. 

"So what exactly is the plan then?" my father asked finally speaking. "What are you planning to do instead?"

I shrugged. "I mean I'm not 100% sure yet. Maybe English..."

That solicited a good laugh out of my father. "English? And what do you plan to do with fucking English?"

"Publishing. Maybe."

"Oh Leandor," My mum said hand to her heart. "Why are you doing this to us. First you're gay and now you don't even want to become a doctor."

I scoffed. "What does me being gay have to do with this?" 

"Well there aren't very many gay doctors. We should have seen this coming. We should have discouraged you from those lifestyles but I thought maybe it doesn't matter if you still find other ways to make a respectable life for yourself," she said shaking her head like she was disappointed in herself. 

So maybe my parents didn't kick me out for being gay but they certainly liked to stab me in the chest with their disappointment every opportunity they got. 

I think about that conversation often. I think about the many ways I could have responded. Like how would she even know how many gay doctors there were? It's not like we all walk around with a sign above our heads announcing our sexualities to everyone. But me not wanting to be a doctor doesn't even correlate to me being gay. That was always their dream, not mine, and they'd been projecting it onto me since I was a child. What they were really disappointed in was themselves and they were angry at me that I couldn't live their dream for them, as if I was some puppet they brought into the world to mould into better version of themselves instead of understanding that I was my own person with my own thoughts and feelings.