Many Words In Silence

Chapter 17

I squinted my already closed eyes as the sun fell through the curtains onto me. I didn’t want to open my eyes, sure of what I was going to find when I finally dared to glare through my eyelids.

As I opened my eyes I let out a sigh. There it was. My own worst fear and greatest wish has come true…

“Morning babes,” Timothy whispered when he noticed my eyes were open.

He was holding onto my torso. His legs wrapped around one of my naked legs. I could feel his p***s against my thigh and I knew that if he were to move his hand just a few inches lower he would feel mine as well.

I tried my best to take inventory of my entire body, almost as if it wasn’t mine. My right arm was holding him. There was a sticky sensation over my stomach. I have done it. I have moved on with someone. Someone who was ten years younger than me and should have still been in school.

“Urgh…” I groaned and closed my eyes again. I knew I was going to regret this. I pulled back the arm that was holding Timothy so that I could put both my hands over my eyes, hoping that by not being able to see, this would have not happened.

“How are you feeling this morning?” I heard Timothy ask. He moved away pulling the sheet away from my body. Usually I would have grabbed it back and covered myself, but there was no way I wanted to let go of my eyes and open them again.

“f**k…” I muttered. The realisation was real, but I wasn’t ready to accept it just yet. For a few more moments I wanted to deny what had happened. That was until…

“What the f**k!” I screamed, sitting upright and opening my eyes, only to find Timothy at the bottom of the bed, his lips closed around my…

“Don’t worry, I remember that you like it gentle,” he said with a grin before he went back into trying to give me a blowjob.

“Stop it,” I mumbled as his head went up and down in my lap. He let out a giggle at my words, but didn’t stop. I could feel myself getting hard again.

“Seriously, Timothy. Stop,” I said, and this time I took hold of his head and removed his face from the position it was in.

“Not into morning s*x?” Timothy asked smiling. I wasn’t sure if he was mocking me.

“We need to talk,” I said as I pushed him away and took the sheet to cover myself, remembering my clothing was all stuffed into bags when I tried to reach for a shirt next to the bed.

“Yeah… We really do,” Timothy said as he stretched himself out on the bed, showing off his hard-on. “I mean… What happens from here? I really like you Elijah. And last night… Wow!”

At his words I wanted to draw the sheets over my head and not come out again. Pretend it was all a dream, or better yet, that it just didn’t happen, whether in a dream or not.

“Last night can’t happen again,” I answer from beneath the sheet. “And you need to get dressed. We need to pretend that this never happened.”

“What?”

I could hear the hurt in his voice, but I could not bring myself to lower the sheet. There was no way I could look him in the eyes and see that hurt as well.

“Just get dressed please,” I repeated myself. I needed him to get dressed and go to work. And then I needed to work on getting back home. There was nothing left for me in this town apart from a psyco stalker and regrets for having s*x with a child.

“No Elijah!” Timothy yelled all of a sudden. “Last night wasn’t nothing. It wasn’t just s*x. It was something more. I could sense it… You said… you said…”

I could hear a sob ripping through him. This was the last thing I wanted to have happened. I could feel my heart falling into my feet. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Timothy. He was a cute kid. He was sexy and somehow he was truly more mature than what I would have thought in the beginning. In another universe this could have worked out. Hell, if he was older this might have worked out, but I could already see my face slapped across a tabloid magazine with a header telling the world that I raped an underage boy.

“I’m going back home today. I can’t stay here any longer,” I said, ignoring Timothy’s pleas.

“You’re leaving?”

I could not handle his sobs. Within seconds he has gone from just one sob to crying. I could hear it. I could feel the bed shaking. One part of me wanted to crawl out from under the sheet and comfort him, promise him that everything would be okay and that there was nothing to cry about. The other side of me wanted to stay right where I was. That part wanted to cry as well.

“I have to,” I said, climbing out from under the sheet, doing the mature thing. I reached for my towel that was in front of the bed where it fell off last night and pulled it around me, offering the sheet to Timothy.

Wrapping the sheet around his shoulders and covering his body, hoping to make him feel less vulnerable, I hugged him from behind. “It’s going to be okay you know. You are gonna find someone you love. Someone your own age. It was wrong of me to take advantage of you last night and I’m sorry.”

