Amends (3/?)
Title: Amends
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Fandom: CSI
Characters: Nick/Greg
Warnings: Underage sexual relationship and discussions of whether this is abusive. Discussions of canon child abuse.
Summary: When Greg's first boyfriend appears in Las Vegas, his reason for being there provokes some soul-searching.
Author's note: With thanks to podga , for a lightning fast, charming, and discerning beta. Any inadequacies or errors in this story are my own.
Chapter three
January, 1997
“How did the dinner go?” Amelia’s voice cut across Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
“Dinner?” Greg was still concentrating on the TV screen.
“The dinner. With Andy’s friend from college. Ben.”
Greg tore his eyes away from the screen. “I forgot I told you about that.”
Amelia shrugged. “It sounded kinda important. Finally having dinner with the best friend and his boyfriend. Like a grown up dinner party.”
For a second, Greg considered telling her. About Andy, and how quiet he’d been after Ben and Mark left. How that night Andy had just rolled over and gone to sleep after Greg had sucked him off, not even kissing him goodnight. How, the following morning, Greg had watched Andy look at the backpack in which Greg carried his school books as if it caused him real pain.
But there was something stopping him and he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. Amelia had never said anything bad about Andy, but there were questions in her eyes, sometimes, that he didn’t want to answer.
It hadn’t helped that the first time Andy and Amelia had met, he’d watched her push food around on her plate with barely concealed concern, and then asked Greg what was wrong with her, as soon as she’d excused herself to go to the bathroom.
“What do you mean?” Greg had asked.
“She looks like she weighs about as much as a magazine.” Andy had replied. “Does she have anorexia or something?”
Greg hadn’t thought to edit Andy’s comments before he related them to Amelia and he’d caught the expression of fearful anger on her face before she smoothed it away. Although she had explained to Greg that everyone in her family was just skinny, dammit, there was an arch quality to her voice when she talked about Andy after that, that Greg didn’t much care for.
Now, Las Vegas
Nick was on his feet as soon as he heard Greg’s key in the lock, and he was standing in the hall by the time their front door swung open.
Greg’s face was ash white and stained with tears and, before he’d thought anything more than Oh, Greg, Nick had closed the space between them and thrown his arms round him. He’d seen Greg cry when he was happy, or when there was something sad on TV or in a film, but he’d never seen Greg cry because he was hurt, and seeing it now stung like a slap.
Nick slid his hands under the waistband of Greg’s jeans, rubbing comforting circles on the warm skin in the hollow of Greg’s back, but Greg twitched under his fingers and pulled away.
“He’s not sick.”
Nick felt a brief pinprick of relief before that sensation was swept away by a growing sense of alarm.
“If he’s not sick, then what’s wrong?”
Greg shook his head. “Can we sit down?”
They sat on the sofa that they’d brought from Nick’s old place, and Nick wondered, briefly, if he had gone ahead and thrown it away would he still be having awful conversations with people he loved on such a regular basis?
“What's wrong? Nick asked again.
Greg sat on the edge of the sofa and he looked smaller, somehow.
“I don’t want you to freak out.”
Nick’s lip quirked. “You’re kinda freaking me out right now, Greggo.”
“Yeah.” Greg smiled and it was as thin and insubstantial as tissue. “I’m just thinking of the best way to say this.”
Nick dropped his hand onto Greg’s knee and squeezed it through the denim. “There’s nothing you can’t say to me, man.”
Greg blew out a breath. “Andy wanted to talk to me because he’s in recovery. He’s doing the twelve steps.”
Nick frowned. “AA?”
Greg shook his head. “NA. For drug addicts.”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “He’s a drug addict.”
“He feels like he is.” Greg hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“You think he’s lying?”
Greg shook his head again. “Not lying, exactly. I guess he feels like the amount of drugs he was taking was a problem. It sounded like he carried on taking the same stuff we took when we were together.”
“He gave you drugs?” Nick asked, steel in his voice.
Greg looked surprised. “Yeah. I thought you knew that.”
Nick leaned forward and laced his fingers through Greg’s, and Greg’s hand was warm in his.
