Bigger Love Read online

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  More from Rick R. Reed

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  Copyright

  Bigger Love

  By Rick R. Reed

  Sequel to Big Love

  Truman Reid is Summitville High’s most out-and-proud senior. He can’t wait to take his fierce, uncompromising self away from his small Ohio River hometown, where he’s suffered more than his share of bullying. He’s looking forward to bright lights and a big city. Maybe he’ll be the first gender-fluid star to ever win an Academy Award. But all that changes on the first day of school when he locks eyes with the most gorgeous hunk he’s ever seen.

  Mike Stewart, big, dark-haired, and with the most amazing blue eyes, is new to town. He’s quiet, manly, and has the sexy air of a lost soul. It’s almost love at first sight for Truman. He thinks that love could deepen when Mike becomes part of the stage crew for Harvey, the senior class play Truman’s directing. But is Mike even gay? And how will it work when Truman’s mother is falling for Mike’s dad?

  Plus Truman, never the norm, makes a daring and controversial choice for the production that has the whole town up in arms.

  See how it all plays out on a stage of love, laughter, tears, and sticking up for one’s essential self….

  For big sissies everywhere… and the men and women who love them.

  “Where there is love, there is life.”

  —Mahatma Gandhi

  “We are born of love; Love is our mother.”

  —Rumi

  “Let men see, let them know, a real man, who lives as he was meant to live.”

  —Marcus Aurelius

  Prologue

  ON A shore somewhere, two boys embrace, clinging, their bodies not pressed so tightly together out of desire, but from a need for comfort, for knowing that this moment is one to savor, because it may never come again.

  Nearby… wind rushes through trees, and a thousand tiny voices lament the boys’ parting.

  Nearby… stars twinkle in an impossibly black sky, not shining down exactly, but providing a jewellike backdrop for this unfortunate and drawn-out farewell.

  Nearby… water rushes, slamming a shore in frustration at the separating of a pair who’d, once upon a time, proclaimed, “forever.”

  Eyes meet. Lips touch. Minds and hearts meld, knowing that tomorrow nothing will ever be the same again.

  Chapter 1

  “THERE’S A man in your room. I can smell him.”

  Truman Reid confronted his mom, Patsy, in the kitchen. Early morning sun streamed in brightly through the kitchen window over the sink, making Truman long for the relative freedom of summer that was about to be put to rest that very day.

  Patsy glowered at him from the stove where she was scrambling eggs. She didn’t often get up to make him breakfast, but Truman had figured—at least at first—that she was doing so because this was Truman’s first day back at school. He’d be a senior at Summitville High. First days of school had always been a source of high anxiety for Truman, who’d been bullied and teased mercilessly throughout almost the entire four years. But now Truman wondered if Patsy had risen early to fix bacon and eggs because she was hiding a man in her room. You know, to distract him. This wasn’t a usual experience for his mom, Truman was sure, and he wondered if he’d embarrassed her. But he couldn’t help but wonder how a man in her room might affect his exclusive hold on her. Would he still get her undivided attention, you know, if this was a “thing”?

  Of course, Patsy, lovely, diminutive, with curly black hair and wide eyes, had every right to have a man in her room. Even if that man smelled of cigarettes and motor oil. But she didn’t have the right, Truman opined, to keep secrets from him. A mother should never keep secrets from her boy, right? Wasn’t that one of those unwritten laws?

  “That may be. Or may not be,” Patsy said, giving the eggs one final push-around with a spatula before dumping them on a plate. She sighed and eyed him. “I have a right to my privacy. You don’t need to be privy to every detail of my life. I show you that respect and expect the same in return.”

  She’s reading my mind. Again. “Oh, I didn’t mean to pry, Mama. I just wanted to say it’s okay if you did have a man sleep over. It’s not like I would mind. It’s not like we’re not both adults around here. We have separate bedrooms and separate lives.” Truman almost choked on the words.

  Patsy set the plate of steaming eggs before him. Truman saw, to his delight, that the eight pieces of bacon Patsy had fried up before the eggs were all for him.

  Patsy smiled, but there was something just a tad bit evil in it. “Thank you, sweetie. I’m so glad to have your go-ahead if I want to whore around.” She chuckled and returned to the counter where she’d left her mug of coffee. She leaned against the counter, mug in hand, and took a sip. Patsy was all of thirty-four years old but looked at least ten years younger in the dappled morning light, and Truman felt a rush of love for her. The bond they had was kind of a you-and-me-against-the-world one. Truman felt he could say just about anything to Patsy, and he knew she felt the same; witness the “whore” comment. What kind of mother said that to her son?

  Truman wasn’t sure, but he was glad he had one who did.

  Besides, between raising him, which could be, um, challenging at times, and working at the Elite Diner in Summitville’s tiny downtown, she had little time for romance. Given that Truman’s father was still a mystery to him—and to Patsy—he assumed that, once upon a time, she did have her whoring-around days, but he’d seen little evidence of them.

