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Ryan stares down at his dress shoes. Black, polished, rented. They’re nice and appropriate. He knocks the soles together. He doesn’t want to look up. Doesn’t want to face what everyone else in this shithole town seems to have accepted.
Naim is dead.
No, that doesn’t even sound right in his mind. Naim. Dead. Gone forever. Just like that.
Just yesterday, he was in Ryan’s bed. Ryan’s arms. Being kissed and held, sharing a joint as they laughed into eachother’s mouths. It had been a holy thing. And it had been taken away.
Naim has been taken away.
Yesterday, Ryan was kissing Naim, holding him, whispering into his ear.
Now, Naim is laid out on a cold slab in a morgue somewhere, waiting to be buried tomorrow.
Ryan feels the suffocating presence of Naim’s mother, Arlene, at his side. He doesn’t have to look up to know that she’s scowling at him.
“Why did you come here?” She whispers, maybe for his benefit. There’s a few people milling about around them. Picking at the lemon drizzles, the cocktail sausages. Someone’s laughing in the corner.
Ryan feels sick. He swallows back his hatred for Naim’s mother, swallows back his grief. He doesn’t want to throw up all over his nice shoes.
His dad would clip him around the head for it.
Ryan doesn’t answer her. His being there should be answer enough.
“You should go.” He looks up, then. Into the eyes of the woman who brought Naim into the world. Ryan finds no traces of him in her face. Her unkind, scrunched up face.
How could something as good, as wonderful as Naim have come from her?
She isn’t even crying.
Ryan feels a stab of anger. A churning of hatred in his gut. He stands up, towering over the woman. A few people look his way, start whispering, but he doesn’t care.
Naim is dead. Why should he care about anything anymore?
“I loved him.” His voice is hoarse. There’s still a hand print around his neck from where the thing strangled him.
Arlene shifts uncomfortably.
“Why didn’t you-“
Why didn’t you protect him? Why didn’t you love him, as he loved you? How could you look at your son, your baby boy, the person you brought into the world, and not truly see him for everything he was?
Why couldn’t you have loved him regardless?
Ryan can’t understand how she could have someone as loving, as beautiful, as kind as Naim was, and not want to stand by his side through anything and everything.
He would’ve. He was prepared to run as far as he could with Naim, just grab him and run until their feet bled, leaving it all in the dust.
His parents have their own failures. Too many to name. But he doesn’t love them the way Naim loved Arlene.
She doesn’t deserve him. Never did.
“Why didn’t you love him?”
Arlene’s eyes water. Ryan doesn’t feel bad. She should be upset. She should be clawing at her throat with grief. She should be beside herself. But here she stands, on stable legs. As if the world hasn’t been pulled out beneath Ryan. As if the very act of Naim being gone isn’t catastrophic.
Ryan feels like he’ll never breathe stable again.
“I loved my son very much,” Arlene says, quiet, but no longer whispering. She stares up at Ryan, a mirror look he’s gotten off his own mum.
Shame.
Ryan won’t back down. He can’t. He loves Naim too much to let it slide.
“He begged you for help. You turned him away. What kind of sick fuck does that to their own child?”
“I was trying to help him,” Arlene looks away, chewing the inside of her cheek. “I hope one day that you understand that.”
Someone gasps behind him. A hand touches his shoulder, probably to get him to stop, to not cause a scene. But he shrugs the hand off.
“I don’t know why Naim wasted so much love on you,” He spits. “You don’t deserve it. You didn’t protect him. You didn’t help him.”
None of you did. None of you helped us.
He turns, addresses the adults in the room. Some he doesn’t know very well and some he grew up knowing. They all know him, though.
They all feel like strangers now. Complicit in Naim’s death.
His voice is heavy as he says, “You all failed him. Failed Hunter. Failed Marnie.”
Failed me.
He hears someone, his old maths teacher, whisper something behind him. Doesn’t bother looking. Let the miserable old fuck say something.
Ryan looks at the blown up photograph of Naim on a stand, a funeral book beneath it, the pages signed by people who didn’t know him.
Ryan wants to take it and burn it. He wants to burn the whole fucking town down.
The photograph is beautiful. In the soft, gentle way Naim was. He’s smiling in it. Eyes twinkling, teeth showing. Ryan’s fingers ache with the urge to reach out, to pull him through space and time, back into his arms.
He’d never let him go.
“You’re all so fucking scared of us being gay. Naim is dead because you all failed us. You’re all just eating and talking and laughing as if—as if any of this is right.”
“It’s a celebration of life-“
“What fucking life?!” Ryan snaps. “He didn’t even get to turn eighteen. Because of you. Hiding behind pages in a dusty book.”
He sees someone open their mouth, no doubt to quote scripture, tell him something he’s heard a thousand times. He can quote the bible backwards at this rate. It doesn’t change anything.
“Tell me, what did Naim ever do, what did Hunter do, what crime did we commit other than feeling?”
Arlene clears her throat. He knows what she’s not saying. That Naim is better off dead than like Ryan. That her son is safe, now. In death.
Away from him.
He stands in the suffocatingly small sitting room of Naim’s house. It smells like incense. It smells like death, and nobody is acknowledging it the way they should.
Ryan lost more than any of them. More than Arlene. And nobody cares. Not one of them.
“My boyfriend is dead because of all of you. Especially you,” He turns to Arlene.
His dad pushes through the crowd, furious. “Ryan,”
He sees his mum apologise to Arlene, tears in her eyes. He can feel his dad gripping his shoulder, pulling him from the room, pulling him away from where Naim existed last.