“This isn’t supposed to sound like I’m accusing you of something, but you leave out a lot of details when you talk about him.” He shook his head. “I guess I was really naïve and thought that you’d done drugs with your friends in high school, but maybe not with Andy. Not after you mentioned how much younger you were.”
Greg huffed out a breath. “Yeah, that’s kind of what Andy wanted to talk to me about.”
“The drugs? Was he worried you were an addict, too?”
Greg shook his head. “No, he wanted to make amends for statutory rape. He said our relationship was abusive.”
Nick couldn’t stop the shudder rolling up his spine. “Jesus.”
“Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction, too.”
Nick tried to gather himself; tried not to think about Greg small and hurting and scared. This isn’t that. “How do you feel about what he said?”
Greg looked for the right words. “I guess that I thought we had a nice time together. At the time I thought we were a lot closer than we were; I didn’t have much to compare it with. He wasn’t bad to me, though.”
Nick squeezed his fingers, feeling the strength of Greg’s hand under his own.
“But now I feel like he’s recasting the whole thing to make it dirty and awful and I don’t really understand why.”
Nick was still. “You’re only a year or so older than he was when you guys met.”
“Yeah?”
“Can you imagine going out with a fifteen year old?”
Nick watched a spasm of disgust flicker across Greg’s face. “Fuck, no.”
“Why not?”
Greg looked down at their linked hands and the silence unfurled until it filled the room, pressing into the space between Nick and Greg.
“I can’t.“ Greg said, carefully. “I know where you’re going with this and I just can’t.”
Nick dusted the fingertips of his hand over Greg’s thigh.
“I’m not trying to back you into a corner, baby. We can talk about whatever you want.”
“My parents thought it was ok.” There was a note of desperation in Greg’s voice. “They thought I was different from your average teen.”
“Did they meet Andy?”
“Yeah.” Greg ducked his head. “He came for dinner a couple of times.”
May, 1997
Greg had never seen his father thrown so off balance as he was when he caught Greg making out with Andy at the corner of their street. Andy was dropping him off, after they’d been to see Suede at some secret, acoustic gig for which one of Andy’s friends had got them on the guest list, and which hadn’t, in Greg’s opinion, really rocked hard enough to be worth the excitement. Andy’s tongue was in his mouth, and his fingers were tweaking one of Greg’s nipples through his shirt, when Greg’s father had knocked on the car window with his knuckles.
“Shit, that’s my dad.”
Greg scrambled out of the car and looked at his father through his eyelashes, trying to gauge his father’s response to what he had just seen. Andy climbed out more deliberately and, looking Greg’s father in the eye, held out his hand.
“Andy Williams. Pleased to meet you, Dr Sanders.”
Greg’s father shook Andy’s hand, and made an indeterminate noise, before ushering his son back up the hill to their house.
“What’s wrong?” His mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop when Greg and his father trooped into the kitchen, Greg praying that his father would say something, anything to break the awkward silence.
“I just came across our son and his much, much older boyfriend necking in a car at the corner.” His father poured himself a glass of wine from the open bottle that was sitting on the kitchen table. “Did you know this was going on?”
“Um, Dad? I’m right here.”
His father ignored him. “Did you?”
His mother sipped from her own glass of wine. “Andy? Yes, Greg’s been seeing him for about six months.”
His father blinked. “Have you seen him? He looks about thirty.”
“He’s 28, Dad.”
“Oh, I do beg your pardon sorry, Gregory. So he’s only twelve years older than you rather than fourteen?”
Greg was stunned into silence by his father’s unexpected sarcasm.
“So you knew about this?”
His mother raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow. “Don’t be such a prudish American, Matt. In most countries of the world it’s perfectly legal for people Greg’s age to have sex with anyone they want.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
“Go to your room, Greg.” His father’s voice was like ice.
“But this is about me. I want to stay and hear this.” Greg was starting to get angry. Frustrated and angry.
“I am your father, and I’ve told you to go to your room.” In sixteen years Greg couldn’t remember hearing his father take that tone with him.
