Philadelphia Read online

  Contents

  PHILADELPHIA

  DISCLAIMER

  CHAPTER 1: DRIVER'S ED

  CHAPTER 2: HOW I BECAME HOMELESS

  CHAPTER 3: THIS IS FINE

  CHAPTER 4: IT GETS BETTER

  CHAPTER 5: I HAVE EARS

  CHAPTER 6: THE SPECTACULAR NON-GAY GAY

  CHAPTER 7: MY FRIEND JAMIE

  CHAPTER 8: JUST PROCESSING

  CHAPTER 9: A DATER

  CHAPTER 10: THANKS, I GUESS

  CHAPTER 11: IT IS WHAT IT IS

  CHAPTER 12: THE ELEPHANT

  CHAPTER 13: HELLO TO YOU, TOO

  CHAPTER 14: ANYBODY SPECIAL

  CHAPTER 15: GRAVITATIONAL PULL

  CHAPTER 16: THAT'S DANIEL

  CHAPTER 17: OFF YOUR HIGH HORSE

  CHAPTER 18: I DON'T WANT TO HURT YOU

  CHAPTER 19: WANT ME TO GO?

  CHAPTER 20: WHAT IT FEELS LIKE

  CHAPTER 21: I DON'T MEAN TO DO THAT

  CHAPTER 22: A BIG FAN OF COMMUNICATION

  CHAPTER 23: IF YOU DIDN'T LOVE ME

  CHAPTER 24: YOU'RE BETTER THAN ME

  CHAPTER 25: YOU DON'T HAVE TO SAY IT

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Philadelphia

  a male/male romance

  By L.B. Winter

  Copyright 2020 L.B. Winter, all rights reserved.

  No portion of this work may be duplicated or distributed without the express permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. All persons are fictional persons and not meant to represent any real persons.

  DISCLAIMER

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Trigger warning:

  This book contains depictions of anti-LGBTQ perspectives, suicidal ideation, and dubious consent. Romantic scenes involve sexually explicit material and should be consumed by mature adults only.

  CHAPTER 1

  Driver’s Ed

  __________

  When I was sixteen and I learned to drive, I couldn’t get a hang of the rearview mirror. I was used to looking in mirrors to see my reflection, check my hair, straighten my collar, that kind of thing. So using a mirror to look at something else, and to look at that something backwards, really threw me. I kept wanting to adjust it so I could see my face, and then when I finally got used to aiming it the right way so I could see traffic, I didn’t want to look at it at all. If I’d already driven over that part of the road, why did I have to keep staring at it all the time? My driver’s education teacher, who also happened to be my much-hated snob of a Chemistry teacher, told me in a bored voice that the rearview mirror isn’t for looking at yourself or looking where you’ve been; it’s for understanding what the other drivers are doing. And I’ll be damned if that didn’t make it all click for me, finally: you use a rearview mirror to look back at somebody else. Of course, where you’ve been yourself is in there, but it isn’t the focal point.

  In life, the same principle applies.

  Mostly, this is a story about me. Not that I’m anyone interesting or important, but sometimes the oddest things happen to you when you’re just being yourself. Sometimes things happen to you that you never dreamed could happen. And life is like that; it’s surprising, and it weaves around and some moments are so wild, you feel like it’s somebody else’s life and not yours. And I’ve felt that way more times than I can count, but now and then I like to stop and look back on where I used to be. I like to check and see what the other drivers were doing, and it’s humbling and terrifying and illuminating all at once. And it’s important; I know that now more than ever. Understanding other people is important. It’s necessary—vital, even.

  But this is also a story about a place—cheesesteak and the river and shopping and college and nightlife, and well…you’ll see. I guess a good place to start is the lowest point—we’ll only go up from there!—and then hopefully the rest will fill in, in that mirror-backwards way. And remember that I wasn’t always looking in the rearview mirror back then, and try to forgive me for the things I did while I wasn’t looking.

