Tied Together Read online

  Copyright © 2015 Z.B. Heller

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted inany form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanicalmethods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

  TIED TOGETHER

  Edited by: Lauren Schmelz and Jen Matera at Write Divas writedivas.com

  Cover Art: Qdesign, Amy Queau

  Formatting: Lindsey Gray Formatting Services

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part II

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part III

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with Z.B. Heller

  To my son.

  May you continue to grow up in a world of love an acceptance.

  You are the one who will make great things happen.

  Just remember, if you dip your wick, wear a raincoat.

  I was outed by accident when I was seventeen years old. I had a whole elaborate plan how I was going to tell my parents I was gay. I was going to decorate my family’s living room with rainbow-colored flags, cook up some rainbow Jell-O, and have a Cher CD playing. I didn’t even like Cher, but from what I heard, she was a gay idol. My outing was going to be the baddest bitch of a coming-out party known to man. Even though I had the elaborate plan in my head, the other part of my mind had horrible images of my parents sobbing on the couch, holding each other for support. They would ask themselves what they did wrong in raising me to make me want to stick my dick up another guy’s pooper. I imagined my baby sister, Cara, would point and laugh at me, asking if I wanted to wear her high heels to homecoming. The answer would be no, I was a flats only kind of guy. Just because I was gay didn’t mean I dressed in drag.

  My folks would then throw me out of the house, and I would be forced to live on the streets and turn tricks for some pimp named Rocco with diamond-studded grills.

  I was in my father’s woodshed making out with Peter Collins. We were both seniors but went to different high schools. Peter was the definition of California Valley girl—but the male counterpoint. He was hot, sexy, blond, and built, but as bright as a broken light bulb. His lack of brain cells worked in my favor because, unfortunately, I was a complete moron when it came to anything that had to do with sex. The only relationship my dick had was with my hand and a bunch of gay porn sites. For some miraculous reason, there I was, sticking my tongue down Peter’s throat. I would never forget the conversation we had in that shed.

  “You have the sweetest lips,” I said. I tried to sound as romantic as I possibly could because what does one say when one is lying on dirt and concrete. I was also trying to distract Peter with my lack of sexual experience by whispering sweet nothings in his ear. “Peter, I love the way you smell.” Or: “Peter, you have such beautiful eyes; they’re the color of a blooming iris.” And my favorite: “Peter your breath smells so minty sweet. What toothpaste do you use?”

  I didn’t get much of a reaction.

  “I could kiss you all day.” I was going with the sweet nothings and threw in some dreamy eye action for good measure. I watched a lot of gay porn. Sometimes the actors would say romantic stuff like that to further the mood. Okay, that’s a lie. I had no idea if they did those kinds of things because I was too busy watching them bone and comparing their dick size to my own. Which I have to say, my cock averaged with most of them.

  “I have a better idea. Since I don’thave all day; why don’t you get down there and suck me off so I won’t be late for track practice.”

  Fuck. I knew I should have never taken lessons from watching Pretty Woman. Julia Roberts had one of the most famous seductions scenes. However, I was picking up vibes Peter didn’t give a rat’s ass about seduction. I was totally naive about these things.

  I broke the kiss and moved down Peter’s body until I came face-to-face with his zipper. Shit, shit, shit. I’ve seen plenty of guys giving blow jobs in porn, and I thought hard to remember some techniques they used. There was the tongue swirl that concentrated just on the tip. The suck and twist, which had some head-bobbing action combined with the wrist-turning work. Oh, I couldn’t forget jingle balls, which included working the guy’s nut sack and sucking at the same time. That was my personal favorite. Finally, there was the dreaded choke. The choke was when a dude stuffed his man meat all the way down your throat, and you choked, gasped for air, and prayed you didn’t upchuck.

  I tentatively took his zipper into my fingers and pulled it down. With each click of the zipper, sweat broke out on my forehead and my hands shook like I was a drug addict jonesing for a hit. Click, click, click.

  “You’ve done this before, right?” Peter lifted his head from the floor and narrowed his eyes.

  “Fuck yeah, I have,” I lied. I tried once to suck my own dick by contorting like a Cirque du Soleil performer. I completely failed, falling off my bed and getting a black eye by slamming into the nightstand in the process. That had been an interesting one to explain to my mother.

  Once Peter’s zipper was down all the way, I reached into his jeans and then into his boxers. I felt the velvet, hardening skin and thick veins of his length. I put my hand around him and marveled how it filled my entire palm. Pulling him all the way out, his cock came free from his jeans with a thud, and my eyes went as wide as saucers. This was not a penis but an anaconda. His dick was a weapon of mass destruction and could have had its own area code. To make matters more frightening, Peter was uncut. I was dealing with a hybrid: an anaconda turtle. I eyed the monstrosity with my mouth agape.

  “Impressive, isn’t it.” Peter smiled so brightly it lit up the dark shed.