Discretion seemed the better part of valour, and Greg retreated to the bottom of the stairs, where he could still hear his parents’ voices from the kitchen.
“I can’t believe you.” His father still sounded furious, but he had lowered his voice.
“What can you not believe?” There was the faintest tint of sarcasm to his mother’s tone.
“I read your book, Asti. Your brilliant, cogently argued book about the sexual exploitation of children and strengthening children’s rights. The weakness of Article 34 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The case for an optional protocol.”
“You’re saying Greg is selling himself to this man?”
His father made a frustrated noise. “Don’t be deliberately obtuse. I’m saying that this man, this Andy, is too old for Greg. He’s a child.”
“We’ve raised him to be independent, Matt. He likes the theatre, and the New York Times. He reads books about poverty and politics. He’s not like other sixteen-year olds. Thank God. Imagine if he were a mouse like Amelia?”
Greg could hear his father’s sigh from his place on the stairs. “All of that is superficial, Asti. Reading Shakespeare doesn’t prepare you for getting your heart broken. Or stop you from getting AIDS.”
His mother made a satisfied noise. “So this is about his sexuality? You are uncomfortable with it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’d be uncomfortable if a 28-year old woman was necking with my son in her car. I just happen to have read an article about HIV/AIDS epidemiology in the doctor’s office the other week, and now I can’t get the figures out of my head.”
There was a long silence from the kitchen, and then his mother sounded gentle, rather than coolly amused. “We’ll invite him to dinner, Matty. You’ll see that it will all be ok.”
(But it wasn’t ok. Not really.
His father had put on a tie and his mother had made pasta and something involving meringue, and coffee that wasn’t as nice as Andy’s. Greg’s mother and Andy had talked about art and music, and theatre, while Greg’s father had scowled at him from his place at the bottom of the table.
Fathers, said Andy, afterwards. But even Greg knew that was unfair.)
Now, Las Vegas
“Thanks for agreeing to see me.” Nick paused. “This feels disloyal, but I don’t know who else to talk to about this.”
James Wilkes caught his lower lip between his teeth. “Sure. My door is always open to you, Nick.”
“Greg said that he’d talked to you about his meeting with his ex. Andy.”
It wasn’t a question, but James answered it anyway. “Yeah, he called me yesterday. He’d mentioned it to me when you guys thought he might be getting in contact with Greg to say he was positive.”
Nick hesitated. “Did you know that when they got together Greg was fifteen and Andy was 27?”
James’s eyebrow flickered.
“Yeah,” said Nick, watching James’s face intently. “My thoughts exactly. I guess I just wanted to ask you, because you do this job and I thought you might know, exactly how fucked up is that?”
James leaned back in his chair and tapped his fingers on the edge of his desk.
“That’s a hard question to answer.”
“I’ll take anything you’ve got.”
“Well, it’s statutory rape. In the state of California the collective consensus is that fifteen-year-olds can’t consent to sex.”
Nick tried to control his flinch at the word rape. “Yeah.”
“On the other hand, a lot of teens have sexual experiences below the age of consent. Rioting hormones, and all of that.”
Nick nodded. Tried not to think about Jessica McKendrick. “Mmm hmm.”
“Gay men who are Greg’s age weren’t necessarily out when they were 15, and, whether they were or not, didn’t necessarily have a whole bunch of gay young men their own age to experiment with.”
Nick nodded again. Tried not to think about David McKendrick, who, he would swear on a stack of Bibles, had checked him out when he arrived to pick up Jessica for the prom.
“The scene is what it is, and a lot of young gay men find themselves in places and situations that are really aimed at an older crowd. I know Greg spent a lot of time in clubs that were basically meat markets.”
Nick cleared his throat. “I kind of get all that. I guess I’m just not real clear on what Andy got out of all of this.”
“Same thing a straight guy in his twenties gets from a teenage girl. Control. The thrill of popping a cherry. Playing Henry Higgins to Eliza Doolittle.” James’s tone was biting.
“So you think it’s abusive?”
James took a breath and let it out. “I do, yes. But - and it’s a pretty big but - I think that there can sometimes be limited value in insisting on that to the person who was in that relationship.”
