You Are the Reason (26 page)

I stood up and scooted over until I was seated next to him. “She’s my mum. Sometimes she gets angry with me, sometimes she’s disappointed in me, but she always loves me. It took her a bit before she embraced me wholly as a gay person. I think she thought it might merely be a phase I was going through, like wanting to be a professional skater or wanting to join the police force. But she supported me. When she began asking me to bring a boyfriend home for her to meet, then I knew she had accepted it completely.”

Dean nodded and stared down at his clasped hands. I knew the next question would be a critical one.

“I don’t want to disappoint her. My mum, I mean.”

I sighed. “Why will being gay disappoint her?”

“She wants me to go to university. Her best friend from school has this daughter who’s a year younger than me. She’s always pushing Bonnie at me, saying we’d make the cutest couple. I hear her and Marissa dreaming of us having kids, having a baby who will be
their
grandchild.”

I sighed again. “Dean? First of all, we can’t always do
everything
our parents want us to do. Yes, it’s a nice dream that you would marry Bonnie if you were straight, but the odds are against it. If you’ve known Bonnie your whole life, you’re more likely to think of her like a sister. I’ll tell you what, you find yourself a man you love, one who loves you back, and I guarantee your mum will be proud of you. And grandkids? My mate’s in the process of adopting his first baby. I’m sure it won’t be the only one. Being gay still means you can be a father.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course. And secondly, there’s nothing about being gay that will stop you going to university. Universities look at your exam scores, not at your sexual orientation. If you want to go to university… well, do it. Do you have any idea of what you want to be when you get older?”

He ducked his head. “I want to be a doctor. A surgeon. I know I’m aiming high, but if I come out as gay, I’ll never be allowed.”

I was confused. “Why not?”

He gave me this look of worldly resignation. “They don’t even allow gay men to donate blood in Australia. How do you think they’ll allow a gay person to be a surgeon?”

Oh, yes. The good ol’
your blood is not good enough to save lives
kick in the gut every gay man has.

“Dean, how old are you?”

“Thirteen. I’ll be fourteen in three months.”

I nodded. “Okay, so at least four years until university. Then how long do you need to study to be a surgeon? Ten years?”

He shrugged. “At least.”

“Well, then. You have fourteen years to get them to change the dumb rule about donating blood. And you know what? I bet your mum would help you with that. I bet your mum would fight for your rights.”

I could see that the thought had never occurred to him to try and change the system himself. “You reckon?”

“I hear mummas are tigers when their babies are denied something they want so much.”

He snorted. “She can be rather scary.”

“Then give her something to fight for. She may be disappointed about Bonnie, but she can’t be serious about it, not really. However, if you say to her, ‘Mum, I’m never going to marry Bonnie. But I need your help. We need to change the law. Can you help?’ I bet you she’ll be behind you the whole way.”

There was pride to his stance as he walked away. I smiled a tiny bit, then noticed Lee was leaning against the wall, observing me from the other side of the room with a considering look on his face. I stood and walked over to him.

“What?” I asked him as I approached.

He had a coy expression as he looked me up and down. “What were you and Dean talking about so intently over there?”

I leaned in, invading his personal space and reminding him of the closeness we’d shared the night before and again that morning. I placed an elbow against the wall at the side of his head and breathed in the scent that was Lee. Those pheromones drove me crazy.

“Tigers. We were talking about tigers,” I whispered in his ear. I watched Lee shiver with arousal and was considering what dirty thing I would murmur at him when there was a shout from the door.

“Hey. Davo. Stop doing kinky stuff to Lee and come out and play basketball. We need one more for the team.”

I looked up and saw Stu waving me over, so I nodded in his direction and dropped a quick kiss on Lee’s ear. “I’ll be back.”

I pushed off the wall and jogged outside to join the game. Me, Dave Pederson, playing basketball with a bunch of guys, half of whom were wearing some sort of makeup?

Yep. And I hadn’t had so much fun in ages.

I
WASN
’
T
out at work. And I wasn’t
not out
.

The subject had simply never come up. In the beginning, there were some comments about “You got yourself a wife, Davo?” to which I answered honestly, “Nah. I don’t want one of them.” The other guys had laughed, and the subject had been dropped. I noticed that the married men seemed to hang together a lot, and when I overheard the company accountant and lead drafter discussing potty-training techniques, it became clear why.

Our business was set into two firm and impermeable lines—the office staff and the workshop staff—and of course, there were all the insults that go flying around a blue-collar workshop like, “You bloody cocksucker!” But I never took offense because I heard “You bloody wanker” just as often.

Besides, I got more riled when a workmate insulted my footy team than I did over comments about sex.

It seemed rather fitting, then, that the week after I publicly declared that Lee was my boyfriend, and the week after my decision to
proudly
date him, I was put on the spot at work.

After working there for three years, I thought I knew most of them. The guys in the office were a nice bunch, and the women were hardworking and valued team members. I wouldn’t have said that any of them were homophobic, mostly because they were too professional to show anything like that. The guys in the workshop were a different kettle of fish, though. Out there, you were judged on your past deeds, rather than something as impolitic as your skin color, sexual orientation, or religion.

Callen Fayed, however, was an unknown to me. A recent addition to the finance team, he was fresh out of university and supposedly knew
everything.
But in reality, he understood little. Of mixed heritage, he had olive skin with startling blue eyes that made an impact—and he knew it. I thought his attitude was rather cocky but didn’t let it bother me. He was working under the supervision of the accountant and didn’t ever need to work with the sales staff.

