Roommate

  Roommate

  Sarina Bowen

  In association with

  Heart Eyes LGBTQ Books

  Tuxbury Publishing LLC

  Copyright © 2020 by Sarina Bowen

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Editing by Edie Danford. Proofreading by Claudia F. Stahl. Cover photo by Wander Aguiar.

  This book is dedicated to the Sarindipity readers’ group.

  You guys keep me showing up for work every day. Thank you!

  Contents

  1. Roderick

  2. Kieran

  3. Kieran

  4. Roderick

  5. Kieran

  6. Roderick

  7. Kieran

  8. Roderick

  9. Kieran

  10. Roderick

  11. Kieran

  12. Kieran

  13. Roderick

  14. Kieran

  15. Roderick

  16. Kieran

  17. Roderick

  18. Kieran

  19. Roderick

  20. Kieran

  21. Roderick

  22. Roderick

  23. Kieran

  24. Roderick

  25. Kieran

  26. Roderick

  27. Roderick

  28. Kieran

  29. Roderick

  30. Kieran

  31. Roderick

  32. Kieran

  33. Kieran

  34. Kieran

  35. Roderick

  36. Kieran

  37. Kieran

  38. Roderick

  39. Kieran

  40. Kieran

  41. Roderick

  42. Two Years Later

  Don’t Miss: The New Vino & Veritas Series

  Roderick

  Sometimes adulting just sucks.

  These are my thoughts as I drive my rickety Volkswagen Bug up my parents’ gravel driveway. I haven’t been here for most of a decade, and I’m bracing myself in every possible way. Anything could have happened during the intervening years. They could have moved away. (Although that’s unlikely.) They could have gotten divorced. (Also hard to picture.)

  Conceivably, one or both could be dead.

  I don’t even know how I’ll feel if that last thing has happened. My parents and I didn’t part on good terms, to put it lightly. But people can change their ways.

  Not all of them do, though.

  At first glance, my parents’ property looks exactly the same. The little one-story house is still clad in cheap vinyl siding, and its shade of ochre-yellow is just how I remember it.

  The tall pines have been carefully pruned of their dead lower branches, which argues for the continued existence of my father, who always enjoyed firing up his chainsaw to tidy things up. Also, Dad’s old ride-on mower is visible inside the garage.

  He’s still around, then. I feel a little hit of relief, which makes no sense. The man will probably shut the door in my face when he sees who’s come to visit. This is going to end badly. I’m already ninety-nine percent sure.

  Still, I need to ask for their help. After paying for the gas to drive up from Nashville, I have less than four hundred dollars to my name. And no job. If they turn me away, I’m sleeping in my car again tonight.

  It won’t kill me, but it’s not ideal.

  Parking in front of the garage, I get out and almost bleep the locks. I’m so used to parking in Nashville. I haven’t lived under these tall pines for eight years.

  Back then, I couldn’t wait to leave this place. I had my reasons, and some of them were solid. And I used to hate the trees and the winding country roads as much as I hated my parents’ attitude.

  I still hate the things my parents said to my teenage self. But Vermont looks better to me than it ever did before. I’m ready to live somewhere without smog and traffic. I miss the smell of woodsmoke in the nighttime air, and the sight of the sun setting over the Green Mountains.

  Maybe it’s weird to feel nostalgia for a place that wasn’t good to me. But I’m in the mood to give Vermont a second chance. I’m hoping it gives me a second chance, too. And I’m about to find out if driving eleven hundred miles was a good idea or just plain stupid.

  As I approach the house, the front door is already opening. My dad stands on the other side of the screen door, TV remote in his hand, staring at me like he’s seen a ghost.

  “Hi,” I say carefully.

  “Roddy,” he whispers. He makes no move to open the screen door, but then, neither do I. Maybe we both need a minute to get over our mutual shock.

  He looks older. It startles me to catalog all the gray in his hair and the new wrinkles around his eyes.

  I’m pretty sure that I don’t look like the skinny eighteen-year-old I used to be, either. So he’s staring back at me trying to get over that, too.

  “You’re back?” he asks, still befuddled.

  “Well…” I let out a nervous chuckle. “I’ve been living in Nashville. And yesterday I just got in my car and drove up here without a plan. It took me two days.”

  I won’t tell him why I left Nashville. He won’t want to hear about the awful way my relationship ended. Hell, he won’t want to hear about my relationship at all.

  “So,” I continue. “I’m happy to be back in Vermont. But I’m kind of starting over. And I was wondering if…”

  “Ralph?” my mother’s voice calls from deeper inside the small house.

  I have very little time to prepare before she appears behind him. She’s drying her hands on a dish towel, her hair in a messy bun.

  My heart gives a little squeeze of familiarity before I can steel myself.

  “Roderick,” she whispers, her eyes popping wide. “Oh, honey. What’s happened?”