  “Umm, y-y-ya,” I stuttered. I froze and my eyes widened. How was I going to fit that monstrosity in my mouth?

  “Well, what the fuck are you waiting for?” He put his hand behind my head and pushed me toward the devil hybrid reptile.

  I took a deep breath and said a little prayer in my head. Dear God, please don’t let my family find me asphyxiated from this giant purple-headed Amazonian constrictor.

  I should have made out a living will. Yes, I was only seventeen, but I had convinced myself I was going to suffocate with this dick in my mouth. I supposed there could be worse ways to die. Such as never having a dick in my mouth, ever. I mulled over my blow job options and thought of a plan of action. First I would swirl my tongue over the head of his penis, which I now named Cockzilla. But what happened if my tongue got caught in the foreskin. There was so much of it, I had no idea if it hid the secret
s to life or, you know, maybe his car keys or wallet. Or maybe there was a little kangaroo joey snuggling tightly in its comfy papoose.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Lick it.” Peter closed his eyes, and his head fell back on the sooty ground.

  I flattened my tongue and ran in up the length of his shaft. I could have sworn it took twenty minutes to get from the base of his cock back to the tip; that’s how fucking long he was.

  “Stop teasing, dude. Fucking suck it.”

  Oh, baby Christ in the damn manger. I opened my mouth wide, held the bottom of his shaft, and stuck his cock in my mouth.

  “Fuck yes!” Peter cried out.

  I tasted pre-cum leaking from his tip. I already had a familiarity of what come tasted like because I may or may not have licked a little of my own. Of course, this was for research purposes only. I took Peter in as far as I could and started bobbing my head up and down like a pecking chicken. He placed his hand firmly in my hair, leading me in a rhythm that felt good for him. By that time, I was rock hard and afraid I was going to make a complete ass out of myself by coming in my pants. However, I couldn’t ignore my throbbing dick, so I rubbed myself through my jeans with my free hand. Peter began thrusting into my mouth as he quickened his place, and I knew Mount Cockzilla was about to erupt.

  “Oh God, it feels too good. I think I’m going to come.”

  My eyes widened at the notion that I was about to get my first load jetted down my throat. I braced myself, hoping to hell I wouldn’t need to have Noah’s Ark rescue me from Peter’s flood. At the same moment, the shed door opened and my dad stood in the doorway. Peter took that opportunity to release his load straight into my eye and the rest of my face before I could stop him.

  An hour later, Peter was long gone and I had taken a shower to remove his swimmers from my face. Once I was positive I wasn’t permanently blinded, my father called an emergency family meeting. I thought of all the different ways this meeting would play out. I saw my future floundering in boot camp or being showered with holy water by nonreligious parents. Although the prospect bunking up with hot military men didn’t seem too bad. I sat on the brown suede loveseat in our living room while my parents sat across from me in the matching sofa.

  My parents were a nice-looking couple. My dad, Carl, had brown hair and hazel eyes, just like me. He was about six feet two inches, and even at seventeen years old, I wasn’t far behind him in height. My mom, Linda, was a thin woman with blond hair and brown eyes. Dad always called her foxy and claimed she stole his heart the moment she turned him down to go his fraternity social. Mom always corrected him and said he was a stupid drunk kid who only wanted to get laid. Things apparently worked out for them, and they were staring me down.

  “How long has this been going on?” My dad leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.

  I didn’t know how to answer that question. Did I tell them I realized something was amiss when I had a crush on Corey Oliver in the third grade? Or did I go with the lie that I was drunk and thought I was making out with a girl who just happened to have a long drooping vagina? I went for option number three: act like nothing happened.

  “What do you mean?” My voice broke under my guilt.

  “Unless I was hallucinating, you had a young man’s penis in your mouth and he decided to paint your face.”

  I winced and kept up the façade.

  “Oh shit. You mean that wasn’t Sarah Collins from down the street?” I said as I thumbed over my shoulder.

  “I don’t think Sarah Collins chopped her hair and grew facial stubble overnight.” Mom spoke up for the first time.

  I dropped my head in my hands and stared down at the floor for a few seconds before I decided I was going to have to come clean. I took a deep breath and looked up at my parents, who were waiting for some explanation.

  “Mom, Dad… I’m gay.”

  It felt like time had stopped. My parents sat there like statues. Tick tock, tick tock. I kept thinking to myself how utterly screwed I was and pictured how I would look with camo fatigues during boot camp. Finally, my dad moved, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. He looked at it and opened it, combing through its contents. Oh my God, he would probably send me to some weird reform school that took gay teens and tried to make them straight. We’d be forced to watch macho movies like Rambo and feel up girls on a daily bases.

  He plucked a twenty-dollar bill from inside and handed it to my mom. Mom looked at him, smiled, and pumped her fist in the air like she’d just won the lottery.

