Open to: Tops.
Plot: Benji comes out to your muse.
Wanted connections: Friends, family, girlfriend’s relative, etc...Anyone, really.
He thought the nerves would have gone away by his third large glass of wine, but they hadn’t. Benji had done this before. He came out of the closet once before. He sat his parents down when he was eleven years old and just told them. And when he did, his extremely catholic parents sent him away to a camp. What happened at that camp? Well, they called it “conversion therapy.” Benji called it torture. Thirty days of physical, psychological, and emotional torture. Torture that put him so far back in the closet he never planned to come out again.
But here he was, chugging down his fourth glass of cabernet sauvignon as his dinner guest stood just a few feet away on the other side of the table. They’d finished dinner and now they were just chatting and drinking. Even though he was a grown man and nobody could force him to go to that hell ever again, he was still damn near paralyzed with fear that the man in his house would have the same kind of reaction that his parents had all those years ago. He’d clearly had something he wanted to talk about all night, but he’d been tiptoeing around it for hours now, knowing that there was no taking it back if he did. He was just one small person on a planet of billions, and yet somehow this felt to Benji like the most important decision in all of human history. Whatever his guest was talking about faded into the background as Benji contemplated what he was about to do until finally, he just set his glass down on the table and did it, interrupting the other
“Hey, so, I’m gay.” Benji said with as much confidence as he could muster. A chill ran up his spine as he said it out loud for the first time in eleven years. And the more seconds that ticked by, the harder it was to keep eye contact with his guest as he tried to gauge his reaction. It felt like an eternity while he waited to hear what the other man had to say.