Nick frowned. “I’m not sure I follow.”
James looked him in the eye. “As a gross generalisation, the young person in that kind of relationships feels respected, and flattered by an older guy being interested in them. They often get to do the kind of sophisticated things that teens generally don’t get to do, and that can isolate them from their peer group. The school environment denies autonomy to young people; so much so that being asked for their opinion and being listened to - however perfunctorily by adult standards - feels like love to them.”
“That makes sense.”
“To get a young person from the position of feeling loved and respected to feeling like their trust is being abused is incredibly difficult, for obvious reasons.”
“No one wants to feel like a victim.”
“Exactly.” James tapped his fingers on his desk. “That kind of awareness raising is something we try to do with the young people here, if they’re in a relationship with someone older. It can be fucking heartbreaking though. If it’s is all in the past, then our counsellors tend to leave it there, unless the relationship was abusive or unhealthy in a way that’s creating problems for the person in the present.”
Nick chewed his lip. “I want to do whatever causes Greg least pain.”
“Then I would take your lead from Greg.”
Nick nodded. “I’ve been trying to do that, but he’s asking me some pretty direct questions about what I think about all of this.”
“And what do you think?” Nick dropped his head. “If it’s okay to ask.”
Nick sighed. “My gut reaction is that Andy deserves to be sat on his ass in a cell, but I have some personal history that makes me think I might be overreacting.”
“You were in a similar kind of relationship?”
“No. ”
“I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”
“It’s fine. I was abused until I was thirteen. By a man and a woman. I guess I have a tendency to see that kind of thing everywhere.” Nick’s voice was steady.
James was very still. “It is everywhere. You don’t get to do my kind of job - or yours either - without knowing that.” He paused. “I’m sorry that happened to you. I really am, man.”
It’s ironic.” Nick’s voice caught, slightly. “Greg got an apology and it’s made him miserable. Whereas, I’m-“
“Probably never going to get one?” The look of understanding on James Wilkes’ face made his throat tighten.
“Yeah.”
(Chapter Four)
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Fandom: CSI
Characters: Nick/Greg
Warnings: Underage sexual relationship and discussions of whether this is abusive. Discussions of canon child abuse.
Summary: When Greg's first boyfriend appears in Las Vegas, his reason for being there provokes some soul-searching.
Author's note: With thanks to podga , for a lightning fast, charming, and discerning beta. Any inadequacies or errors in this story are my own.
Chapter three
January, 1997
“How did the dinner go?” Amelia’s voice cut across Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
“Dinner?” Greg was still concentrating on the TV screen.
“The dinner. With Andy’s friend from college. Ben.”
Greg tore his eyes away from the screen. “I forgot I told you about that.”
Amelia shrugged. “It sounded kinda important. Finally having dinner with the best friend and his boyfriend. Like a grown up dinner party.”
For a second, Greg considered telling her. About Andy, and how quiet he’d been after Ben and Mark left. How that night Andy had just rolled over and gone to sleep after Greg had sucked him off, not even kissing him goodnight. How, the following morning, Greg had watched Andy look at the backpack in which Greg carried his school books as if it caused him real pain.
But there was something stopping him and he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. Amelia had never said anything bad about Andy, but there were questions in her eyes, sometimes, that he didn’t want to answer.
It hadn’t helped that the first time Andy and Amelia had met, he’d watched her push food around on her plate with barely concealed concern, and then asked Greg what was wrong with her, as soon as she’d excused herself to go to the bathroom.
“What do you mean?” Greg had asked.
“She looks like she weighs about as much as a magazine.” Andy had replied. “Does she have anorexia or something?”
Greg hadn’t thought to edit Andy’s comments before he related them to Amelia and he’d caught the expression of fearful anger on her face before she smoothed it away. Although she had explained to Greg that everyone in her family was just skinny, dammit, there was an arch quality to her voice when she talked about Andy after that, that Greg didn’t much care for.
Now, Las Vegas
Nick was on his feet as soon as he heard Greg’s key in the lock, and he was standing in the hall by the time their front door swung open.