  Until this morning.

  “So who is he? Can I go take a peek? Is he hot?” Truman laughed.

  Patsy answered the three questions in short order: “None of your business. No you can’t. Yes. Very.” She took another sip of coffee and tightened the sash of her white chenille bathrobe. Truman noticed she was wearing a little makeup this morning—mascara, some blush, a hint of lip gloss. She hadn’t overdone it. Truman would say she looked “dewy” if she asked. “You need to eat up and get in the shower, young man. The bus will be here—” She turned to look at the wall clock on the soffit above the sink. “—in twenty minutes. I know you need your primping time.”

  Truman dropped his fork to the table. “Seriously? Only twenty? Good Lord.” He wrapped his bacon up in a paper towel and headed for the single bathroom. Patsy blocked his way. “Since when do we leave our plates on the table? What? You think I’m your servant?”

  “Mom!” Truman whined. “You know I need time to get ready. Please, please, please take care of it for me. I’ll love you forever!”

  “Okay. This once. And sweetie, I’d thought loving me forever went without saying. But you cook and clean up tonight.”

  “Deal.”

  Truman rushed to the bathroom, wondering if Patsy would use the time to sneak her man out of the house. Too bad the only window looked out on the backyard. It was frosted glass anyway.

  He hoped his mom had fou
nd someone to love.

  He hoped his mom hadn’t found someone to love.

  It had been just the two of them for so long, Truman didn’t know if he could cope with someone else vying for Patsy’s affections. He felt a little sense of violation at the thought.

  In the bathroom, Truman laid out on the counter all the stuff a boy would need to make a suitable senior-year debut:

  eyeliner,

  clear mascara,

  blush,

  and the lip gloss that added no extra color to his lips but made them shine.

  He stepped into the shower after brushing, flossing, and exfoliating his face.

  WHEN HE emerged, breathless, in what he thought was far too little time, Patsy rolled her eyes and then smiled. “The bus is waiting outside. I signaled Fred to hang on for you, but I think he may be losing his patience. Didn’t you hear him honk? Three times?”

  “I heard him.” Truman, ever observant, noticed Patsy’s bedroom door, just off the kitchen, was open. It had been closed before. Patsy had hastily made up the bed, from the looks of it. He thought about mentioning it to her but decided to give her some slack. After all, one day he might want a little privacy, although he still didn’t know how he felt about his mom’s newfound secretiveness. Or why it was even necessary.

  Besides, he didn’t have time to interrogate her. A honk sounded outside—again.

  Patsy kissed him on the cheek and handed him his lunch in a brown paper sack.

  “There’s no carbs in this, right?” Truman asked.

  She side-eyed him. “What do you think? Celery, carrots, ham-and-cheese rollups, and a Honeycrisp apple. You worry about carbs but have no problem wolfing down eight slices of bacon!”

  “Thanks, Mom.” He snatched the paper-towel-wrapped packet of bacon he’d made earlier off the table. “Bacon doesn’t have carbs, or hardly any. Carbs are what make you fat.”

  “Whatever.”

  The bus horn sounded again.

  Patsy slapped Truman’s ass. “Scoot!”

  Truman hurried to the door. When he had it open, she called after him, “Love you, son.”

  He waved over his shoulder and called back, “Love you more.”

  WHEN HE boarded the bus, there were whispers. There were snickers. Someone said, “Get her!” which caused an eruption of laughter as Truman headed for the back of the bus.

  He was used to it. There was a time when he would have been devastated by the laughter and the remarks, but now? Just another part of the school day, he told himself. Truman knew it was important that they didn’t know they could get to him. So he took a little bow, left, then right. He forced himself to smile at the other kids, who gawked at him. “Please. No special ruckus for the likes of me.”

  Once upon a time, he wouldn’t have dared say such a thing. He would have hurried to his seat, face burning and head bowed. That was before he knew the power of claiming your own identity, however different it was. That was before he stopped believing he was worthless because he wasn’t like everyone else. That was before he’d caught on to the lie that being different somehow made you less. Often it made the reverse true.

  He headed toward a pair of empty seats near the back of the bus, knowing every eye was trained on him. For his first day of school, he’d paired black skinny jeans with a hot-pink-and-black polka-dot button-down shirt—he’d raided Patsy’s closet for the blouse. Black Chuck Taylors completed the ensemble. He thought the look had kind of an eighties vibe, back in the olden days when his mama was born. For Truman, today’s outfit was dressing down. For everyone else on the bus, well, he knew they were stupefied into silence by his ensemble. He couldn’t imagine why. He’d been dressing this way—a style he’d come to term gender-fuck—since freshman year, when the bullying and teasing had reached a tipping point, driving him to the literal edge. He’d almost jumped off the roof of the high school after a particularly humiliating and cruel prank.

  What he’d learned that year was not to hide who he was but to claim it—to get right up in the faces of those who dared challenge him, in effect saying, “Fuck you, sister. This is who I am. If you don’t like it, that’s your problem, not mine.”

