"I came out when I was fifteen. Just went home on a Friday night, sat at dinner, and thought it was time to tell my parents I liked boys better than girls. I guess it was naive of me, but I thought it'd be alright. It's not as if my parents were zealots or particularly conservative, and they'd always been good parents, until that day — I thought it'd be alright," he repeated, as if it somehow needed to be said twice to be understood.

"My mother started crying, spewing some rhetoric about selfish boys who didn't know what they wanted and broke their mothers' hearts. How she wanted grandchildren and I was going to die with 'that gay disease'. My dad just put his arm around her, looked at me, and told me to go to my room. To sleep on it, and if I told them at breakfast I was just acting out then all would be forgiven. And if I didn't I could grab my things and go because I wouldn't be their son anymore."

It was only when he heard Emery's sharp inhale without really seeing it that he realized he was staring through the other man, lost in memory. This wasn't one he was in the habit of revisiting, but it still held weight, even after all these years.

"I went to bed and told myself things would be different in the morning. Still packed a backpack with some clothes and what money I had from odd jobs I'd done during the summer — I've always been good with my hands, and I'd been helping one of the neighbors with her fence, restoring parts of it, painting, that sort of thing. It was pocket change, nothing that would get me a room for more than a couple of nights, but I didn't really know what else to do, so I just held on to the hope that I wouldn't have to find out how to go from there."

Emery made a motion with his still shaky hand, as if he were reaching out. Before Josh could take it in his own and clasp it, the comforting touch spreading in both directions, Emery dropped it once more. Whether the other man had decided against it or Josh had imagined what it meant, he didn't know, but he felt bereft. He breathed slowly, in through his nose, out through his mouth, eyes trapped in Emery's.

"Morning came and nothing changed. I won't lie, I thought about it. Thought about telling them I wasn't gay after all, thought of hiding who I was for the rest of high school and maybe go to college and then I could be me. But it just... I couldn't. I'd trusted them and they pulled the rug out from under me as if I weren't their son; as if I were nothing. 'You can either be something you're not or I won't have you as my son anymore,' and all this without even the excuse of religious extremism. As if my having children or not had anything to do with them. As if I were less likely to catch AIDS by them kicking me out. As if they were showing me tough love, slapping my hand for misbehaving."

As he'd been talking, Emery's expressive brown eyes turned as anguished as Josh felt. "Josh..."

He couldn't. He couldn't keep telling him this, exposing himself like this, to someone who held the kind of power Emery still held over him, all while looking into eyes that could undo him without even trying. This wasn't what he'd rushed over to Central Park to accomplish — there had to be something else he could do to dispel the tension. He got up to retrieve a pair of tweezers only to sit back in front of Emery. "Give me your foot," he said abruptly. "Might as well do something with my hands while we talk."

For once Emery didn't fight him — he looked as though he were about to, but in the end, he didn't, allowing Josh to position the plastic stool so his foot would be hovering over the bathtub. Josh washed off the worst of the dirt before beginning the painstaking task of removing the slivers of rock and chips of wood from the other man's wound. Emery was silent, waiting for the rest.

"In the end, I left. I grabbed the backpack with my things and left. Even then I didn't go far. It was the weekend and I just sort of sat down on the bus stop across the street for two days, hoping that my mom or my dad — both, ideally — would come get me and apologize. Then on Sunday the neighbor I'd done the fence work for saw me there and came to ask what I thought I was doing, slumming it in the bus stop like that; if I didn't have better places to go at my age, and if not why wasn't I studying instead."

He concentrated on his task as he spoke, his tale a little easier away from Emery's piercing eyes. "Frankly she was scary in a sort of primary school teacher way. Weathered and gray, ramrod straight, always looked vaguely disapprovingly at everyone. She seemed older than time itself. Smoked like a chimney to boot. After the way my parents had reacted I thought she'd be disgusted by me — I mean, she was older and stricter, it felt logical. I only told her because I wanted my parents to be embarrassed that everyone would know they'd raised a gay son, because that was so obviously something I'd done on purpose, to spit on their faces."

It was a struggle, not to clench his hand around Emery's foot when he remembered those days, the very real anger masking the gaping hurt he'd felt when he'd been cast out. "She looked positively terrifying when she told me to 'wait here a moment, dear' — I don't think she'd ever called anyone 'dear' in her life. She marched across the street to my parents' house and all anyone could hear was her yelling about how some people were unfit to have children. I think my dad tried to say something to the tune of it being his house and she told him she hadn't given him leave to speak yet. She was magnificent."

The first foot dealt with, or as much as it was going to be before Emery's bath, he switched to the second one, the one he'd thought was better for not being actively bleeding, but that was somehow worse. "Then she got into my parents' house and came back out with suitcases filled with my things, as if it were all perfectly normal. She came to get me at the bus stop and told me to go home with her. That she wasn't in the habit of hating people for who they loved. And she took me in, just like that."

There were scraps of fabric from Emery's sock stuck to the wound. Each strand Josh removed, no matter how carefully, made it bleed again. There was a parallel he didn't want to think about in there somewhere. How long had Emery been walking around barefoot? Wanting to be left alone in Central Park, with nothing to keep him warm or fed, instead of accepting any kind of help?

Thinking about that was less of a distraction than he'd hoped, bringing him back to his tale. "She was stricter than my parents were — I had a tighter curfew, she monitored my grades and my studying habits like a hawk, and at any point when I was just idling she'd immediately find something that needed repairing or an errand that needed to be run — but she made me feel welcome. And she was never bothered that I was kissing a boy instead of a girl, provided I wasn't kissing anyone past eleven pm."