Full of Grace (Scomiche)

Ch 4. Questions

The weeks passed. Scott looked forward to his daily morning and afternoon meetings with Mitch. He had tried getting him to have lunch with him, but Mitch always said he already had plans.  Scott tried to get him to come have dinner at his apartment with him or just come over to hang out, but he would always have an excuse. 

It was frustrating, but he decided not to give up on him. He was determined to break through the wall he kept around him and he just kept extending the invitations.

He tried harder and harder, making it nearly impossible for Mitch to evade him or his questions, but somehow Mitch always seemed to find a way. 

Scott was also singing again. He loved his sessions with Mitch. Mitch always looked at him as if he was proud of him, as if he truly believed that Scott was talented. It meant a lot to him. He found himself smiling like an idiot, staring at the boy randomly while he tried to give him instruction, but Mitch didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary. 

But Scott would notice the sideways glances and the tiny smiles that Mitch thought were secret. The boy's eyes were almost always on him, and he worked that much harder to show off for him.

He managed to get some answers to a few of his big questions. Where are you from? Do you have a girlfriend? Oh, a boyfriend? Do you live alone? Y’know for a germaphobe you touch an awful lot of stuff. What is it about people? - that last question had earned him a long diatribe about how disgusting people really are and how gross their hands are after touching everything in sight.

But, even after he offered to use hand sanitizer first, Mitch still refused to touch him and had looked at his hand with a sad look. 

He guessed it really was a mental thing. He wasn’t sure how someone could live without human contact, but it was Mitch. Nothing about him really made sense anyway. 

He’d also asked him about where he lived, curious if the building was all in his head. Mitch had stated he lived in an apartment building downtown. It had caused Scott to jump up as soon as Mitch had gone and he pulled out his file again. The address was different than the one he remembered. He put it into google maps and a normal apartment building was what he found. 

It was all so confusing, but it kept his mind off of anything to do with Alex for a few hours. The nights were still hard, the moments when he was left alone with his own thoughts and insecurities. The lonely weekends that dragged on were the worst. Those were the times he couldn’t seem to shake Alex’s memory and he fell right back down into the rut he’d been in.

This particular Sunday found him curled up on the couch, his brain going a million miles an hour. Last night had been a particularly bad one. Alex had tried calling him twice, and even though he’d found the strength to not answer, the 12 or so text messages that had accompanied those missed calls were hard to ignore. 

They were all full of lies. “I miss you.”  “I love you” “I want to come home.” “Please talk to me.” “Give me another chance.” “I’ll be better this time.”… etc

He’d been spending the last few hours debating with himself. Should he give him another chance? It would be better than feeling like this. He stared at his phone, wanting to send a reply. He wanted to say come home, but he kept hesitating. 

A knock on the door shook him from his internal war and he stared at it.  What if it was Alex? Would he be happy about that?! 

He slowly got up, and approached the door as if it were an angry wild animal. He looked out of the peep hole in the door and got quite the surprise when he saw Mitch making a face and sticking out his tongue, eyes straight at Scott as if he knew he was there checking to see who was there.