“But Elijah… Please… It doesn’t have to end like this… Take me with you…” Timothy sobbed, turning around and crying into my shoulder. “I don’t want to be here anymore… Just take me with you… Even if you can’t love me, just take me with you…”

“And what about your parents?” I asked. There was no way I was driving a minor over state lines. It was bad enough that I slept with him.

“You don’t… you don’t… you just don’t get it, do you?”

His crying was uncontrollable now. I could hardly make out his words, and he just kept on crying.

“Did they throw you out of the house?”

I had once read that the majority of homeless teens actually identified as gay. Maybe his parents kicked him out. Gosh, maybe I was even harbouring a runaway. But Timothy shook his head, confirming that he was not in fact thrown out of the house.

“Did you run away?” I asked, using my second guess.

He didn’t say a word as another deep sob ripped from his chest and I pulled him in for a tighter hug. He did however nod. Now I knew it was worse. Way worse than what I had thought. What was I thinking in any case? This kid has been sleeping in my hotel for two days. I should have asked myself this question the very first night already, but like always I was too caught up in my own s**t.

“I can take you back to your parents,” I said, trying to see where it might lead. Maybe he would allow me. Maybe the circumstances weren’t as bad as one might think. There were many reasons teens ran away from home. Maybe his was one of the really stupid reasons.

“Y… you… you… can’t…” he sobbed. I felt so bad for making him cry like this, but there was no other choice.

“Why not?”

Timothy pulled out of the hug I had him in and turned to face me. I could see he was trying to control the tears that was streaming down his face, but it just wasn’t working. I remembered a time I was like this. For weeks upon weeks I could not stop the tears from coming no matter how hard I tried. They just kept on streaming down my face. I had to create a fantasy word for myself and truly start to believe in it before they stopped falling. I knew better than anybody else what it felt like when the heartache was so much that it was trying to consume you.

“They’re dead.”

It hit me in the stomach. I felt like a fishing hook grabbed me behind the navel and pulled me up. I was expecting many things, but this wasn’t one of them.

“They f*****g died. Is that what you want to hear?” Timothy said with a hiccup through the tears that he tried to wipe away with the back of his hands. “Not everybody’s life is as f*****g perfect as yours. Sure, you lost a boyfriend… What? Ten years ago! I lost my mom and my dad and even my little brother last year. You have nothing to f*****g cry about.”

What he said was mean and it hit me. It hit me really hard. If he meant to hurt me, he achieved in his mission. I knew this feeling as well. Wanting to hurt everybody around you just so that they could feel a fraction of what you were feeling at that moment. You didn’t really want to hurt them. You just wanted them to understand your pain and what it felt like when you were being ripped apart from the inside out.

I opened my mouth to answer him. To comfort him. No sound came from my lips. It was like my voice box was frozen, not wanting to say the sorry I was forming in my mind. I was however not allowed the time to formulate my words completely before Timothy intercepted.

“You think I don’t know who you are? You are f*****g E. Blake. I read your stuff when it came out. My mom liked your writing as well. She thought you were a deep broken soul. You wrote that everybody needs someone to glue them back together when they were broken. Didn’t you write that?”

I looked at him. I can still remember the smell of the ink on the paper as I wrote down the line that Blake had once said to me. It felt like a million years ago at this moment. It felt like it came from another lifetime. But how could I tell Timothy that these weren’t my words? I wasn’t the one with the glue; the one who fixed people. That the person who fixed me was long gone and in a grave somewhere West from here.

“I… I… I…” I stumbled, not knowing what to say. Not wanting to shatter the dreams of a kid who was shattered enough as it is.

“You know what… Leave it…” Timothy said as he climbed off the bed, leaving the sheet behind him and exposing his body. Only for me to notice for the very first time there was a huge scar on his back. Could that be..?

“Where did that scar came from?” I asked, pointing at him as he pulled his jeans onto his legs, covering himself up.

He glanced at me through his wet face, squinting in a way that looked like he wanted to call on superpowers to burn me alive with his gaze. “It has nothing to do with you. Not anymore.”

“Your family died in a car crash?” I guessed. It made sense. How else do entire families just die? By fire? I’m sure a crash was statistically more possible.

“Yeah. And?” Timothy said as he pulled a shirt over his head, following it up with the hoodie I had bought him.

“And you survived. You live on the streets now? Ran away from your foster family?”

He nodded.

“How do you survive? Apart from the coffee shop?” I asked.

And though he gave me a quiet stare, I knew there were many words in his silence. Minutes later a door slammed as he walked out of my life.