Greg’s face was ash white and stained with tears and, before he’d thought anything more than Oh, Greg, Nick had closed the space between them and thrown his arms round him. He’d seen Greg cry when he was happy, or when there was something sad on TV or in a film, but he’d never seen Greg cry because he was hurt, and seeing it now stung like a slap.
Nick slid his hands under the waistband of Greg’s jeans, rubbing comforting circles on the warm skin in the hollow of Greg’s back, but Greg twitched under his fingers and pulled away.
“He’s not sick.”
Nick felt a brief pinprick of relief before that sensation was swept away by a growing sense of alarm.
“If he’s not sick, then what’s wrong?”
Greg shook his head. “Can we sit down?”
They sat on the sofa that they’d brought from Nick’s old place, and Nick wondered, briefly, if he had gone ahead and thrown it away would he still be having awful conversations with people he loved on such a regular basis?
“What's wrong? Nick asked again.
Greg sat on the edge of the sofa and he looked smaller, somehow.
“I don’t want you to freak out.”
Nick’s lip quirked. “You’re kinda freaking me out right now, Greggo.”
“Yeah.” Greg smiled and it was as thin and insubstantial as tissue. “I’m just thinking of the best way to say this.”
Nick dropped his hand onto Greg’s knee and squeezed it through the denim. “There’s nothing you can’t say to me, man.”
Greg blew out a breath. “Andy wanted to talk to me because he’s in recovery. He’s doing the twelve steps.”
Nick frowned. “AA?”
Greg shook his head. “NA. For drug addicts.”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “He’s a drug addict.”
“He feels like he is.” Greg hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“You think he’s lying?”
Greg shook his head again. “Not lying, exactly. I guess he feels like the amount of drugs he was taking was a problem. It sounded like he carried on taking the same stuff we took when we were together.”
“He gave you drugs?” Nick asked, steel in his voice.
Greg looked surprised. “Yeah. I thought you knew that.”
Nick leaned forward and laced his fingers through Greg’s, and Greg’s hand was warm in his.
“This isn’t supposed to sound like I’m accusing you of something, but you leave out a lot of details when you talk about him.” He shook his head. “I guess I was really naïve and thought that you’d done drugs with your friends in high school, but maybe not with Andy. Not after you mentioned how much younger you were.”
Greg huffed out a breath. “Yeah, that’s kind of what Andy wanted to talk to me about.”
“The drugs? Was he worried you were an addict, too?”
Greg shook his head. “No, he wanted to make amends for statutory rape. He said our relationship was abusive.”
Nick couldn’t stop the shudder rolling up his spine. “Jesus.”
“Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction, too.”
Nick tried to gather himself; tried not to think about Greg small and hurting and scared. This isn’t that. “How do you feel about what he said?”
Greg looked for the right words. “I guess that I thought we had a nice time together. At the time I thought we were a lot closer than we were; I didn’t have much to compare it with. He wasn’t bad to me, though.”
Nick squeezed his fingers, feeling the strength of Greg’s hand under his own.
“But now I feel like he’s recasting the whole thing to make it dirty and awful and I don’t really understand why.”
Nick was still. “You’re only a year or so older than he was when you guys met.”
“Yeah?”
“Can you imagine going out with a fifteen year old?”
Nick watched a spasm of disgust flicker across Greg’s face. “Fuck, no.”
“Why not?”
Greg looked down at their linked hands and the silence unfurled until it filled the room, pressing into the space between Nick and Greg.
“I can’t.“ Greg said, carefully. “I know where you’re going with this and I just can’t.”
Nick dusted the fingertips of his hand over Greg’s thigh.
“I’m not trying to back you into a corner, baby. We can talk about whatever you want.”
“My parents thought it was ok.” There was a note of desperation in Greg’s voice. “They thought I was different from your average teen.”
“Did they meet Andy?”
“Yeah.” Greg ducked his head. “He came for dinner a couple of times.”
