Chapter Nineteen

Ethan

A ping from his phone jolted him up from his sleep. He looked around and realized he had dozed off in his office. He walked to the door and sighed with relief, seeing it locked from inside. 

He felt extremely disoriented as he walked back to his desk, he didn't like it when he was losing any bit of control.

He searched around for his phone, seeing it glow faintly on his desk sent a shiver up his spine. 

He wavered before picking it up.

It was a new message.

From the same unknown number.

It read: “How do you feel going home to an empty penthouse while your subordinates live your dreams openly? I guess you like being in the closet that much.”

He didn’t sleep in his own bed that night. He ended up, sometime past one in the morning, in the small private study two floors above his home  office, a room that Ethan almost never used, mostly because using it required walking past the oil portrait that hung just inside the door, Alistair Cross, silver-haired and unsmiling, painted the year before he died, watching the room the way he’d watched everything in his life, like he expected it to disappoint him and was rarely wrong.

Ethan poured himself a drink he didn’t want and sat in his father’s old leather chair, and let himself, for the first time in longer than he could remember, actually look at the portrait instead of walking past it.

I guess you like being in the closet that much, the text had said, and the cruelty of it had landed exactly where it was aimed, because it was true, and because Ethan knew exactly whose fault that was, and it wasn’t this unknown individual, not really. This person was just the latest hand on a very old wound.

—

He was fifteen the first time he understood what he was, and for a short while, shorter than he would have liked, it had felt like nothing so much as relief. There’d been a boy in his class named Daniel, langy, quiet and funny in a dry, understated way that nobody else at that school seemed to notice, and Ethan had spent an entire spring finding excuses to sit near him, The day Daniel noticed him and spoke to him was one of the happiest days of his teenage life. He continued making excuses to walk the same route home and to linger in the library a few minutes longer than either of them needed to.

What he remembered most wasn’t any one moment. It was just the general  feeling of it all. That strange, dizzy kind of happiness that settled somewhere beneath his ribs and stayed there, turning ordinary days into something brighter. It was like carrying around a secret that belonged only to the two of them.

They’d held hands once in the old school boathouse, hidden in the dark, both too shy to actually look at each other. He remembered their first kiss, it was quick, awkward, and over almost as soon as it had begun. It wasn’t perfect because they didn't know what they were doing. It didn’t need to be. Somehow, because it was so small, it felt like the biggest thing that had ever happened to him.

Ethan had been happy. He remembered that with a clarity that almost hurt now. For a few months, when he was fifteen, he had simply been happy. Not a care in the world.

His father found them in April.

Ethan rarely let himself think about that day for too long. The exact words had blurred over the years, but he still remembered the sound of his father’s voice. It cracked with something. Whatever it was, it felt uglier than both.

Alistair Cross had opened the door to the old boathouse expecting to find his son alone. Instead, he found Ethan with Daniel’s hand still loosely tucked inside his pants. Ethan never forgot the look on his father’s face. It was as though something inside him had quietly shut. Like a door closing. Without the slightest warning.

There had been shouting. A lot of it.

Even now, twenty one years later, Ethan refused to remember the exact words. He knew what they had been about, of course. The kind of things a man like his father said when he wanted his son to understand that what he had just seen was something to be ashamed of, something to be fixed, not accepted.

He remembered Daniel’s face more clearly than anything else. Pale and terrified. Their driver at that time had rushed him out of the boathouse before Ethan could even say his name, let alone goodbye.

Less than a month later, Ethan was told he would be transferring to a boarding school two states away. It was never presented as a discussion. The decision had already been made. His opinion was never asked for.

He never saw Daniel again.

They never spoke again. 

For years, Ethan convinced himself that was simply how things had to be. The silence, the absence, the total erasure of a boy who’d once made him happy for no reason except that he existed. He told himself it was the price he had paid for making the mistake of getting caught.

His father never raised the subject again after that spring, not directly anymore. He didn’t have to. He simply began, harshly and thoroughly, reshaping his son into the “Perfect Cross”, every school function attended was with the “correct” kind of date, every summer filled with the “correct” kind of activities, every dialogue subtly planned to remind Ethan, without ever quite saying it outright, that Cross men did not embarrass the family, that the company his grandfather had built did not have room in it for scandal, that love, the  real love, the kind worth building a life around, it only looked like a pretty woman  in a green dress at a charity gala and nothing else.

The lesson had been thoroughly engraved in his body and mind that by the time his father died, eleven years later, Ethan had built an entire life almost alike from the one his father had wanted for him. A marriage, an empire, and a reputation polished to an unbeatable shine. Everyday he had told himself without fail that this was simply who he was now. That scrawny boy in the boathouse hadn't existed.

He hadn't cried at the funeral, never did  even after that. He remembered standing at the front of the church full of people who had known his father as a titan of the industry who had no idea he had once looked at his own son like something that needed fixing. Ethan had stood there dry-eyed and composed and had felt relief mixed with rage and grief. He was grieving the boy in the boathouse who never got the chance to find out what his life might have looked like if someone had let him be happy.

—-

Ethan set the empty glass down on his father’s old desk and looked up at the portrait again, at the unsmiling, unforgiving face that had shaped so much of what he’d become without ever once having to say a word.

You still don’t get to have what they have. You never will.

The anonymous texts had meant every word as a taunt. Sitting here now, in his father’s chair, under his father’s painted eyes, Ethan let these thoughts run free in his mind with a clarity that felt almost unbearable. It was simply the truth, he would never have what they have, not in this life perhaps. 

He thought of Mark from editorial, kneeling in front of a coffee cart and a cheering floor, utterly unafraid of what it might cost him. He thought of himself at fifteen, holding a boy’s hand in the dark of a boathouse, before he’d learned that happiness like that came with a price.

He didn’t know, sitting there, whether he had it in him to be a different kind of man than the one his father had spent eleven years constructing out of him. But he knew, for the first time in longer than he could remember, that he wanted to find out.

He picked up his phone.

Ethan:  What I said to you wasn’t about anything you did. I apologize for my rudeness and erratic behavior.

He read it over twice, waiting for the old instinct to delete it. It didn’t come, or it came and he simply didn’t listen to it this time.

He hit send before he could change his mind, set the phone face-down on his father’s desk, and sat a while longer in the dark, looking up at a man who had never once, in his entire life, given his son permission to be exactly what he was.