  ***

  I went to Philadelphia for the second time when I was still a teenager. The first time, we had gone there for a field trip in elementary school, and I didn’t remember a lot about that, but now that I was here again, I could see why Mom and Dad never wanted to drive us out here, even though it was only a short drive away. It sucked. I wanted to go home.

  It was December, and it was too cold to sleep. I drew my knees up to my chest and sat up. It was already pitch-black outside, and I was willing to bet nobody would notice me if I tried to sleep somewhere a little bit warmer.

  I kicked my legs out from under the thin, raggedy blue blanket that had been my most consistent source of shelter for a couple of weeks now. The hole in the middle had gotten bigger. I’m not sure how it happened; I had the blanket stashed behind the pillar under the bridge where I always kept it, but one day when I came to pick it up, it had this stupid hole. I didn’t know where to get another one, except back at the shelter, and I definitely didn’t want to go back there, so I just made do.

  I started wiggling my toes, trying to get the blood flowing back into my feet. I’d gotten used to almost everything about this now: sleeping in the bushes to stay warm, getting a meal a day at the soup kitchen, smelling so strongly of sweat and hunger that people crossed to the other side of the street so they didn’t have to share a sidewalk with me. But I couldn’t get used to being so cold at night that I couldn’t feel my feet. I used to love curling under blankets to stay warm during the winter, safe and dry in my bed. That night I realized I would probably hate the cold for the rest of my life. However long that would be.

  I stood up under the cloud-blotted moon and folded my blanket neatly, hardly even thinking about how ridiculous that was. I reminded myself that my mother probably didn’t care if I folded my blankets anymore. I let the thought fall tiredly into the river, swallowed up by dark.

  Over the riverbank, there was a bridge, a street, and a row of closed or closing businesses, sparkling in their holiday lights. The asphalt had that perpetual wetness of winter, not icy but still soggy and cold. This part of Philly, I noticed, had practically no squirrels at all. That’s the strangest thing about it, because usually no matter where you go, there are rodents, but for some reason, this stretch is rat-free, mouse-free, chipmunk-free. Maybe that’s why I gravitated toward here, orbiting around the upscale neighborhood where I was the nastiest rodent, and I wasn’t so bad, was I?

  It was close to 11 p.m., I realized as I glanced up at the flickering clock sign above a bank. There shouldn’t be many people on the street. I should be safe from them. What I worried about most was police. Apparently being homeless is illegal in Philadelphia, which is a fact I never would have guessed until I became homeless in Philadelphia two weeks before. Was that right? Only two weeks? Fourteen days? I couldn’t remember for sure. It felt like longer, like forever, to be honest.

  When I got to the storefronts, slowly shuffling my chilled bones and frosty skin, I started looking for a spot between streetlights where I could curl up next to the building and maybe feel the warmth through the siding. I had been able to stay warm on some cold nights doing that before, although the first time I did it, I didn’t know I should be discreet and almost got arrested. That was my third night in the city, when the weather was really cold and I’d been at the shelter for a couple days. St. Mary’s Shelter and Soup Kitchen is a couple of miles from there, but there weren’t enough beds one night, and I was new there, l
ow on the food chain, so they kicked me out to make room for the women with kids. Never mind that I was a sixteen-year-old boy, myself; I guess I didn’t look it, and they told me with polite smiles to come back tomorrow, but I couldn’t stay that night. I’ll always remember that helpless feeling, what drove me to it, because some pervert overheard it and offered to share his bed with me if I sucked him off. So I did, and it was horrible and dirty and it made me gag, and then in the morning I took his blanket and I never went back.

  I don’t want to talk about that. Not now. Some things you should look away from, like roadkill you pass on the highway.

  I stopped in front of a boutique with a cute display of snowmen in brightly colored hats in the window. The lights were dim inside, but I could see the burgundy carpet and the racks covered in straw, tweed, lace, ribbon. It looked nice enough there; the shop had been closed for an hour, and I was concealed from the streetlights, at least for the most part. I sat down carefully in front of the window, still feeling stiff from the frigid night air. The blanket didn’t make me feel warm, but at least it stopped me from feeling the bite of the wind, so I tucked it around my legs and leaned my back against the window. At first the glass felt cold through my sweatshirt, but after a few minutes, I thought I could feel the warmth from indoors reaching my skin. I wasn’t really sleepy anymore, so I just closed my eyes and tried to think about being anywhere else, anybody else.