May, 1997
Greg had never seen his father thrown so off balance as he was when he caught Greg making out with Andy at the corner of their street. Andy was dropping him off, after they’d been to see Suede at some secret, acoustic gig for which one of Andy’s friends had got them on the guest list, and which hadn’t, in Greg’s opinion, really rocked hard enough to be worth the excitement. Andy’s tongue was in his mouth, and his fingers were tweaking one of Greg’s nipples through his shirt, when Greg’s father had knocked on the car window with his knuckles.
“Shit, that’s my dad.”
Greg scrambled out of the car and looked at his father through his eyelashes, trying to gauge his father’s response to what he had just seen. Andy climbed out more deliberately and, looking Greg’s father in the eye, held out his hand.
“Andy Williams. Pleased to meet you, Dr Sanders.”
Greg’s father shook Andy’s hand, and made an indeterminate noise, before ushering his son back up the hill to their house.
“What’s wrong?” His mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop when Greg and his father trooped into the kitchen, Greg praying that his father would say something, anything to break the awkward silence.
“I just came across our son and his much, much older boyfriend necking in a car at the corner.” His father poured himself a glass of wine from the open bottle that was sitting on the kitchen table. “Did you know this was going on?”
“Um, Dad? I’m right here.”
His father ignored him. “Did you?”
His mother sipped from her own glass of wine. “Andy? Yes, Greg’s been seeing him for about six months.”
His father blinked. “Have you seen him? He looks about thirty.”
“He’s 28, Dad.”
“Oh, I do beg your pardon sorry, Gregory. So he’s only twelve years older than you rather than fourteen?”
Greg was stunned into silence by his father’s unexpected sarcasm.
“So you knew about this?”
His mother raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow. “Don’t be such a prudish American, Matt. In most countries of the world it’s perfectly legal for people Greg’s age to have sex with anyone they want.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
“Go to your room, Greg.” His father’s voice was like ice.
“But this is about me. I want to stay and hear this.” Greg was starting to get angry. Frustrated and angry.
“I am your father, and I’ve told you to go to your room.” In sixteen years Greg couldn’t remember hearing his father take that tone with him.
Discretion seemed the better part of valour, and Greg retreated to the bottom of the stairs, where he could still hear his parents’ voices from the kitchen.
“I can’t believe you.” His father still sounded furious, but he had lowered his voice.
“What can you not believe?” There was the faintest tint of sarcasm to his mother’s tone.
“I read your book, Asti. Your brilliant, cogently argued book about the sexual exploitation of children and strengthening children’s rights. The weakness of Article 34 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The case for an optional protocol.”
“You’re saying Greg is selling himself to this man?”
His father made a frustrated noise. “Don’t be deliberately obtuse. I’m saying that this man, this Andy, is too old for Greg. He’s a child.”
“We’ve raised him to be independent, Matt. He likes the theatre, and the New York Times. He reads books about poverty and politics. He’s not like other sixteen-year olds. Thank God. Imagine if he were a mouse like Amelia?”
Greg could hear his father’s sigh from his place on the stairs. “All of that is superficial, Asti. Reading Shakespeare doesn’t prepare you for getting your heart broken. Or stop you from getting AIDS.”
His mother made a satisfied noise. “So this is about his sexuality? You are uncomfortable with it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’d be uncomfortable if a 28-year old woman was necking with my son in her car. I just happen to have read an article about HIV/AIDS epidemiology in the doctor’s office the other week, and now I can’t get the figures out of my head.”
There was a long silence from the kitchen, and then his mother sounded gentle, rather than coolly amused. “We’ll invite him to dinner, Matty. You’ll see that it will all be ok.”
(But it wasn’t ok. Not really.
His father had put on a tie and his mother had made pasta and something involving meringue, and coffee that wasn’t as nice as Andy’s. Greg’s mother and Andy had talked about art and music, and theatre, while Greg’s father had scowled at him from his place at the bottom of the table.
Fathers, said Andy, afterwards. But even Greg knew that was unfair.)
Now, Las Vegas
“Thanks for agreeing to see me.” Nick paused. “This feels disloyal, but I don’t know who else to talk to about this.”
James Wilkes caught his lower lip between his teeth. “Sure. My door is always open to you, Nick.”
