Let Me Be Yours

  “Let Me Be Yours”

  M/M Gay Romance

  David Horne

  © 2020

  David Horne

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This book is intended for Adults (ages 18+) only. The contents may be offensive to some readers. It may contain graphic language, explicit sexual content, and adult situations. May contain scenes of unprotected sex. Please do not read this book if you are offended by content as mentioned above or if you are under the age of 18.

  Please educate yourself on safe sex practices before making potentially life-changing decisions about sex in real life. If you’re not sure where to start, see here: http://www.jerrycoleauthor.com/safe-sex-resources/ (courtesy of Jerry Cole).

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Products or brand names mentioned are trademarks of their respective holders or companies. The cover uses licensed images and are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any person(s) that may be depicted on the cover are simply models.

  Edition v1.00 (2020.06.22)

  http://www.DavidHorneauthor.com

  Special thanks to the following volunteer readers who helped with proofreading: Bob, RB, JayBee, Big Kid, Jennie O., and those who assisted but wished to be anonymous. Thank you so much for your support.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  Lucas Lopes

  Standing in the high dormitory window on a foggy day, you could almost feel as though you were in the clouds. I liked to pretend that it was true, that the world below me was getting farther and farther away. Things were easier in the sky, and I didn’t have to look down at the same grass and concrete I’d known my whole young life.

  In the clouds I could pretend this wasn’t where I grew up, could pretend I’d had my choice of schools, instead of ending up in this one as a matter of convenience and poverty. I could also, mercifully, blow smoke out the window and no one would notice. It was a bad habit, I knew, even back when I started it. But this place, the place on which I’m quick to blame everything, breeds bad habits. They’re the only thing you can turn to when you’re forced to live on the muddy ground of my New York State town. And I took it with me into the foggy sky like a reminder that I would eventually have to go back down.

  And sometimes, as I stood there soaring through the atmosphere, the fog would clear. I would come in for a landing and put my cigarette out on the windowsill, thanking God or whomever that you didn’t have to put a security deposit down on a dorm room. You just paid up front, a surprisingly handsome fee for a state school. This allowed you to leave your dents and stains and burn marks. Then they paid someone to come in, paint over it, buff it out, and make it shine like new for the next student to ruin it all over again.

  It was a bit like my old bedroom back home, which was not far away. I’d not been out of the house three days by the time my mother tossed the old twin-sized mattress out into the street for free, by the time she stripped the wallpaper and waxed the floors. She’d always wanted a guest room. I had, with great haste, been demoted to ‘guest.’ I could have just adopted that new title over the summer, stayed in the freshly painted guest room in a bed that no longer held my lanky shape. I could have been grown up about it and suffered through one last summer of feeling like anyone could own me, and then left my mother’s house with my middle finger in the air.

  But I didn’t. I stayed in the sweaty basement of a friend’s house, hedging my bets as to whether she and I would hate each other by the end of it. I guess we were lucky.

  I’d left Angela’s house a week before the official move-in day, desperate for any amount of time alone I could get my hands on, after two months of family dinners and the sound of the television, turned way up for her father’s slowly failing ears. It had been six days since I got to the dorm, but still my stuff lay unpacked in a disorganized heap, items taken out as-needed from the sloppy pyramid of suitcases and boxes. It was something I ought to fix, given that my roommate would be getting in today. As juniors, we were finally lucky enough to have some semblance of actual floor space between our beds. It was a scratchy blue carpet no one could ever quite get the smell of spilled beer out of, but it was a luxury I’d not had since coming to this school.

  This time, when the fog cleared, that clarity was met with the ever-jarring sound of a train, warning everyone of its arrival. It was a sound I’d been hearing since birth, that same whistle, the same ringing of the descending barrier to keep cars off the tracks. The train station was right across the road from campus, and only a few miles from my old house. Behind it there lay an old factory made of bricks, with a high smokestack and hundreds of little cracks in the windows. It was some of the remaining evidence that this town was a hotbed of decay. Everything else was in a state of repair or had already been fixed up into something that no longer resembled the crumbling economy. The school had been too.

  Northeast State College used to, back in the 1920s, be known as Greystone Psychiatric Hospital. Its sprawling campus climbed well into the base of the mountain, all brick buildings and cobblestone pathways. A place to heal or get a lobotomy, depending on how much trouble you caused. Once it was shut down, all patients released into the world untreated, it quickly fell into disrepair. Until the late 80s it was nothing but the source of ghost stories and a place to sneak in and prove to your friends that you weren’t chicken.

  But now its halls were full of a different kind of insanity: the unbearable mental anguish of being something akin to an adult for the very first time.