  My thoughts tumbled back to how I got here, a maze that I’d have never guessed would lead me to this winter-frosted road. I had been so miserable when I realized I couldn’t “pray out the gay,” no matter what I did. I figured out I was like this when I was eleven, when I had a crush on my best friend, Taylor, but I thought for sure I could get over it. If I prayed hard enough, God wouldn’t let me stay this way. Then I had my first (dry-lipped, shaking, magical) kiss with a boy named Aaron Decker, at my last junior high track and field meet. He and I had been on the 800 meter relay team together for a couple years, and we were thirteen, clumsy, and scared shitless. He noticed that I got a hard-on when we were in the showers, and he told me once that he had one, too. So we figured, what the hell? We kissed behind the concessions stand, his thin arms stiffly resting on my shoulders, and even though nobody saw it, I was so embarrassed and ashamed afterwards that I couldn’t even look at Aaron anymore.

  It took a while for me to admit it. When I worked up my courage and told my parents just after I turned sixteen, Dad had said not to worry, it would be okay, they would send me to conversion therapy. Looking back, I wonder if they saw it coming. They even knew of a place near Philly, and they enrolled me that fall. But wonder of wonders, it didn’t work. In fact, that made it worse—but more on that later.

  I opened my eyes and looked down at my feet, at the shoes now ragged and dirt-crusted. I thought maybe I was growing, because my toes were pressed up to the tops, curling. I hadn’t gone school shopping that winter like normal. Mom didn’t take me. I lifted my toes up and down and remembered that I missed her. I thought maybe I should stop by the house after all. See if Mom and Dad would let me come home. See if they could forgive me for leaving therapy when they told me not to. See if they could forgive me for being…me. Of course, I’d have to buy a bus ticket, and I didn’t know how I’d ever scrounge up the cash. We only lived an hour outside of Philly, but it may as well have been a thousand miles away. I wondered if they worried about me. I wondered if they cared that I had nowhere to go. Then I swallowed the guilt threatening to press up over my eyelids; I was sure they cared, and I was so sorry. My eyes were stinging then, not from the cold, and I blinked away the tears and decided that, tired or not, I should try to sleep.

  I didn’t get to rest very long before something extraordinary happened to me, one of the most important somethings of my life, though I couldn’t have known it at the time. I heard a jingling bell and the shuffling of feet, and I looked up to find a woman standing next to the glass door of the boutique, keys in her hand, looking at me. I met her eyes for only a second before looking away. I didn’t like how people looked at me then, but I kept forgetting and looking anyway. Before I became a street rat, strangers used to smile at me. I think I have one of those faces, you know?

  I could hear her lock the door, and then she took a couple steps toward me. Heaving a heavy breath, I wrapped shaking fists around my blanket. I was sure she was going to call the cops to get me away from her neat, shiny shop. And then I’d be wandering through the cold again, or worse—forced to do things to get shelter that I knew I couldn’t bear to do.

  “Hey,” she said carefully. Her voice was light and breezy, and I looked up at her face because the sound caught me off-guard. She was young, probably in her twenties. Pretty, too, and she wasn’t giving me that You disgusting piece of shit look. Just looking.

  I tried to say hi back, but I hadn’t really needed to talk at all in two days, so my throat was out of practice. I coughed once and tried again. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” she repeated, and then she was frowning. Yep. Just like everyone did when they saw the homeless loser with his ratty blanket. I looked away and waited for the inevitable. Waited for her to tell me to get my worthless ass away from her stupid, wonderfully warm hat and bag store.

  “Pretty cold night tonight.” She said it like it was a simple conversational topic. Like she had any idea how cold it was. Like she wouldn’t be heading somewhere warm and safe in the next ten minutes while I huddled back in my bush by the river.