  “Well, not much,” I stammer. “I just needed to get out of Nashville and start over. So I was thinking of doing that here.”

  “Here?” She squeezes the dish towel, her eyes alight.

  “Perhaps,” I say, trying to sound like it isn’t my only option in the whole world. But if I step over the threshold and stay with them, it has to be because I’m invited. I won’t live with their disdain. Sleeping in the car would be better.

  “You want to stay here,” my father clarifies. He’s still holding that TV remote. And he still hasn’t opened the screen door.

  It’s not a good sign.

  “Just for a little while,” I say. “Until I find a job and a place of my own. I’m a baker.”

  “You…what?” my mother asks. “Like, cakes?”

  “Bread, mostly. I went to culinary school. I specialize in bread-baking.”

  My father squints at me, and that’s another clue this isn’t going to work. “Culinary school,” he echoes. There’s dismissal in his voice. Baking is not a real man’s job. I might as well have said that I’m a ballet dancer, or that I star in a drag show. My father’s ideas of what a man should do with his life are straight out of the fifties.

  “No more guitar?” my mother asks. She’s hoping I’ve grown out of being the queer little music nerd my father couldn’t tolerate. She’s trying to sway him.

  “No guitar,” I agree, although it kills me a little to imply that I somehow got with Dad’s program and outgrew music. The truth is that I accidentally left my guitar behind in Nashville.

  I did outgrow musicians, though. But that’s another long story.

  “If you stay…” My father purses his lips. “It’s our house, our rules.”

  I swallow hard. “I’m a great house guest. I even
cook. And clean up.”

  My mother makes a happy sound and reaches for the latch on the screen door. She even elbows my father a little to shift him out of the way.

  He doesn’t move, though. He’s still staring at me like I’m a puzzle he’s trying to figure out. “But you’re not… You won’t…” He falters.

  “I won’t what?” I ask, already knowing where this is going.

  Dad can’t even spit out the loathsome words. “You have a girlfriend?” he asks.

  Coward. I shake my head. “I don’t have anybody. That’s why I’m standing on your front steps. I had to leave a bad relationship with nothing but my clothes and a box of books. But I still date men, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m still gay.”

  My mother lets out a sound of dismay. And the way my father’s face shutters, I know I came here for nothing.

  “You haven’t been to church,” my father says, as if that isn’t a non-sequitur. But to him I suppose it isn’t.

  “Not lately,” I admit. “My life blew up, Dad. I have nowhere to go. I’m asking to stay in my old room for a couple of weeks until I can regroup. And I’d help out around here, of course.”

  There is a terrible silence while we stare at each other. And then he slowly shakes his head. “Not until you ask God’s forgiveness.”

  It’s really astonishing that you can storm out of a house at eighteen in the middle of a shouting match, and then pick right up again in the same place eight years later. We’re still trapped in the same dialogue we’d had my entire last year of high school.

  “I am humble before the Lord,” I say quietly. “But I will not apologize to Him for who I love, or who I am.”

  My father gives me a disgusted look, as if I just announced my committed worship of Satan. He folds his arms across his chest. The posture is clear. Go away. You are no longer my son.

  Message received. I feel a flash of the old hurt, but it’s followed swiftly by exhaustion. My anger is muted by two days behind the wheel of my car and by already having years of living with his rejection.

  Still, I look him right in the eye. You arrogant fuck. Who says you can judge me?

  My mother sniffs, and I know she’s crying. Mom wants me to come inside. But she doesn’t want it enough to stand up to him.

  That’s when I finally realize I’m done here. Probably forever. There is nothing left to do but turn around and leave.

  I take one last look at him. But there is no softness there. No affection for the kid he used to love, although I’ve always been me. I’m the same boy who caught all those baseballs with him in the various yards around the country where we lived when he was in the Air Force. I’m the same son who mowed the lawn and got up early to go fishing, because I craved his attention.

  He doesn’t even blink. His rejection is unmoving.

  So I turn around and make myself walk away.

  The sound of the heavy wood door shutting behind me comes even more suddenly than I expect it to. And I have the sudden, terrible urge to spin around and hurl myself at that fucking door. Open up, you cowardly fuck! I might scream. Part of me wants to make a big scene, the way I used to when he lectured me during my senior year of high school.

  But the other half of me is already numb. I drove all the way to Vermont thinking I might have a chance. When God closes a door, he opens a window. It’s the worst kind of cliché, but I wanted it to be true. All the way here I wondered if my breakup was some kind of sign that I was meant to live my life elsewhere. I thought maybe I was sent home again for a reason.

  Apparently not, though. This week, when God closes a door, he also engages the deadbolt.

  I go back to my car and start the engine again. Might as well have left her running. I do a three-point turn without looking at the house, yellowed pine needles crackling under my tires. It’s time to form a Plan B. So I point my car toward the center of Colebury.