  It took a while, and many days of daring, to come to school in thrift-store treasures that played with the idea of gender with a mélange of male and female options, a little makeup to highlight his handsome yet waifish appearance, and an attitude that one might be tempted to say he’d borrowed from someone like RuPaul. Fierce. When he began saying, with his outward appearance and attitude, that he was different, and that this difference was his right, the bullying and teasing continued but slowed dramatically. It was hard for someone to call him a “sissy,” a “fag,” or a “piss-willy” if he first claimed those terms for himself. It became difficult, if not impossible, for the bullies to challenge what they thought of as his effeminate ways if Truman himself not only didn’t hide them but celebrated them.

  Of course, inside, Truman was always terrified he’d be pummeled, teased unmercifully, spit on, or worse, but he tried his best to never let that fear show. He discovered, after a long time of practice, that one could be quivering with fear on the inside while his outside could exude a calm radiance.

  No one knew he was shaking in his boots if they couldn’t see it.

  Though the bullying and teasing never quite came to the halt Truman dreamed of, it slowed increasingly over the past three years of Truman’s high school career. For this, he was grateful. Yet he always harbored a little anxiety that the front he projected would one day come tumbling down, things would go back to the way they once were, and he’d find himself again on his knees in the dark of his bedroom praying tearfully to God that the hurt would stop, if only for one single day. He’d spent too many nights in the past like that, even wishing his very identity away.

  Just like Pinocchio, he’d once been desperate to be a “real” boy.

  But Truman, through hard-won self-acceptance, realized he was just as real as any other boy… or girl.

  For now all he had to do was stare out the window and wait for the bus to transport him to Summitville High. It was his final year, the year when seniors ruled the school. What would these nine or so months hold for him?

  Truman couldn’t wait to jump the hurdle of this final year and get out. He knew that once he put Summitville behind him, with its small minds and judgments, he could really begin to live. He could be the person he was meant to be—somewhere with bright lights, skyscrapers, cosmopolitan drinks, and cosmopolitan people….

  He took his gaze away from the view out the window, the sun-dappled foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, and opened the book he’d started a week ago—Letters to a Young Artist by Anna Deavere Smith. The book was fast becoming his bible; it deepened his faith that something bigger lay in wait for him beyond the tree-covered rises of this provincial valley.

  Near the last stop before they got to the high school, Truman couldn’t prevent a grin from spreading across his face, because he spied his best friend waiting there beneath the shade of an old maple. Like Truman, Alicia Adams had endured her fair share of teasing over her school years. She’d tell you herself she was fat, black, and sassy, and if you didn’t like it, you needed to get over yourself, because that’s just the way God made her. Hey, if Ms. Oprah Winfrey could claim those same attributes and be adored by the masses, well then, by God, so could she.

  One day.

  Like Truman, Alicia put up a brave front but had been tormented a lot—especially in elementary school—until one day a group of mean girls pushed her past her breaking point and she lashed out with fists, claws, and a brick. Alicia wasn’t proud of how she’d sent two of the mean girls to the emergency room, at least not in retrospect; but she was proud of how her actions, decidedly not compassionate or kind, had afforded her a measure of fear-based respect she used to her advantage from about the sixth grade onward.

  She and Truman had become pals when she became his first defender and supporter. Sh
e knew what it was like to be different, and she celebrated Truman’s courage when he’d shown up one day at school in a “Sissies Rule” T-shirt and makeup. Her defense, and his gratitude, had forged a bond—one that allowed each to be vulnerable around the other. That was something neither could claim with almost anyone else.

  A dark shadow crawled in front of the sun when Truman thought of Alicia’s brother, now playing basketball at Ohio State. Darrell. Truman closed his eyes for a moment, thinking of him, of the warmth of his eyes—and his arms. He’d thought they were in love. And, in his naïve way, he’d supposed Darrell would forgo a full-ride scholarship to stay in town and close to Truman. He knew it was horribly selfish to expect such a thing, but Truman read a lot of gay romance, and his thoughts were clouded by their easy visions of happy-ever-afters.

  He forced his mind away from the image of Darrell, the two of them pressed close, their contrasts of skin color, height, and weight not mattering. He realized toward the end of that summer after Darrell’s senior year, he had no choice other than to let him go, to wish him well at school. He could still harbor the belief that one day Darrell would come back to him.

  He’d gotten disabused of the notion, though, once Darrell was really gone to that metropolis of Columbus, Ohio, and a school with five times the population of Summitville. The fact that their love affair had ended all too quickly became easier to endure as a figure stepped out from behind Alicia. A figure that caused Truman to forget, if only for a moment, all about Darrell.

  Wait. A. Minute.

  Damn.

  Who is that? Truman wondered.

  The boy, young man really, was one Truman had never seen before. He’d know if he had! Good God, this one was unforgettable.

  There was something about the guy that set Truman’s heart to racing, that erased every logical thought from Truman’s mind as all the blood in his body rushed south.