The Strong Silent Type - BL

Note: Yes, this is a boy love story, if you don't like it...please just don't read it? The rest of you, please, enjoy it!

Sometimes things come out when you least expect them, and for me, that happened more than with most other people. One minute, I would be sitting there, doing nothing at all and the next I would be spilling my guts to an absolute stranger. The thing about that is sometimes you tell things to the wrong people, like when it got silent at the Thanksgiving table two years ago and I couldn't take it anymore. I've always hated silences, awkward or otherwise, so after what felt like hours, but was probably only a minute or two, I opened my mouth and said "So, mom, dad, everyone, I'm gay!"

That sure did the trick – the table went from silent to 17 very loud Italian-American's screaming various things in my general direction. Some of them were asking me if I was sure, some of them asked if that was my idea of a joke, some were shouting at me to go get myself saved and some, mainly my cousin Mary, were asking if I had a boyfriend and if we were safe. Of course, I realized about three seconds too late that this was not the way I wanted to come out. I stood up from the table and ran to my room, hiding until all of the family, save for my mother, father and younger sister, had left.

I half expected it to come up at breakfast the next morning, but no one said anything, and as the week went on, people continued to say nothing and I just sort of got used to it. My family was very don't ask, don't tell with my homosexuality and as long they were happy, so was I. Until I met Connor Caruso.

Connor was six and a half feet of perfection. He had green eyes, shaggy brown hair that always flipped just the right way, and slightly tanned skin. He was thin, too, but not so much that it looked bad, no, he was gorgeous, and not only was he gorgeous on the outside, he was amazing everywhere else as well. He was always relaxed, always laid back, and always attentive to those around him. He worked at a used CD store that catered mostly to stoners and music junkies and he rotated playing bass and drums for a local garage band.

Connor was that person that everyone knows, but no one knows; everyone was his friend, but no one was his best friend, or even his good friend. He was always around, but no one knew anything about him aside from the obvious, mostly because he was a listener, not a talker. It wasn't that Connor was quiet, he talked, nowhere near as much as I did, of course, but when he talked, he gave away very little about himself. When Connor was asked a question, he always gave the most vague answer he could and my friends and I, when he wasn't around, wondered if that's just the way that he was, or if he had something to hide.

In case it wasn't painfully obvious already, I was in love with Connor, head over heels in love with him, to be exact, and I often found myself zoning out and staring at the back of his head in Physics my senior year of high school. I would go to the CD store where he worked more often than I needed, going up and asking for CDs that I knew they wouldn't have just to get out of buying things; if Connor noticed this, however, he said nothing about it, and since he let no hints of knowing anything, I continued paying visits to the store.

I guess you could say that, from a young age, I had a thing for the strong, silent type. This went against everything else that was me because I was the opposite of strong and very much the opposite of silent. As was the Saviero family norm, I was loud, rambunctious and liked to talk. I could also cook, but only because my mother said that if I ever wanted to get married, I needed to know how to cook. To this day, I don't understand her logic, maybe she pegged me as gay from the start, but I learned to cook right along with my sister.

At 5'9", I was short, well, at least in comparison to Connor, and while I wasn't overweight, I wasn't underweight either – a healthy 147 pounds at the age of 18. I had thick, dark brown hair that fell in shaggy waves just a bit below my ears and for a gay boy, I had the worst fashion sense, sticking to baggy jeans and band t-shirts, but I had the enthusiasm for life to make up for it.

I hated staying still, I hated silence, I hated awkward moments and I hated being bored. As a result, I was out of my house most of the time, coming in well after midnight almost every night after I turned 18. That was how I met Connor – parties. At first I didn't notice him because he was so, well, quiet, but after a couple of weeks I started realizing that he was everywhere, hanging out in the back, always with a can of something in his hand – always a can, never a bottle. Sometimes he had soda, sometimes he had beer, once he even had iced tea.

I don't think that love at first sight exists, just lust, and lust was definitely what I felt when I started noticing Connor. Until I talked to him, the feeling was exclusively in my jeans, but the first time I talked to Connor, that all changed. That's when I fell in love with him, really, the first time we spoke. He had a calm, relaxed voice, he sat and listened as I rambled on and on, and though he revealed nothing about who he was as a person, I liked him immediately, maybe even loved him.

After that, I started thinking about Connor more and more. I asked around, trying to figure out if anyone knew who he was, if he was crazy, if he was nice, if he was single, if he was straight, but no one knew anything aside from the fact that he worked at the CD shop and that he played bass and drums for Seeds of Hades, which, despite their name, was actually fairly mellow music. I learned later, talking to Connor, that the band name had come up during the Greek Mythology unit we had in English sophomore year. It had started out as Pomegranates From Hell, then Pomegranates of Hades and then, to shorten the title for their home made t-shirts, Seeds of Hades.