  The train came in, slowing to its screeching stop. Through the dirty windows I could see the silhouettes. It was a mostly-empty train, always, because all the worthwhile stops came before this one. The only people riding the train this far upstate at ten in the morning were winos returning from the city, or students doomed to move into the dorms without the help of an SUV or their parents.

  And so, the first time I saw him was from above. The faraway approximation of a sandy-haired young man, laden with a backpack and wheeling along a suitcase behind him. Though I could not make out the detail of his face, though I could not see him well enough to make any sort of judgment, I felt immediately like a voyeur. Like looking at him was a depraved act, like he was something I was not supposed to see.

  It was a feeling I’d not had in a long time. It felt like that old first inkling that I was attracted to men, seeing them, and getting the sense that whatever the flutter was I felt in my chest, was different than any other sensation. Realizing that not every boy around me felt that same excitement.

  But something about the vague, far-off shape of him sent through me that old familiar thrill. I quickly shook it off, knowing that in my near-constant mild depression I was likely to fall in love with every handsome stranger for a while. But imagining a life with him that might save me, I knew wasn’t the way to be saved. I was supposed to save myself, but it would just be so much easier if someone else did it for me. I would, I told myself, never see this guy again, unless we somehow ended up in a class together.

  I turned away from the window then and sighed at my massive pile of unpacked belongings. Running one skinny hand through my grown-out hair, smoothing down the knots and flyaways I’d allowed it to collect, I set about trying to make this place look a little bit more like someone actually lived in it.

  I unzipped the suitcase with most of my clothes in it, all stuffed in at random, wrinkled from the haphazard packing. It seemed to explode with an impossible volume of thrift-store shirts and unpaired socks. It went into the dresser in the very same fashion, but at least it was no longer in the suitcase. I set the record player on my desk, lined my sneakers up in a row on the floor. In one of my mislabeled shoeboxes, I found the little rainbow flag, the desk ornament Angela’s mother had bought me in an attempt to show her approval. I twirled it between my fingers, watching the blur of colors whip around, contemplating if I ought to display it.

  The reactions from previous roommates had been varied. They ranged from indifference to obvious discomfort. There was no telling what this new guy might think. And though I knew I ought not to care, that I ought to live my life out loud like so many people had told me to, still I hesitated. It was so very important, then, to be liked.

  But as I held the little flag in my hand, I heard the struggle of a key in a lock, and the turning of a metal handle. I turned around, my hand still wrapped around the stick of the flag, and I saw him for the second time. The guy from the train station, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

  Wonderful, I thought, that his first
impression of me should be this. Standing disheveled in sweatpants, holding a pride flag like I was reluctantly standing on a float in a god damn parade. I gulped, slammed the ornament down on the surface of my desk, and attempted to smile. He smiled back, immediately establishing his capability to absolve me. It was a wide, tired grin, the kind someone has when they’ve finally, after much struggle, reached a place where they can settle down their load and breathe. With a happy groan, he let the backpack slide from off his shoulder, and tossed his head back. He was tall, like me, but looked a lot sturdier. His arms radiated strength, more toned than my own skinny limbs, and his clothes seemed to fit him more properly than they ought. I felt then not only like a voyeur, but very ugly. But still he was smiling, reaching out a hand for me to shake. Absolved, again.

  “Are you Lucas?” he asked me, the kind of question you ask even though you already know the answer but are still deathly afraid of being wrong. I nodded.

  He introduced himself as Ryan, and I noticed in him the slightest hint of a Southern accent. Buried deep as if he was trying to keep it a secret.

  He threw his suitcase up on his bed and dragged an arm across his forehead to wipe away the sweat. It had rendered his hair all stringy, but somehow, he didn’t look like a mess. Some men were made to sweat and be strong.

  I soon found out that my hearing wasn’t tricking me. He came from South Carolina, a transfer student from a two-year community college program. He’d long dreamed of coming up to New York and had made a deal with his father that if he got a 4.0, he was free to travel wherever he pleased.

  “I got the grades,” he told me as he neatly stacked his pants into a dresser drawer. “But celebrated a little too hard. N’ he said to me ‘New York? Have it your way,’ so that’s why I’m here instead of the city.” He laughed, and I laughed, but then his face took on a distinct look of guilt. “I’m sorry man, not trying to say this place is--”

  “A shit hole?” I interrupted, waving a hand. “It’s fine, because you’re right.” More genuine but as-yet uncertain laughter.

  As we continued to unpack, we set about the usual questions. What’s your major, what’s your plan. He told me he was an English major, and my head was filled with the idea that I was now rooming with William Fucking Faulkner, but then he told me his focus was on poetry. Another thing his father punished him for.

  “How about you?” he asked me, and I wondered if he wanted to know, or was simply following a script.

  “Journalism.”

  “Oh, America’s most wanted,” he said, and pointed his fingers at me as if shooting two pistols. “Careful out there, bud.”