  I’ll bet my father is already watching the playoff game again. Maybe he’s treated himself to a second beer, just to wash away the disturbing intrusion of his queer son during the fifth inning.

  And my mother is crying into a hand towel in the bathroom. Quietly. So she doesn’t make a fuss.

  I can’t think about them right now. I have more practical problems—like how to get a job immediately. And where to sleep tonight. Best-case scenario—there is magically a job opening at the King Arthur Flour Bakery, where I began my career. But even if they hire me tomorrow, it will be at least two weeks until I could expect to be paid.

  I have to figure out how to stay alive for several weeks on a few hundred dollars.

  As I drive into town, I notice that my gas tank is almost empty. There goes twenty-five bucks. I drive slowly anyway, taking in the sights, wondering what’s changed. Just before the turn into Colebury, I spot a couple of new businesses. There’s a bar called the Gin Mill with lots of cars in the parking lot. That place looks like a good time, but I don’t have money to spend, not even on a single beer.

  In the same lot, though, there’s another business that’s even more interesting to me. The Busy Bean. A coffee shop. It’s closed now, but I make a note to pay it a visit soon. If it’s a big coffee shop, they might be able to use a baker, one who doesn’t mind pouring coffee, too.

  Beggars can’t be choosers. And since I’m this close to becoming an actual beggar, I have to keep my options open.

  I gun the engine, climbing the hill toward the town square. The houses look a little better maintained than the last time I was here. It’s a warm autumn night, and there are people standing outside the old diner, chatting. That place has shined itself up, too. When did Colebury get cute? I’m stunned at how cheerful it looks, with window boxes on the store fronts and every street lamp lit.

  My nostalgia bubbles up inside me again like yeast. This is my hometown, even if I never felt welcome here before. I was born here. And even if I spent most of my first eighteen years living on various military bases around the world, I finished high school here, too.

  And I like the look of the place, damn it. I feel the pull.

  Wouldn’t it be funny if I settled down in Colebury right under the noses of my parents? I want to see the look on my father’s face when I walk into the diner holding hands with my future boyfriend.

  Now there’s a happy thought I’ll need to revisit when I’m trying to fall asleep in the passenger seat later.

  Behind the old diner, I see something that’s actually useful to me. A gym. TRY A WEEK ON US, reads a sign in the window.

  It’s the first lucky break of the day. Or maybe the month, if I’m honest. If the gym has even a half-decent locker room, I can shower there every night. I’ll need to look professional while I’m job hunting.

  I park my car and get out. Come on, Colebury. Don’t let me down.

  Kieran

  I’m leaning against my car in the parking lot at the gym. I’m aware that just standing around outside the gym defeats the whole purpose of being here, but I’m on the phone, listening to my older brother plead with me to do his chores at home.

  “Come on, this is my opportunity to make an extra hundred bucks. You can come into the Gin Mill and I’ll buy you a beer.”

  “How can I come in and drink beer if I’m moving the cows for you?” I ask. People always tell me that I have a grumpy voice. But lately it’s extra grumpy when I talk to Kyle.

  “Come later,” he says. “After chores.”

  Only Kyle would pretend that’s a workable plan. He expects me to abandon my workout, drive forty minutes home, move the cows’ grazing fence before it gets dark, and then finish the other farm chores.

  Then drive forty minutes back for a free beer? Ridiculous.

  And here’s the shitty thing—Kyle gets paid by our dad for farming. But I don’t. “You have two jobs, and Kyle does most of the ranch work,” he’d said last year when he’d finally added Kyle to the payroll.

  That would make sense if only it were true. But Dad’s back problems started
getting worse right after that, so I’ve been pitching in three nights a week. “Let me get this straight. I’m doing your chores for free so that you can earn money elsewhere?”

  “Please?” he begs. “What if I paid you twenty bucks? It’s only a two-hour gig, but Alec says the beer-industry people are big tippers.”

  I look forlornly toward the gym. If I’d gotten here ten minutes earlier I would have been inside already, unreachable. I do everything that’s asked of me. Everything. And nobody really appreciates it.

  “Tell me this—what are your plans for the rest of the week?” I demand. He’s terrible at planning. And I need him to use his head for once, before I lose mine.

  “Well, tomorrow I promised Dad I’d take him to the newest Robot Wars movie in Montpelier…”

  While he talks, my attention is snagged by a man who’s just climbed out of a bright blue Volkswagen Bug. He’s reading the sign on the door of the gym. I can’t see his face, because he’s turned to the side. But I get a good look at his muscular shoulders, which are straining his black T-shirt. And his forearms have terrific muscle definition…

  “Kieran?” my brother prompts. “Did you get that?”

  No, I was just admiring a dude. I close my eyes and try to forget the hot guy across the parking lot. This is the extent of my sex life—admiring men, and then feeling confused about it. I spent the first twenty years of my life thinking that attractive men were interesting to me only because I admired them as people and wanted to be like them.