"Something the problem?" Stephen asks as he thunders down the stairs seeing Calum groan and clutch his coffee cup to his chest from his reclined position on the sofa.
"No, but could you keep the elephants from running up and down the stairs?" Calum asks quietly, rubbing at his temple.
"Excuse me?" Stephen says in a loud voice as if he hasn't heard Calum, slamming a cupboard door shut.
"Nothing!"
"You got in at three last night!" Stephen says, shrugging his jacket on.
"I did?!"
"Your mother must have been really sick!"
Calum does a little cough before he speaks, "Yeah, well you know those flu-cough..."
"...Fever-cold-kind of things?" Stephen finishes for him, knowing exactly what he was going to say. "Calum, I know she wasn't sick because I went over there to find you..."
"Oh shit."
"And then I caught the late show at the Empire!"
Calum's heart sinks as he looks up, "Double shit."
"You know you and Michael play pretty well together," Stephen continues relentlessly. "The two of you...well I shouldn't be surprised..."
"I told you Michael is going through a really tough time right now!"
"And I told you something too!" Stephen thunders at him, more pissed than he's ever been. "Is this the way it's going to be? You lying to me so you can be with him?! I think we'd better rethink things."
With that, Stephen marches out, late for work, leaving Calum on the sofa with a banging headache and a nagging sense of guilt.
~~~
"What's the fuck the matter with you?" Joy asks in the Fox that evening. "Lying to Stephen, telling him I was sick?! I didn't know what to say!"
She and Dave look over at Calum, their disgust with him etched into their faces. Sam, who's sitting next to Calum, just peers into his drink, wanting to keep the fuck out of it.
"And that's a first!" Dave tells him.
"Oh shut up!" Joy barks at her brother.
"Okay, I made a mistake..."
"Your damn right you did and if you keep this up you're going to blow it! You hear me?!" Joy yells at him.
"I already said I was wrong," Calum tells her, feeling stupid at being told off by his mother in the middle of a bar and knowing she's right. "If you want to torture someone go the the S&M bar across the street..."
Luke sniggers into his beer.
"What's with you guys anyway? This is supposed to be a gay bar remember?" Dave asks, looking around at all their long faces.
"I saw Corey last night. With this woman. At least that how she proported to represent herself..." Sam says, making Joy and Dave ogle at him in disbelief.
"He really is going straight," Calum tells them seriously. Luke can't believe it, Corey's always been the most flamboyant of all of them, casually flirting with Luke whenever Michael's not looking, how can he just turn that off?
"And so are we, straight to hell according to them," Dave says.
Luke shakes his head, "Doesn't he know that every reputable psychological study done in the past twenty five years emphatically states that a persons sexual orientation is established by the time they're 6? Sometimes even before birth, and it's completely unalterable."
YOU ARE READING
Queer as Muke
Fanfiction"The thing you need to know is, it's all about sex. It's true. In fact they say men think about sex every twenty-eight seconds. Of course that's straight men. With gay men it's every nine." Twenty nine year old advertising executive Michael Cliffor...