“Greg said that he’d talked to you about his meeting with his ex. Andy.”
It wasn’t a question, but James answered it anyway. “Yeah, he called me yesterday. He’d mentioned it to me when you guys thought he might be getting in contact with Greg to say he was positive.”
Nick hesitated. “Did you know that when they got together Greg was fifteen and Andy was 27?”
James’s eyebrow flickered.
“Yeah,” said Nick, watching James’s face intently. “My thoughts exactly. I guess I just wanted to ask you, because you do this job and I thought you might know, exactly how fucked up is that?”
James leaned back in his chair and tapped his fingers on the edge of his desk.
“That’s a hard question to answer.”
“I’ll take anything you’ve got.”
“Well, it’s statutory rape. In the state of California the collective consensus is that fifteen-year-olds can’t consent to sex.”
Nick tried to control his flinch at the word rape. “Yeah.”
“On the other hand, a lot of teens have sexual experiences below the age of consent. Rioting hormones, and all of that.”
Nick nodded. Tried not to think about Jessica McKendrick. “Mmm hmm.”
“Gay men who are Greg’s age weren’t necessarily out when they were 15, and, whether they were or not, didn’t necessarily have a whole bunch of gay young men their own age to experiment with.”
Nick nodded again. Tried not to think about David McKendrick, who, he would swear on a stack of Bibles, had checked him out when he arrived to pick up Jessica for the prom.
“The scene is what it is, and a lot of young gay men find themselves in places and situations that are really aimed at an older crowd. I know Greg spent a lot of time in clubs that were basically meat markets.”
Nick cleared his throat. “I kind of get all that. I guess I’m just not real clear on what Andy got out of all of this.”
“Same thing a straight guy in his twenties gets from a teenage girl. Control. The thrill of popping a cherry. Playing Henry Higgins to Eliza Doolittle.” James’s tone was biting.
“So you think it’s abusive?”
James took a breath and let it out. “I do, yes. But - and it’s a pretty big but - I think that there can sometimes be limited value in insisting on that to the person who was in that relationship.”
Nick frowned. “I’m not sure I follow.”
James looked him in the eye. “As a gross generalisation, the young person in that kind of relationships feels respected, and flattered by an older guy being interested in them. They often get to do the kind of sophisticated things that teens generally don’t get to do, and that can isolate them from their peer group. The school environment denies autonomy to young people; so much so that being asked for their opinion and being listened to - however perfunctorily by adult standards - feels like love to them.”
“That makes sense.”
“To get a young person from the position of feeling loved and respected to feeling like their trust is being abused is incredibly difficult, for obvious reasons.”
“No one wants to feel like a victim.”
“Exactly.” James tapped his fingers on his desk. “That kind of awareness raising is something we try to do with the young people here, if they’re in a relationship with someone older. It can be fucking heartbreaking though. If it’s is all in the past, then our counsellors tend to leave it there, unless the relationship was abusive or unhealthy in a way that’s creating problems for the person in the present.”
Nick chewed his lip. “I want to do whatever causes Greg least pain.”
“Then I would take your lead from Greg.”
Nick nodded. “I’ve been trying to do that, but he’s asking me some pretty direct questions about what I think about all of this.”
“And what do you think?” Nick dropped his head. “If it’s okay to ask.”
Nick sighed. “My gut reaction is that Andy deserves to be sat on his ass in a cell, but I have some personal history that makes me think I might be overreacting.”
“You were in a similar kind of relationship?”
“No. ”
“I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”
“It’s fine. I was abused until I was thirteen. By a man and a woman. I guess I have a tendency to see that kind of thing everywhere.” Nick’s voice was steady.
James was very still. “It is everywhere. You don’t get to do my kind of job - or yours either - without knowing that.” He paused. “I’m sorry that happened to you. I really am, man.”
It’s ironic.” Nick’s voice caught, slightly. “Greg got an apology and it’s made him miserable. Whereas, I’m-“
“Probably never going to get one?” The look of understanding on James Wilkes’ face made his throat tighten.
“Yeah.”
(Chapter Four)