  “Woo-hoo!” my mom yelled out, fanning herself with the cash.

  “Wait, what’s going on?” My heart started to race even more than it had been doing.

  “Your mother bet me that you were going to come out in high school. I said college, and your sister had when you were in your forties. She’s going to be pissed because she thought she was going to win for sure.”

  I sat there frozen with my mouth hanging open so wide an airplane could have flown into my mouth. I smacked my forehead with my hand so hard I may have left a handprint. The words barely came out of mouth. “You knew?”

  “Yeah, Ry. We knew,” Mom said, sitting back down on the couch next to Dad.

  “For how long?” My voice started to rise, and I jumped out of my seat, stomping my leg on the floor like a two-year-old having a tantrum

  They looked at each other, and my mom gave me a timid shrug. “Forever.”

  “ ‘Forever’? What the fuck?” I yelled.

  “Ryan Keller, language,” Dad said.

  “Are you kidding me? All this time, no one ever thought of saying, ‘Hey, Ryan, how do you feel about men?’ Or maybe, ‘We’re pretty sure you’re gay; would you like to go get ice cream?’ ”

  “It wasn’t for us to say, Ry. You had to do it on your own time.” Mom got up and sat next to me on the loveseat.

  She wrapped her arm around my shoulders, kissed my cheek, and ran her hand through my short hair. “For what it’s worth, we’re very proud of you, no matter who you choose to be with.”

  Dad gave me a thumbs-up in approval. He wasn’t a super affectionate man, but he always had my back. “There’s one thing, though,” Mom said as she looked at me.

  “What’s that?”

  “If you ever sneak a boy home and let him attempt to ruin this beautiful face, I will kill you,” she said, pinching my cheeks and making a ridiculous duck face.

  That was the story of how I came out of the closet and straight into a brand new world of crazy.

  “Why are you watching this fag show?” My dad huffed as he came into the room with his third, or maybe fourth, beer in hand.

  “It’s not a fag show, Dan,” my mother said. “It’s one of those home decorating shows. I’m watching it so I can dream about the house we will never have since we live in this shit pit trailer.” She took long drag out of her cigarette before smashing the butt in the overflowing ashtray. Two minutes hadn’t even passed before she reached for her pack, tapped out another smoke, and lit it.

  We lived in a trailer park community called Spruce Orchard just outside of the wealthy town of Davison, Iowa. It was the butt of everyone’s jokes, which meant if you didn’t have the latest technology or wore current fashion, and then you must live in Spring Orchard trailer park. It was a stereotypical white trash community. Men sat outside double-fisting their Natty Lights dressed in pit-stained wife-beaters. Older women in flowered housecoats yelled from their rickety porches at the men for being lazy and no good. In turn, the men then ignored their wives and eyed the skinny jailbait who flounced around the park with barely a stitch on and nothing better to do than tease the old men drinking their lives away.

  Our trailer was one of the most beaten-down in the park. The paint on the siding was chipping off, yellow wallpaper was peeling off the walls, and secondhand furniture was scattered around and smelled like stale smoke.

  “Fuck, Mary Beth, get off your fat ass and get me another beer. Make yourself useful for once.
God knows that kid over there does nothing around here that matters.”

  My mother let out a congested cough and smashed the butt of yet another cigarette into the ashtray. “Dan, why don’t you get a goddamned job, so we can get a fucking butler to cater to you?”

  It was a typical evening with my parents. I sat in the corner of the tiny kitchenette and tried to study for my final exams, which were coming up in a few weeks. I would have gone to study in my room, but that area was mostly filled with shit my mom kept buying on QVC with money we didn’t have. Because of her shopping addiction, we constantly had creditors calling our house. We might as well have had the phone service turned off since the calls fell on deaf ears. There was no point worrying about my parents’ financial situation; I wasn’t going to get any help from them for college anyway. I had to focus on keeping my grades up because I didn’t want anything to jeopardize my scholarship. I had been accepted into a premed program in Chicago, and it was my one-way ticket out of this hellhole.

  I would be doing everything solely on my own, and that was the way I wanted to keep it. Not that my parents had any money to contribute to my education anyway. My mother waitressed at a local dinner, and my father couldn’t hold a job down longer than a few weeks because most days he drank himself into a stupor. Neither of them had a high school diploma. They dropped out of school at sixteen when my mom found out she was pregnant with me. As far as my parents were concerned, I was nothing more than a mistake and wasted space.

  I’ve heard people talk about families like mine. We were trailer trash; nothing but worthless pieces of shit who sucked government money through welfare, food stamps, and other financial assistance. I didn’t want to be the person who ended up a statistic. I wanted to be the person who made a difference, and I’d worked my ass off in school so I’d get that chance.

  Working hard had come at a price, though. I had no real friends and was constantly teased by others. I thought if I could just work on my grades, I could get the fuck out of there and start my life over. So I ignored the people around me and kept to myself.