ate in silence for a few moments and Colby was trying to figure out how best to approach that looming elephant in the room when Keats pointed his fork at the window behind Colby. “So what’s with your neighbor?”
Colby glanced over his shoulder to see Georgia in her yard, picking through the remnants of the toilet paper he hadn’t gotten to yesterday morning. “What do you mean?”
He swallowed his bite of eggs. “Nothing, just saw you hightail it over there last night, figured I’d interrupted plans or something.”
“I was supposed to help her finish cleaning up, and I was going to bring burgers over but … got sidetracked last night.”
“By me?”
“Eventually by you. But by whiskey first. Had a shitty day at work.”
“How come?”
Colby pushed at his breakfast. “A student attempted suicide over the weekend.”
Keats flinched. “Sorry. He okay?”
Colby blew out a breath, not sure why he was sharing any of this with Keats but unable to stop. “Yeah, thank God. But I’ve been put on leave since I was the last one to counsel him. His parents want an investigation.”
“Counsel?”
Colby took another long sip of coffee. “Yeah, I’m a school counselor now. I went back for my master’s after … after I left Hickory Point.”
Keats’s head lowered and he picked at the food on his plate. They stayed quiet for a few more minutes until Keats shifted on his feet and cleared his throat. “You lost your teaching job because of me.”
Colby leaned back in his chair, the past pressing down on him with that, smothering him in the bright, airy kitchen. “No, I resigned. I knew the rumors wouldn’t stop. And really, I didn’t want to be there anymore anyway.”
Colby wouldn’t tell Keats that he’d been physically sick with grief for months, torturing himself with the constant what ifs, wondering what could have saved Keats, and knowing, deep in his gut, that he’d handled things all wrong. He’d seen too much of himself in Keats and had wanted to be there for him. But he should’ve known that offering that level of open conversation could be misconstrued by a confused kid. He hadn’t kept the boundaries clear enough. And that last night, when Keats had asked if Colby was bi, Colby had admitted that the rumors were true.
Looking back, it had been so inappropriate to share that. But he’d seen Keats tearing himself up for feelings and urges he was having, using his father’s hateful language as a constant internal soundtrack. He and his dad had had a huge fight that final night, and his father had threatened to send Keats to military school.
Besides the regular music classes at school, Keats had been taking guitar lessons two nights a week with Colby. But that final evening, he hadn’t shown up for his appointment at the rec center where they met. Late that night, he’d shown up on Colby’s doorstep instead, carrying his broken guitar. Keats’s father had smashed his son’s most precious possession against the wall.
Colby had made the fatal error of letting Keats inside. Keats had spilled everything about the fight with his dad. His father had found a sheet of lyrics Keats had written—a song called “Off Limits” that had made it sound like Keats was in love with a boy. His father had flipped his shit, called Keats every disgusting name in the homophobe handbook, and had told him he’d rather be dead than have a fag for a son. Even when Keats denied that the song had anything to do with that—that it was really about how everything he loved to do, like playing music, was off-limits—his father hadn’t listened. His dad wasn’t going to be satisfied until his artsy son turned into what he wanted—a tough-as-nails “man’s man” who would follow in his father’s and older brother’s footsteps into the Marines.
It had taken everything Colby had not to drive over to Keats’s house and beat the stupid out of Keats’s father. How could anyone look at Keats and not see how talented and amazing the kid was? But he’d controlled himself and had tried to be there for Keats as a sympathetic ear and to offer a safe place for him to express his feelings. But when Keats had asked him point-blank about his sexuality, Colby hadn’t been able to lie. Instead of saying that wasn’t an appropriate question to ask him, he’d been honest.
Colby had long suspected the kid was confused about his sexuality, and he’d wanted Keats to know that if he felt drawn to both guys and girls, he wasn’t alone, that it was okay to have the feelings he did. That being a “real” man had nothing to do with who you were or weren’t attracted to. But while Colby was busy trying to be Mr. Save the Day teacher, he’d been too stupid to realize that Keats’s confused feelings were a lot less hypothetical and a lot more personal. Not until Keats had leaned over to kiss him had Colby realized how wrong everything had gone.
And he’d handled the whole situation in the most immature and dangerous way possible, reacting out of fear, thinking of self-preservation first. He’d shoved Keats away and asked him to leave.
And Keats had. For good.
“So you left there and came here to be a counselor,” Keats said, breaking Colby out of his reverie. “Glutton for punishment?”
He huffed a quiet laugh. “Maybe.”
“And now you’re on leave because some kid tried to off himself?” Keats shook his head and ate his last bite of bacon. “I guarantee you they don’t pay you enough to be held responsible for the decisions of teenagers. I remember what I felt like back then. I didn’t know which way was up. No amount of talking or intervention would’ve made me change my mind about running away.”
“I don’t believe that,” Colby said. “I screwed things up that night. I should’ve handled it differently.”
“No.” Keats shook his head, his gaze shifting away from Colby’s. “You did what you needed to do so that you didn’t get tossed in fucking jail. I was messed up and terrified of what my dad was going to do. You were nice to me, listened to what I had to say, and seemed to give a shit. My head got all mixed up about it and I thought that maybe if I kissed you, you’d let me stay there and not send me back home. Plus, I think I needed to find out if what I was feeling was really attraction. You know, that maybe the reason I felt so out of place all the time was because I was into guys or whatever. But it was just reaching for straws.”
Colby considered him. “Was it?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. I haven’t wanted to kiss a guy—or do anything else with one—since.”
“So I scared you off guys for good. Good to know,” he said, trying to lighten the mood and chase away the dark memories.
Keats met Colby’s gaze for half a second. But whatever he had planned to say never made it out. He grabbed his plate and turned around to rinse it in the sink.
When he spun back around, he hitched a thumb toward the hallway. “Thanks for the breakfast. I’m going to grab my stuff and get out of here. You don’t have to pay me the money. You don’t owe me anything. Never did.”
Colby didn’t have time to respond before Keats had disappeared from the kitchen. But no way was this going to be the end of it. He hadn’t gone through the trouble of taking Keats home only to drop him back off on the street this morning. Colby followed him down the hallway