Talking to Connor, however uninformative it actually was, quickly became like a drug to me. Just hearing his voice, just listening to him talk was enough, and when I said things, I got the feeling that he actually heard them, something most people would have to pop 20 milligrams of Ritalin just to attempt.
Connor was different, but no one knew how different, and it started to become an obsession. I was desperate to find out who he was and in that attempt, I became fascinated with him, with everything about him. Getting to know Connor was one of the biggest challenges I have ever faced, but getting through to him was even more frightening.

One night, after a Seeds of Hades show at a local bar/restaurant downtown, he offered me a ride home, seeing as we lived only a mile from each other. By that point, I had tried everything; tiptoeing around, asking him questions, asking other people questions, trying to get him to talk, to tell me who he was, and nothing had come of it, so I saw only one option. Ask him. Of course, I meant to do it in a roundabout way, mention that other people at school said he was a mystery, but did that happen? Of course not.

It got quiet all too quickly, and while Connor seemed comfortable with the silence, not even moving to turn on the stereo, I grew more and more nervous with every second. When I get nervous, I say the wrong things, as have been proven many, many times in my past, and this occasion was no different. When I opened my mouth to recite my rehearsed 'Connor the mystery man' speech, something completely different came out.

"Okay, I'm going crazy not knowing, but I've asked around and no one else knows, who are you, Connor Caruso?" The second I spoke, my eyes widened with horror. Not only had I admitted that it was driving me crazy not knowing him, but I admitted that I had gone into stalker mode and checked up on him. Then and there, I wished that all of those spy movies with cars containing ejector seats were real and that I could just fly up out of the top of the car and not have to deal with the repercussions of my words, but alas, that was not the case.

"Who am I?" Connor spoke slowly in his calm, laid back manner, as always; he didn't even seem fazed by my admissions. He paused for several seconds, biting his lip before responding. "I'll let you know when I find out."

I should have seen that one coming. A vague response that not only told me nothing about him and seemed final; it was everything that Connor was about. Normally, I was able to just tuck it away, label it as part of the Connor Caruso charm, but this time, it angered me. I had asked him a question, but a staggering amount of myself out in the air between us, and he had given me? Eleven words that told me nothing.

"That's not fair." I frowned as I looked at Connor, folding my arms across my chest. "I just wanted to get to know you, to find who you are because I'm actually interested in knowing more about you, I- what the hell are you doing?" Connor veered the car off of the road, pulling to a stop, but said nothing. "Connor, what the hell are you doing?" My eyes widened as Connor parked the car.

"Shh." Connor unbuckled his seatbelt, turning to face me. "You put too much value on words." He moved closer, placing his hand on my cheek before softly pressing his lips against mine, sealing me in a gentle kiss. I wanted to push him away, to demand a verbose explanation, but I couldn't do that, not when I was getting what I had wanted since I first saw him.

"Wow." I gulped as we broke away, biting my lip and trying to get my head around what had just happened. "What was that?" I frowned, remembering that, only moments earlier, I had been furious at Connor.

"If I let you into my life," Connor stated, his voice even and calm, though more serious than usual. "You have to promise that you won't ask me for words I can't give you. If you want to know who I am, you will, but slowly. I'll show you, I won't tell you, I don't know how to tell you."

"What do you mean 'if you let me into your life?'" I asked. That one sentence could have meant a whole lot of different things, and after the kiss, it was more confusing than it would have been before. As I should have expected, Connor leaned in, kissing me again, releasing no verbal reply to my question. Again, I kissed him back, this time allowing the kiss to go on longer before I pulled away.

"Actions speak louder than the words you're so obsessed with," Connor stated. "You couldn't explain that kiss with a thousand words, so why try?"

"I…I just…I don't understand," I admitted. "I don't know what you're doing, what you want, where this is going if it's even going anywhere. We're on the side of the road, god damnit, in the middle of the night and I-"

"Shh." Connor moved still closer, pulling me into yet another kiss, this one slightly more aggressive. He held my head in place by resting his hand firmly on the back of my neck, but even if he hadn't, I would not have pulled away, I couldn't.

"What do you want?" I asked, my voice weak and trembling. I was left in shock from the three kisses, each one better than the last, and the anger and resentment I had felt had drifted away, leaving me wanting Connor more than ever.

"I want you," he said simply, stating everything in just three words.

This time, I kissed him, unbuckling my own seatbelt and moving forwards with a greater aggression than Conner. I wrapped my arms around his neck, fingers instantly twisting through his hair as we sat there, bodies straining over the gap between the two seats, explaining through our kisses what I had never known words could not.