In the couple of weeks he’d been with us, I’d observed him flirt with the pretty receptionist, Kendall, and the administrator, Eliza. I’d also seen Eliza get reprimanded by the general manager after not doing her work because Callen had been talking to her for nearly an hour.

My not-so-high opinion of him took a further dive when I overheard the accountant, Nick, remarking to the CFO that Callen wasn’t listening and insisted on doing things
his
way. So it was funny that Callen was the catalyst to my outing at work.

It started on Monday, in the break room, when I was giggling over Lee’s slightly dirty little texts.
What makes a gay man a great dental assistant? He knows exactly what to do when the man above him says, “Open wide.”

I was chuckling and messaging back, telling him he was an idiot—but that I liked it—when Callen strolled in and began gathering the coffee and sugar.

“Girlfriend?” he asked me.

“Huh?” I responded, unsure what he was referring to.

“The person you’re messaging. You’ve got a leer on your face which makes me think she must be hot.”

“Oh.” I mentally checked my face and discovered that perhaps I was smiling, but it was in no way a leer. It was more of a God-I-think-Lee’s-cute grin.

“So, your girlfriend, then?” Callen remarked, pouring the boiling water into his mug.

I wondered why the sudden buddy-buddy friendship, but figured it was because we were around the same age. Many of the staff were upward of forty. I was the youngest on the sales staff, and only Sean, who was in charge of IT, was of similar age.

“No,” I told him, putting my phone in my pocket. “A friend with a twisted sense of humor.”

To anyone else, they would’ve moved on from that subject, but not Callen. “So do you have a girlfriend?”

I pulled out my stock answer. “No. I’m not looking for a girlfriend.”

Hint, hint. Drop the subject.

“Why not?” Callen asked, taking the lid off the biscuit jar.

“I’m just not,” I told him rather shortly. But I should’ve known since I’d already heard his manager complain that he didn’t listen very well.

“A single man. Nii-iice.” He drew out the word in a distasteful manner, and I decided to cut my break short. Unfortunately he opened his arse-aholic mouth first. Most people struggle to find this accurate medical term because it doesn’t seem to make it into too many medical journals, but all you need to know about arse-aholic mouths is that they can’t stop themselves from spewing shit. “So have you nailed Kendall out on the front desk? She’s okay. I’m going to do her. Unless you tell me she’s a flop.”

Kendall was our receptionist, and a nicer girl you couldn’t have asked for. She was painfully shy but always happy to help out, any way she could. She’d been with the company since she was seventeen, and we all considered her the baby of our workplace. The one we all watched out for. And this foul-mouthed idiot was denigrating her.

I stood and glared. “Shut your mouth, you idiot. That’s a coworker you’re speaking about. Does the word ‘respect’ mean anything to you?”

Like the arrogant jerk he was, instead of shutting up, he flared up. His university education had given him an inflated sense of self-worth. “You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my manager.”

I put on my best big-brother glare and took another step forward. “Is that the best you can come up with? I think I used that same line when I was fifteen. To my sister. Except I said, ‘You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my mother.’ Smarten up, Mr. Fayed. This is grown-up life now. Treat women with respect. Treat everyone with respect. You need to learn how to negotiate the lower rungs of the ladder before you can climb higher than the ground floor.”

He was opening his mouth to spew some more shit—that medical problem of his—when the sales manager stepped in and froze at the obvious tension in the room. We weren’t quite standing nose to nose, but we weren’t far away from it. No phone-a-friend guesses needed to work out that we weren’t choreographing dance moves in the break room.

“Is there a problem in here, gentlemen?” Frank Liddle wasn’t exactly a “liddle” man. If you told me he mud wrestled crocodiles for fun, I would believe you.

I didn’t take my eyes off the cockroach in front of me. “Nope. I believe there
was
a problem, Frank, but now we’ve sorted it. Right, Fayed?”

Callen didn’t move, so I stepped back, being the bigger man. I left the scene. I nodded to Frank on the way past, and he gave me a look that promised I would need to explain to him later.

Later
turned out to be less than three minutes.

“What the hell was that all about?” Frank grumbled as he plonked his huge frame on the end of my desk. “I thought I was going to need to go in swinging.”

I’d made my decision to let sleeping dogs lie, so I said, “Pecking order stuff, I think. He’s desperate to be anyone other than the bottom of the pile, and he was testing the waters my way.”

Yep. I was the king of clichés.

“I hope you whooped his arse, then,” Frank growled.

“I told him he needs to earn his stripes before he can throw his weight around.”

I needed a better title than merely king. Maybe I could be the grandmaster of clichés?

I was tiptoeing my way around the sleeping dogs the following day, but it turned out that Callen had more weasel in him than I anticipated. His revenge was a few dropped hints around the office, all blackening my name. And he picked the perfect subject—office sex.

And once the rumor mill starts, it’s hard to stop. Eliza stopped me on my way back from the toilets.

“Dave, do you know who it was? The couple?” She was whispering conspiratorially, and I immediately looked around to see who was listening in.

“What? Huh? I don’t know anything. I’ve been out with Woodside all morning.”

Her face lit up as she realized she was the one who could pass on piece of juicy gossip. “There’s rumors flying around this morning that two people were caught having sex in the office, after hours last night. I’m desperate to work out who it was.”

“What,” I gasped in astonishment. “In the office?”

Eliza nodded. “No one seems to know who it is, so if you find out, you have to tell me, okay?”

I didn’t agree, but Eliza took my silence for approval, brushed past me, and entered the ladies toilets. So I went back to my desk and began to update my paperwork.