Page 76 of Hamartia

I give her a slow nod and all the small fragments of the conversation start to sink in for her, with meaning. Whatever look she sees on my face makes her move and sit next to me on the bed. She’s staring at me hard, searching my eyes for something. Not like I’m a stranger, that would be terrifying, but like I’m an old friend she hasn’t seen in a long time and she’s looking to see what’s different.

“You’re gay?” she asks very gently.

I shrug. “I don’t know. I mean I guess I like both?” I like him.

She’s nodding now. “So…you’re experimenting? That’s okay.”

“Is it?”

“Well, cheating on Camille still isn’t. Regardless of what you’re going through, baby. That’s never okay. She loves you and she trusts you. You need to talk to her. She deserves that.”

I nod furiously. “I know, and I have. I guess, I went dark on her and she knew something was off. Now she knows there’s someone else. We spoke in New York. After Jae and I…” I trail off realizing I just said his name out loud to my mom. It’s real. I know what it is. “She came to see me and, fuck, she was great. She doesn’t know about this…about him but she was…Camille, you know?”

Mom nods, though I’m not sure she knows Camille that much to say either way.

“She’s a great person, mom. Really. And I don’t want to hurt her. I know I have already but, I didn’t know…I wasn’t even sure what this was because it’s big, you know? It’s really fucking big, mom. Maybe even blow-my-entire-life-up big and I’m not quite ready to do that yet. I’m scared, I guess. But he makes me feel like maybe the aftermath wouldn’t be bad at all. That what we’d be left with after the dust settled would be all I‘d need. Perfect, actually. I don’t think I’d need that much if I had him. He’s kind of everything…he’s enough. And I’d be enough too, you know?”

I look at her to see if anything I’ve just said makes any sense at all—honestly, it’s the most succinct I’ve ever been inside or outside of my head when it comes to Jae—but she has these big fat tears in her eyes and then my vision blurs too and she’s pulling me into her, arms tight around me.

“Oh, baby,” she says against my hair. “My beautiful baby boy. I love you so much.”

I hadn’t meant to cry. Hadn’t expected to. I don’t really cry. I cried a lot as a kid, too much, and then one day, mom said, I just stopped. I can’t remember the last time I cried. It feels kind of nice. Soothing in a weird way, like those deep breaths I do before going onstage.

“Am I making a huge mistake?” I whisper so quietly I’m not sure I even said it. “I really don’t know what I’m doing here, mom.”

She pushes me away from her. “Listen to me, baby, listen. Mistakes are part of life okay, they just are. And if you try and avoid them your whole life then, well, you’re not really living.”

“Not getting the full experience, huh?” I laugh, sniffling.

“Exactly.” She ruffles my hair. “You’re so smart. You’re beautiful and smart and brave and talented, and you have more heart in this little finger here than anyone I know.” She tugs on my little finger once before giving me a very serious look. “Follow it.”

“My little finger?”

She laughs, wetly, before wiping her eyes. “That too!”

“And what about this whole dating a guy thing? You’d be okay with that?”

She frowns at me, looking genuinely perplexed. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

I shrug. “All the usual reasons I guess.”

“Which are?” She puts a hand on my cheek.

“Grandkids?” I offer weakly.

She slaps me on the shoulder, insulted, and stands. “You think I want to even contemplate being a grandmother at forty eight? Do you know your mother at all? AT ALL, RAPHAEL!” She walks toward the bedroom door shaking her head, stopping to gesture for me to follow. “Dinner’s ready, come on. Pride & Prejudice is on PBS at nine and I want us all to watch it together.”

I groan, but get up to follow her, wiping the dampness from my eyes. “Again? Surely there’s some other movie about stuck-up British people we can watch?”

“Mmm, if you’d prefer we could drink beer on the porch and talk aboutJae?” She throws a wide-eyed look over her shoulder. “It was Jae, right? Yeah, it was. I’m going to need to know all there is to know about him eventually so…”

“Actually, it’s been a while since we’ve seen it? Like two years maybe?” I hook my arm through hers. “I told you Camille worked with her once, Kiera Knightley? On a film about Freud. When I met her I told her that you made me watch this film every Thanksgiving.”

I can see mom’s eyes go wide before she hits me again, gently.

“You never told me that! Why didn’t you tell me that? What did she say?” She stops, eyes narrowing. “Wait, I see what you’re doing. You’re not going to get out of it that easily, we are going to talk about him.”

I smile. “I know. We will.”