Hell, Look at Me

Chapter 1 “He loves me, he loves me not.” Charlie knew the answer to that and snorted in self-derision. Trying not to be overt about it, he watched Ricky. They were attending the opening night cast party at a local club. Ricky Moore, the star of the show, was leaning against the bar, surrounded by admiring females. He has one arm around a blonde’s waist and the other around Belinda Cameron’s shoulders while he whispered something to his costar. Charlie saw Belinda blush and nod. So she won tonight’s lottery? Figured it wouldn’t be me. A least not publicly. Charlie and Ricky sometimes ended up in bed together. No one knew that. It was Ricky’s deep dark secret and Charlie, very unwillingly, went along with it. Why the hell I do… He sighed. He knew why. Against his better judgment he’d fallen hard for the tall, dark-haired, green-eyed, and extremely handsome actor. So when Ricky had come on to him late one evening when both of them were very drunk—and for the moment alone—in the washroom of another bar, Charlie had happily agreed to go home with him, even though he figured it would just be a pity f**k. When the night ended, Ricky had made it very clear that if Charlie let anyone know about their encounter it would be the last one they had together. “But if you keep our little secret,” Ricky said, stroking Charlie’s arm then kissing him quite thoroughly for a long moment, “then we can be together whenever the spirit moves. As long as we’re careful.” The problem with that was, ‘the spirit’ had to move Ricky. Charlie had no say in when they slept together, or even where. Ricky would show up at his apartment unannounced, or call and tell Charlie to come to his place, always reminding him to be careful that no one saw him. It really burned Charlie that he wasn’t Ricky’s only lover. The man was notorious for his affairs with whatever woman, or man on rare occasion, caught his fancy. Either someone at the theater or one of his many fans. I’m just the only one stupid enough to keep my mouth shut about it. What he didn’t understand was why, when Ricky was admittedly bi, he wasn’t willing to let anyone know he was sleeping with Charlie. Okay, that wasn’t really the truth. He did know why. After all, look at me. Who wants to be connected with a freak? He stared at his left arm. Sure, no one could see the burn scars at the moment because he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but they were there—on his arm and in his mind. They were the result of an accident, not of his own doing, when he was nine. His mother had come home late one evening after having more than a few too many drinks. A norm in her case. She decided she needed to fix supper in spite of his protesting he wasn’t hungry. “I’ll make it, you’ll eat it,” she said angrily as she took out two frying pans. One was for hamburgers, the other for French fries. She filled the latter with lard and set it on the stove. Then, after taking a beer from the fridge, she made burgers, plopped them in the first pan to cook and sat down to wait. It wasn’t until the grease in the other pan was so hot it spattered on the stove that she realized what was happening. Charlie did at the same time and made a grab for the pan. She beat him to it. As she hauled it off the burner the hot grease splashed onto Charlie’s arm. He would never forget the pain, or his mother telling him to shut up. “It just a bit of grease, you wimp,” she shouted drunkenly as she turned on the water and stuck his arm under it. That was the last thing he remembered until the next morning. He woke in agony to find his arm was clumsily wrapped in a towel, held on with masking tape. His mother was sitting by his bed, more asleep than awake, her head lolling on the back of the chair. When she heard him move she opened her eyes to look at him. “Mama, it hurts,” he whimpered before he started crying. “I know it hurts, baby,” she said. “But it’ll get better. I put some burn ointment on it and now that you’re awake I’ll give you aspirin.” She kept dosing him with aspirin, and carefully putting more ointment on the burns, for the next two days, only leaving the house to get more beer. He spent most of his time curled in a ball, trying not to cry because when he did she would yell at him—even more so with a couple of drinks in her. Finally she realized that she needed to take him to a doctor. “But you tell him it was your fault, you got that? Otherwise I’m leaving you there and calling you father to pick you up. You don’t want that, do you?” He didn’t. He’d lived with his father one summer before the man had brought him back to his mother, telling her Charlie was her brat and her responsibility. If he thought his mother’s occasional drinking sprees were bad, they were nothing compared to his father’s drug use. The man never physically abused him but he would be gone for days at a time, leaving Charlie locked in the dirty sixth-floor apartment to fend for himself. By the time she took Charlie to the ER the skin on his arm was leathery, almost numb, and pale white. The doctor determined he’d sustained a third-degree burn and would need plastic surgery. Charlie’s mother told him she couldn’t afford that and, obviously reluctantly, he gave her instructions for how to continue caring for the burn. “He will scar badly,” he cautioned her, “if you don’t follow my instructions.” Then he told her he had called Children’s Services to report what had happened. Panicked, Charlie’s mother grabbed him up and left the hospital, muttering angrily, “I knew that would happen. I just knew it. And I’m not going to let them take you away from me, baby. I’m just not!” Three hours later she’d packed their clothes and a few belongings in her car and they were on the road. By the next day they were in another city. She found a cheap one-room apartment, managed to get a job in a sleazy bar, and when autumn came she enrolled him in school. By then his arm was as healed as it ever would be, and, as the doctor predicted, badly scarred. He never again wore anything but long-sleeved shirts, even in the summer, until he was in college, majoring in technical theater with an emphasis on scene design. During his second year there, his roommate had tried to convince him the burns weren’t as awful to look at as Charlie thought. For the next three days Charlie had dressed for the season, which, considering the college was in the south-west, meant short-sleeved shirts or tank tops. He soon found he couldn’t stand the stares and the dismayed glances. Suffering the heat was better than suffering the looks. It was the last time he did that until he got the job at the theater. Even now he kept his arms covered except when he was working. He almost fled the first time he came into the scene shop wearing a tank-top and saw the looks of shock and surprise on the faces of his crew. Then Jace Parish had come over, put his arm around Charlie’s shoulders, and said without missing a beat, “Gentlemen, I think we have the star for Phantom if we can figure out how to make an arm mask instead of a face mask for him.” The others had cracked up and even Charlie had finally joined in. After that, when he was working at the theater, he dressed for comfort. The rest of the time though he wore his long-sleeved shirts. A crew who understood was one thing. People outside of his immediate circle of friends were another. And despite the fact he’s sleeping with me, Ricky is no friend. Not the way I want. Not a friend who will accept all of me the way I am. But damn it, I’m…in love with him? Maybe. Grateful because he was willing to sleep with me more than once? Definitely. He dropped his gaze from Ricky to the drink sitting on the table, praying no one had seen the yearning, the need, he felt for the actor.