  When I didn’t answer, she took a step closer. “Do you have any place to go?”

  I muttered under my breath, “If I did, I wouldn’t be here,” and tucked my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around them. Stop talking to me, I silently begged her. Either send me away or ignore me, but don’t act sympathetic. I can’t take that.

  “I was just going to grab some dinner. Down at the sandwich shop on the corner.” She gestured with her arm. “They’re open 24 hours. The foot-long pizza sub is on special this month. Wanna share it?”

  Oh, shit, I thought tiredly. She’s a missionary. She’s going to try to turn me straight and pray with me (like her prayers work better than mine) and feed me sandwiches.

  “Not hungry,” I mumbled back to her, and tried to turn so my back was towards her as much as I could without actually breaking contact with the warm window.

  “Oh, well, I can never eat the whole thing, so you’d really be helping me out. I don’t need the extra calories,” she said, her voice almost laughing.

  I looked up at her in disgust. Did she really just tell a homeless kid about counting calories?

  My glare rolled right off of her. “Plus, I don’t like eating alone. Are you sure you don’t want to come along?”

  I sighed and stared at my feet. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d let some do-gooder buy me lunch. Made them feel good about themselves for a while—I would know, it’s exactly the kind of thing I would have done once upon a time—and now I wouldn’t have to scrounge around in garbage cans looking for halves of thrown-away sandwiches that some calorie-counting imbecile threw away. I hated my life. I hated myself.

  Looking up at her face, I was relieved to see that, despite the cheerful note in her voice, she wasn’t smiling at all. Still just looking. “Yeah, okay,” I said, before standing up and folding my blanket again. I packed it up carefully, pulling the corners flat, taking my time, feeling embarrassed and stupid and pathetic. She was quiet while I tucked the blanket against the stoop at her store, mumbling something about coming back for it later. Then we were off, walking side by side in silence to the restaurant on the street corner.

  After a few paces, I began to sense that she was putting as much distance between myself and her as possible. I knew it was the smell; everyone did this to me, and sometimes I thought that was the worst part.

  We finally got to the restaurant, and she asked me what kind of bread I like. I told her that anything’s fine, and then she surprised me by saying, “Okay, I’ll order the
sandwich, if you want to go wash up in the bathroom or something real quick.”

  I felt tears sting behind my eyes again. Fuck my life. Why was she doing this to me? After a short pause, she said, “Want to come to my apartment and use my shower, actually? I wouldn’t mind.”

  I couldn’t believe this. Was she going to all this trouble just to humiliate me? What did I ever do to her? But when I finally met her eyes, glaring, ready to tell her to fuck off, ready to run out of this restaurant and never look back, I was taken aback again. She was still just looking; no judgment, no condescension. She was just looking at me. She just maybe wanted to make sure I got a shower, and that’s it. I wasn’t used to this anymore; the past few weeks had made me hard on the outside, and scared, and now I felt this kindness and it was like chemicals corroding these walls I needed to survive. I shook it off and decided she was probably a serial killer, but what was the difference if I died at this point, anyway?

  “I don’t know,” I said on a long exhalation.

  She shrugged. “Alright. I’ll order the sandwich.”

  She stepped into line and I watched from a booth as she ordered. The guy waiting on her was hot. And filthy and rotten as I was, I felt something small stirring inside me. He reminded me of the boy I lost my virginity to (but seriously, more on that later). Sandwich guy was about my age, a few inches above my height, and more muscled, with shaggy brown hair. I was so tired and dirty and lost that I had no self-control, and I stared at him for a long time, slack-jawed, even after she finished paying. I finally noticed her again when she was walking up to the booth with a tray, two drinks, some chips and cookies, and a sandwich cut in two for us. She sat with me, followed my gaze, then looked back and smiled.

  “He’s cute,” she remarked simply. Then she said, “I’m Lynn.”

  After a couple seconds passed and I hadn’t answered, she pushed the tray toward me, told me to pick the half I wanted, and added, “You don’t have to tell me your name if you don’t want to.”