  With great relief that he was apparently not a staunch conservative, I put the little rainbow flag in with the cup full of pens on my desk. If he saw it, he didn’t say anything.

  And unfortunately, one’s sexuality is not part of the script. What’s your major? Do you have siblings? Who do you fuck? It just doesn’t come up naturally. I felt very much like an investigative journalist indeed, during that first meeting. Trying to glean the details of him, the nuances, without actually having to ask. But I wasn’t particularly good at my job. Still, I learned a lot of other things about him. His family owned the largest farm in South Carolina, and his parents tended to hoard their wealth. He’d spent his summer as he spent every summer since he was strong enough to lift a bale of hay, working on the farm in exchange for the ongoing privilege of getting to live in that giant farmhouse.

  “My house is just up the road,” I admitted. “Well, not really my house anymore. After this year I’ve gotta get my own place.”

  “That’s my plan, too. Can’t stand it anymore, man. You get along with your parents?”

  “It’s just my mom and stepdad.”

  “Oh--”

  “My dad’s not dead or anything.”

  “Oh.”

  “Just far away and shitty.”

  “Ha.”

  I put on a record to fill the air once we ran out of questions to ask one another. We unpacked to the sound of a dreamy melody, and I swear I heard him singing.

  Chapter Two

  Angela, still managing to remain my friend even after spending the summer together, walked with me to class whenever our schedules lined up.

  “You have every month a new sworn boyfriend,” she teased, misquoting her beloved Shakespeare. Ryan, too, was fond of the Bard, and the two of them had taken to running scenes together in the dorm. I tried to quell my jealousy, and Angela reminded me it was unfounded. “But I think this one might stick.”

  “I dunno,” I said, adjusting the strap of my backpack on my ever-sloping shoulder. “I like him, obviously, but I don’t even know if he’s--”

  “He is,” she confirmed.

  “He told you?”

  “No, he cried while reading ‘When Lilacs Last in The Dooryard Bloom’d’ in class last week.”

  “Oh.” I laughed at her attempt at proof. Angela was always funny, until she was sad, or cruel. Her jokes were her most obvious defense.

  Once we parted ways, I attended my photojournalism class. It was effectively an hour and fifteen-minute slideshow, three days a week, where we tried to decide if the important historical moments captured on film were only important because they’d been seen and recorded. If anything, I said out loud with my hand raised, these photos were just documenting man’s capability for violence and love, as those seemed to be the most common subjects.

  It was bullshit, but my professor seemed impressed. By Junior year, everything you do is either bullshit or your opus. There is no… in between. By that time, you’ve learned how to navigate college work like channels in the ocean. It allowed me so much time for daydreaming.

  It allowed me to stare out the classroom window, wondering what used to be in here. Wondering how many people suffered shocks or prodding to the brain to cure them of something that wasn’t even wrong in the first place. I probably would have been there, strapped to a chair with electrodes stuck to my temples, getting the gay electrocuted out of me. I could have looked out this same window and seen my reflection just like I was right now. I counted myself lucky for living when I did, and where I did, even if I hated it. It could always be worse.

  I thought about Ryan, about what it must have been like, if Angela was right, growing up gay in the south. I thought about his smile, and his arms, and how he let out the gentlest snores in his sleep. Despite their quiet nature, still they managed to wake me up in the middle of the night. I was always so vigilant. Ryan told me about how he sleeps like he’s dead, because he’d lived next to so many animals for so long and had to get used to it. Even the rooster couldn’t get him out of bed in the morning.

  I thought about him in my bed. I thought about the two of us nestled impossibly close on the twin-sized mattress, its frame comically small against our long bodies. I thought about him, and thought and thought, ignoring the bloody images on the ancient projector, every face in the courtyard outside looking like his for one brief second. Wishful thinking, that I might get the chance to see him. Again, even though I saw him so often.

  I thought about how, at night, he would take out his contacts. I thought about his thick-rimmed glasses and the stubble that grew on his upper lip by the end of every day.

  When we were dismissed, and I struggled to get out of my chair, transfixed by my daydreams, I realized that Angela was right about at least one thing: this one was going to stick.

  ***

  In the evening, when all the sky seemed to be dyed a deep orange, the three of us sat on my bed, books open but unread in our laps. It was the Friday sickness one feels when you know the weekend is just around the corner, so despite our exams and assignments and deadlines, we dallied instead. Ryan forewent his Wordsworth in favor of listening to me tell tales of the way this town used to be.

  “So, they performed, like, lobotomies and shit?” he asked me, adjusting his position on the bed, leaning against the wall with his knees bent. The sparkle of curiosity in his eyes rendered me silent, but I nodded, trying not to swoon at the adorable way he pushed his glasses up his nose.