Free Trust the Focus by Megan Erickson

by myself for five fucking minutes.”
    “I’m not comfortable with you taking off—”
    That’s when the boiling reached the surface, my pores oozing my lifeline, so I was bleeding out right in front of his eyes.
    And I blew.
    “Just fucking leave me alone, will you?” The weeks of frustration, the grief, the self-discipline, swirled in my head, flashing in front of my eyes, and all of it spewed out my mouth in one hate-filled sentence, directed at the one person alive I loved more than my life. “I’m not some fragile fag.”
    Landry’s face froze in a mask of ice.
    I wanted those words back. I want to reach in and grab them out of his brain and then stomp them over and over again until they were nothing but dust beneath my shoes.
    Some asshole had sneered that word to Landry at a party. Landry had kneed him in the balls. And I’d had to ice my knuckles later—dude had a hard jaw.
    And now my stomach threatened to hurl its contents.
    “Landry—”
    He shook his head and backed away from me, each step tugging my heart out of my chest with a meat hook. And then he turned and ran, taking my bloody, still-pulsing heart with him.
    I took off after him, not sure if I’d drop dead because I’d left all my blood back there at Sally’s wheels. I could hear his footsteps, but it was dark in the fields around the truck stop. I was a collegiate athlete, but Landry was a runner carrying thirty less pounds. And he must have been a cat and able to see in the dark because I lost sight of him within minutes.
    And then panic set in. This was all my fault.
    Sweat poured from my face, dripping off my chin in the humid night. I called his name like a psycho, combed every inch I could find.
    I went into the restroom and opened every single stall, twenty doors slamming back on their hinges in my desperation. I even asked a woman to go into the women’s room to call Landry’s name. She did with some hesitation, informing me the restroom was empty.
    No Landry. No Landry in a rest stop at midnight full of truck drivers and motorcycle clubs and probably a couple of serial killers.
    I took one more loop in the darkness, using the tiny flashlight on my key chain to peer into the spaces between tree trunks.
    I’d consciously dealt with my secret for almost eight years, not denying it in my heart but believing maybe I could conquer it. Outgrow it.
    But the older I got, the tighter my skin constricted around my throat. The hotter that coil grew in my gut, threatened to unfurl.
    I’d taken it out on Landry, calling him the word my own subconscious hurled at me on a daily basis.
    When my stupid key chain battery dimmed, I ripped it off the ring and sidearm whipped it into the woods, listening as it pinged off a tree trunk. Then I stumbled back to Sally, certain I’d seen a high-powered flashlight in the cabinets above the dashboard.
    As I drew closer, I saw a figure leaning against the door, arms crossed, head bent. And—oh, thank God—the light touched the curls on that head.
    I’d found my heart.
    But the relief of seeing Landry was short-lived, because that tense coil that had sat in my gut during my search burned red hot and needed release.
    When I was five feet away, he raised his head but all I saw was red. I shoved his shoulder and his back slammed into the side of the RV. “Don’t you ever, ever, fucking
ever
do that to me again, you asshole. You don’t disappear at a truck stop in fucking Kansas in the middle of the night. Who knows who’s out there? Someone could have hurt you or—”
    “Oh, right, because I’m a fragile fag,” Landry spat.
    His voice peeled back the bloody film from my eyes and that’s when I saw the tears spilling out over his copper lashes. My proud Landry, who never apologized for who he was, shed tears because of me.
    The pain pierced my chest, and I reared back and bent at the waist, tearing my hands through my hair, unsure how to make this better. How to fix this. But I had a feeling that no