I Love You More Than I'm Afraid (Our Forevers #2), Rebel Hart [best adventure books to read .txt] 📗

guided my arm around her shoulders. She was five feet tall if she was lucky, so standing at just under six feet, there was almost a full foot between my head and hers. That considered, I was hunched over and barely able to keep myself on my feet, so she was bearing almost all of my weight as we walked down the hallway.

“This is the beginning of a much happier and healthier life for you, my child,” Sister Flint said. “Don’t you feel a weight has been lifted from your shoulders?”

“Totes,” I huffed ironically, because even at the brink of death, I just couldn’t keep my snark at bay. I could hear Hannah berating me for it, but whatever. This holy bitch locked me in a cement storage closet for anywhere from a day to a month, she could take a little bit of sass.

It took the better part of twenty minutes for us to get up the single flight of stairs that led from the basement of the camp building where I was being kept, to the main floor with the food hall and other activity spaces. On the other side of the inconspicuous door that led down to the isolation chambers was the fun, cute looking camp that my parents had dropped me off at. There was artwork on the walls, adorable daily goal sheets decorated with stickers, and a display board of all the incredible activities a camper could look forward to. My parents were cruel, but I had to believe that if they’d known that a refusal to conform to heteronormativity would result in being locked in a room alone getting only bread and water for meals for who knows how long.

Well… at least my mom would have put up a little bit of a fight.

Then again, maybe their lesbian daughter was just that much of a pall on their picture-perfect Christian, nuclear family. It’d probably be their preference at this point to just send me up the river and pretend as if they only had two daughters as opposed to three. Little did they know that’d be my preference too. I was more than ready for them to quit trying to “save” me, and just let me go live my best, gay life.

Yet here I was with no more strength than a newborn bird being dragged through a bright, sunshiny camp with unkempt hair, bad B.O., and guilt for denying my identity.

Isn’t that the American Dream after all?

When Sister Flint pulled me into the food hall, the quiet chatter dulled to nothing as all eyes turned around and looked at me. I scanned the room, looking for a friendly pair of eyes, and found them looking back at me from a table near the back.

Codie was my only real friend at the camp, a boy who would gladly date all the men I’d never touch in my lifetime. My heart seized up when I noticed how much longer his light brown hair was from the last time I saw it.

How long was I in the basement?

He jumped up from where he was sitting and scuttled across the room to where Sister Flint was holding me aloft. He snaked his arm under mine and looped it around my back. I put what little energy I had into wrapping my arm around his shoulders.

Sister Flint relinquished me to him with a sweet smile and a “Thank you, child,” then she twirled off to torture some other poor, gay soul and left me to sob on Codie’s shoulder.

“Shh, I know,” Codie said. “Come on. Let’s get some food in you first, then we’ll talk it out.”

Everyone kept their eyes trained on me as the only sound that filled the entire, massive eating hall were the sounds of my sobs. One of the other campers had gone in the time that it took Codie to get me back to his table and retrieved a plate of food. She set it in front of me along with a couple of cups of water and then rushed off.

Unseasoned chicken and a mush of peas and carrots never looked so good. I couldn’t even wait for Codie to offer me his fork. I grabbed the chicken with my hand and lifted it to my mouth. It was dry and lukewarm, but none of that bothered me. I chomped into it like a dog off the streets, and Codie just sat and let me. He’d gone to the isolation chambers early in the experience, and knew all too well the stress I was under.

“I’m sorry,” I choked out between tearstained bites. “I’m sorry for what I said.”

“It’s okay,” Codie said. “I would have been mad too if I didn’t know. You get it now. Saying it is the only way out.”

Not long after Codie got out of the isolation chamber, and only once he’d recovered some of his strength and sanity, did I scold him for lying about his sexuality. Coming in, I believed nothing was worth denouncing something that was just as much a part of someone as their eyes or natural hair color.

I understood better now.

“I just…”

“Shh.” Cody combed my hair down with his fingers, no doubt trying to make it look a little more presentable. “It’s okay. I told you already, I get it. Just eat.”

Eventually, the attention left me and the chatter slowly rose up again. I had to have eaten at least four people’s worth of food, but there wasn’t a single person around who questioned it. Everyone had either been to the isolation chambers or had someone close to them who had. It was already about a month into the summer, without adding the time I’d been locked up. The staff just worked their way down a list alphabetically, and fortunately, my last name started with an ‘N.’ There were very few people who hadn’t been there yet.

Even with the food slowly working its way through my body, it still took Codie aiding me to get me