He hears the gasps and the whispers as he’s marched out of the house.
“Get the fuck off me-“ he kicks at his dad, pushes him away, but the bigger man doesn’t stumble. Doesn’t let go of the death grip he has on Ryan’s shoulder.
He pulls Ryan far enough away from the Reid house and tosses him into the dirt. Ryan scrambles back on his hands. His mum is somewhere crying.
“I’m sick of this shit, Ryan.” His dad is furious. Ryan expects the hit, but it winds him anyway.
His mum sniffles, wipes her eyes. “How could you do that? That woman just lost her son. How could you be so horrible?”
“She didn’t lose anything! I did. I fucking lost him.” His chest is heaving. He swipes furiously at the tears on his cheeks. “I loved him, mum. And you can’t even look me in the eye. None of you can. He—Naim mattered. He fucking mattered.”
Ryan’s dad tenses his jaw. “What happened to him is awful. To die like that… But now do you see, son? This is what we’ve tried to protect you from.”
“I don’t need protecting,” he sniffs. “None of this would’ve happened if-“
If you had all just left us the fuck alone.
His mum opens her mouth to speak, but his dad gets there first, cutting across. “You should’ve left that boy alone, Ryan.”
Ryan doesn’t sob, but it’s a very close thing. He looks to his mother for help, and as usual, she hides behind his dad, quiet and subservient.
She doesn’t defend him.
“Mum?” His voice cracks, and he feels like a little boy again, crying alone in his bed in the dark, waiting for a hug that never comes.
“It’s a sin,” She looks away. He’s used to it.
Doesn’t make it hurt any less, though.
“We forgave the thing with Hunter because you repented. But this fixation you had with Naim? It better stop. Now. He’s dead. Leave that woman alone. Let her grieve her son in peace. She doesn’t need you making it worse.”
“She did this.” Ryan chokes. “She sent him to that healer. I hate her. I hate her so much-“
“Where does this end with you?”
“What?” Ryan whispers, throat clogged. He feels like an ant under the microscope.
“When is this phase going to go away? Haven’t we given you everything, Ryan? I know I haven’t been a perfect dad but I’ve tried my best. So, why-“
“I can’t just stop being gay.” He’s aware that people are looking out of the kitchen window of the Reid house. “It isn’t a phase, fucking hell. This is my life. If you can’t love me, or whatever-“
“You know we love you.”
“Do I?” He rebuts. “Do I know that?”
His dad stares at him. After a beat of silence, says, “I don’t want this for you, Ryan. I don’t want this life of suffering, of pain-“
“I’m suffering no matter what, dad! Why.. fucking hell. Why can’t you understand that? No prayer or ritual or whatever the fuck you can come up with is going to fix me, because I’m not broken.”
His dad sighs. Heavy. Ryan feels the weight of disappointment wrap around him like an old winter coat. “You know what the bible says.”
His dad doesn’t hit him again, but he doesn’t back off, either. Ryan kind of wants his dad to hit him again. He’d take a solid, meaty fist over the gnawing animal of grief any day, he’d take a hit over the way his stomach is twisting in knots.
Ryan feels the ugly sob as it tears out of his throat. He digs his palm into his eyes.
He wants his parents to hug him. He wants to be comforted. He wants them to ask if he’s okay, tell him that it’s normal, that he’s normal. That he’s not wrong for loving Naim, that he’s not diseased, that he doesn’t need to be fixed.
His dad sighs again.
“I never got to tell him,” Ryan’s shoulders shake as he cries into his hands. “I never, we never-“
“Ryan. Look at me.”
He does. He stares up into the eyes of the man who helped create him. He sees nothing in the reflection that he likes.
So this is what dad sees when he looks at me.
His dad grips his chin. “I’m putting an end to this. Get a fucking hold on yourself, boy. I won’t tell you again. You’re going to apologise to Mrs. Reid and then you’re never going to speak to her again. Or I swear-“
“This isn’t right,” his mum adds, cutting in. She has a death grip on her purse. “This isn’t normal. You’re scaring us, Ryan.”
He scares them. He always has. Ever since he was younger, the first time he looked at a boy too long. The time he got caught with his hand down another boy’s pants. And now, retching into the grass.
Just once, he wishes he could be just a boy who lost his boyfriend. The love of his life. He just wants someone, anyone, to ask him if he’s okay. The world feels sideways. He’s untethered, with nothing and nobody to ground him.
Briefly, he hopes, he wishes that he’ll see the thing. Wants it to haunt him. Atleast it’ll be wearing Naim’s face, so it’s like Ryan never lost him. He scrambles up, sniffling, doesn’t look back at his parents as he walks away.
They don’t call after him. He doesn’t expect them to. They probably hope that he’ll never come back. Another problem dealt with.
He makes it to the abandoned, charred mill. Strips off his suit jacket, lays it on the ground, and sits. He waits. Stares down at his empty finger, where the snake ring resided.
He looks up only when he feels the thing beside him. It’s smiling at him, like Naim used to. Grief rears its ugly head, but so does hope.
He scoots closer, reaches out a hand, and closes his eyes as his skin meets the apple of a cheek.
He could cry. He is crying. Feels the tears marr his cheeks, his throat is clogged.
The thing even smells like Naim. Earthy, intoxicating. Ryan’s pulse thumps.
For the first time since the ritual, Ryan isn’t afraid. He’s looking into Naim’s eyes, and Naim is looking into his, and it’s all okay.