Mouthful of Rust

By Chris Hodge

Content warning: The following story contains a homophobic slur and a depiction of a hate crime.

The first time I wanted a boy, I thought something had crawled inside me and was chewing its way out.

It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t poetic. It was teeth.

I grew up in Abilene, where the sky is so wide, you’d think there’d be room for everything. There wasn’t. There was room for football, for God, for girls in white dresses and boys who hit hard enough to prove something.

There wasn’t room for the way my stomach flipped when Jonah laughed.

He smelled like sweat and grass and cheap body spray. He was all sharp elbows and bruised knuckles and a grin that could get him forgiven for anything. We shared a locker. Our shoulders touched every day like it was nothing.

It was not nothing.

I liked girls. I need to say that first, because people always want the math to be simple. I liked the softness of them. The way kissing a girl felt like sinking into warm water.

But when Jonah leaned over me in the weight room, correcting my grip, his hands wrapping around mine, something feral woke up.

I would go home and scrub myself in the shower like heat could cauterize it.

I would kneel by my bed and press my forehead to the mattress and bargain with a God who had never once answered back.

Take it.
Take this.
I’ll give you anything.

The night it broke open, we were seventeen and stupid with boredom. His parents were gone. We were in his bedroom, the air thick with summer and the hum of a box fan that couldn’t keep up.

We were wrestling. That’s the lie I told myself later.

He pinned me to the carpet. His knee between my legs. My wrists above my head. We were laughing—until we weren’t.

There’s a moment before a cliff where you know exactly how far the drop is.

He stopped smiling.

“Dude,” he said, but it wasn’t a warning. It was a question.

I could feel him against me. Hard. Unmistakable.

My body answered before my brain did.

The silence went animal.

“You feel that?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

We could have rolled apart. Could have called each other faggot and laughed too loud and buried it.

Instead, he lowered his mouth to mine like he was daring the world to strike him dead.

It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t cinematic. Our teeth knocked. He bit my lip too hard. I tasted blood and mint gum and something electric and irreversible.

I made a sound I’d never made before. It scared me.

He kissed like he was trying to win. I kissed like I was starving.

When he pushed his hand under my shirt, I arched into it without thinking. My whole body felt like an exposed wire. I wanted everything at once. I wanted to crawl inside him. I wanted to be unmade.

Afterward, we lay there panting, the fan chopping the air into useless pieces.

“What the hell was that?” he said.

I stared at the ceiling. “I don’t know.”

But I did.

It was me.

At school, he acted normal. That was the first cut.

He flirted with a cheerleader named Marissa. He wrapped his arm around her waist like it belonged there. In the locker room, he talked about her body in graphic detail.

Then, at night, he’d text me: come over.

We were two different species in the dark.

In the dark, he’d grab my jaw and say, “Don’t get weird about this.”

In the dark, he’d pull me on top of him and gasp my name like it was something holy.

In the daylight, he’d shoulder-check me in the hallway and call me “princess” if anyone was close enough to hear.

I told myself I could live split in half.

I told myself wanting both didn’t make me broken.

Because I still wanted girls. I still felt that pull. I still got hard when Marissa kissed me once at a party, her lip gloss sticky and sweet. My body didn’t lie.

But it didn’t tell the whole truth either.

The rumor started small. It always does. A look held too long. A door not locked all the way. Someone seeing something they shouldn’t have.

The word faggot showed up on my truck in white paint.

My dad saw it before I did.

He stood in the driveway staring at it like it was a diagnosis.

“You got something to tell me?” he asked.

My throat closed. I thought of Jonah’s mouth on mine. Of Marissa’s hands in my hair. Of how both felt real. Of how neither canceled the other out.

“No,” I said.

The lie tasted like rust.

Jonah came over that night furious.

“They’re talking,” he said. “You told someone.”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, somebody did.”

He was pacing, wild-eyed, like an animal caught in a trap.

“My dad asked me,” he said. “Straight up. Asked if I was a queer.”

“And what did you say?”

He looked at me like I’d slapped him.

“I said no.”

The room felt smaller.

“You are,” I said quietly. “At least with me.”

“Shut up,” he snapped. “Don’t label me.”

“It’s not a label. It’s what we do.”

He grabbed my shirt, fisting it in his hands. “I like girls.”

“So do I.”

He blinked.

“I like girls,” I repeated. “And I like you.”

The word hung there: like. Too small. Too safe.

He shoved me back. “That’s not how it works.”

“Why not?”

“Because it just doesn’t.”

What he meant was: because if it works that way, then everything cracks open.

Because if you can want more than one thing, then the rules don’t protect you.

He stopped coming over after that.

At school, he got louder. Meaner. Once, in front of half the team, he said, “Don’t bend over around him,” and they all laughed.

I laughed too.

That was the worst part.

I left for college with a duffel bag and a chest full of rot.

The first time I said “I’m bi” out loud, my voice shook like I was confessing to a crime. The girl I was dating at the time blinked, then nodded like I’d told her my favorite colour.

“That’s cool,” she said.

That’s cool.

No lightning. No exile. No one scraping paint off my truck.

Later, I fell in love with a man who didn’t ask me to choose. He didn’t flinch when I told him about Jonah. He didn’t treat my past like contamination.

“Did you love him?” he asked once.

“Yes.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

He kissed me like those answers could coexist.

Years later, I saw Jonah at a bar back home. He had a wife. Two kids. A gut where his abs used to be. He looked tired.

We locked eyes across the room and the years fell away.

Outside, in the alley, he lit a cigarette with shaking hands.

“You ever think about it?” he asked.

“Every day,” I said.

He nodded, jaw tight.

“I couldn’t,” he said. “I just couldn’t.”

I knew what he meant.

Couldn’t lose his dad.
Couldn’t lose the team.
Couldn’t lose the version of himself that fit.

He looked at me like he was starving.

For a second—just a second—I thought he might kiss me again. Right there, under the buzzing neon and the Texas sky that had never made room for us.

Instead, he crushed the cigarette under his heel.

“You were the only one,” he said.

It wasn’t romantic. It was tragic.

I drove back to my hotel and called my husband. I listened to his voice, steady and warm. I pressed my hand to my chest and felt it beat, whole, not split.

Being bisexual isn’t confusion.

It’s not greed.

It’s not a phase I failed to outgrow.

It is the truth that my body can recognize beauty in more than one direction. It is the refusal to amputate half my desire just to make other people comfortable.

It is loving a boy on a basement floor and loving a man at an altar and knowing neither love cancels the other out.

I survived the town.
I survived the silence.
I survived myself.

And sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet and my husband is asleep beside me, I let myself remember the taste of blood and mint gum and summer air.

Not because I want to go back.

But because that boy on the carpet deserved to exist.

All of him.

Teeth and terror and wanting and all.