Stigma

Chapter 8

Jason

Law is such a vague profession. There are so many different types of lawyers: civil lawyers, immigration lawyers, bankruptcy lawyers, contract lawyers. Most people that find out I'm going to law school couldn't care less what kind of lawyer I hope to be, they are just impressed that I'm going.

I think people being impressed was maybe what drew me to the profession in the first place. That sounds shallow and absurd, but when you've been told your whole life that you'll never amount to anything impressive, the need to impress starts early and runs deep. I spent so much of my childhood striving to earn my mother's love, only for it to always remain just out of reach. I'm not naïve enough to think that now, in my twenties, I've finally cracked the code, but that desire to really excel at something, something important and impressive, is still there.

I might've chosen to be a doctor, but I don't much care for blood. Plus, my older brother Derek is in his residency at a cardiac hospital in Detroit, and there was no way in hell I was ever going to do something he was doing. He's already got our mother's admiration, if not her love, and he's had that since he could crawl. I knew there would be no competing with him, and I didn't much want to try.

I used to spend hours agonizing over what Derek had that I didn't, trying to figure out why our mother so very obviously preferred him to me. We're both blonde, blue eyed, and fine boned, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. Maybe it was the eight years in between our births, maybe something happened to her to make her detest her second child. When she found out I was gay, I thought, maybe this. Maybe she has known this about me my whole life and this is why she hates me. But I don't really believe that's it. I don't think there is a reason, and if there is, I am done trying to riddle it out.

But I still think about her every time I tell someone I'm studying to be a lawyer and they are impressed. I think about how she is not, how she never has been and never will be.

The test I'm currently studying for is on property and torts, and if there was ever a niche of law that I know for a fact I am not interested in, it's this one. I don't particularly care about why someone gave something to someone else or whether or not it was legal to do so. I'm more interested in the person who gave the thing away in the first place.

Because property and torts is not holding my interest, I take my work phone off of Do Not Disturb. I leave it in this mode while I'm studying otherwise it would never stop ringing and pinging and distracting me with the promise of sex and money. But I'm not getting anything done and I'm trying very hard not to think about James, which is difficult on a good night and impossible right now, so I decide to check my messages.

Because the universe has a twisted sense of humor, as soon as I turn on the work phone, my personal phone buzzes. And of course it's James.

He's sent me a picture of a bottle of tequila on the shelf of what looks to be a liquor store, with the accompanying message of: thinking about you

I feel my lips curl into a smile without my consent. I almost respond, almost say something about how difficult it is for me to not think about him, but I don't. I just stare at the tequila bottle, imagining the smirk on James's face when he took the picture. I imagine what he might be wearing, jeans and a t-shirt with a flannel thrown over it. His Doc Martens. I imagine what his hair looks like, swept back into a bun, a few escaped strands hanging around his face.

And then I put that phone down and go back to the other one, where I've got four text messages and a missed call.

The missed call is from a guy saying he got my number from a friend and that he never does this kind of thing but would I like to meet him at the hotel he's staying at. I'm not in the mood to be the Jason Dean that meets new clients tonight, I don't have it in me at the moment.