Secret Sunday Boyfriend

I didn’t go back to the restaurant that
night.

That sounds dramatic, like a movie line, but it
was mostly just me sitting in the passenger seat of my dad’s car
with my hands shaking so badly I couldn’t unlock my phone, Kim
slumped beside me with a bandage wrapped around his palm and his knee
starting to swell under torn denim, and my dad driving like the
freeway had personally offended him, jaw clenched, eyes fixed forward
as if looking sideways at either of us might make it real.

Nobody spoke for a long time.

Not because there was nothing to say, but
because everything that mattered had already been said in one
sentence in front of a room full of strangers, and the rest of our
lives were still trying to catch up.

My phone kept buzzing.

My mom kept calling.

Then it stopped.

That was almost worse.

Kim stared out the window like he was watching
a different world slide past, one where boys didn’t get fired for
feelings, where love didn’t come with sirens and ultimatums, and I
wanted to tell him he didn’t have to be brave anymore, that he
could fall apart if he needed to, that I would hold the pieces, but I
didn’t know how to say anything like that without sounding like I
was pretending.

My dad pulled up outside urgent care, told us
to wait, then came around to help Kim out with the kind of gentle
efficiency he usually reserved for carrying heavy boxes. It made
something hot and painful swell in my throat—gratitude, guilt,
fear, all tangled together.

While Kim was inside getting checked out, my
dad sat with me in the waiting room, the fluorescent lights turning
everything too sharp.

He didn’t lecture.

He didn’t say “when I was your age” or
“you don’t understand how hard it is.”

He just stared at the TV bolted to the wall
playing a muted cooking show and said, very quietly, “Your mom is
scared.”

I laughed once, humorless. “She threatened to
disown me.”

He nodded like that was a normal thing to say.
Like he’d heard worse. “That’s what scared people do when they
don’t know how to hold on.”

I looked at him, furious and desperate at the
same time. “So I’m supposed to let go of him so she can hold on?”

My dad’s jaw tightened. “No,” he said
after a moment. “I’m telling you so you understand that the anger
isn’t the whole story.”

I didn’t want the whole story.

I wanted Kim.

I wanted my mom to stop turning love into a
threat.

I wanted my life to stop feeling like a room
with no doors.

Kim came back out with a limp and a paper bag
of supplies and a forced smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“I’m fine,” he said immediately, like he
could read the panic still sitting in my face. “Just bruised. No
stitches.”

I exhaled hard, the relief making me dizzy.

Outside, the night air was warm and smelled
like car exhaust and jasmine from somewhere nearby, and for a second,
under the streetlights, the world looked almost normal, like we were
just two boys leaving a place together.

My dad cleared his throat. “I’ll drive Kim
home,” he said.

Kim’s eyes widened. “You don’t have to—”

“I do,” my dad said simply, then glanced at
me. “Moon, go home. Shower. Sleep. You have school tomorrow. We’ll
talk.”

Home.

The word hit like a joke.

I hadn’t been told I could go home. I’d
been told not to come back.

But I nodded anyway, because my body was
running on shock and the idea of arguing felt like trying to hold a
waterfall in my hands.

I walked the two blocks to our apartment, each
step heavier than the last, and when I got there, the lights were
off.

My mom was awake, though.

I could feel it.

The silence had a shape.

I opened the door slowly, heart pounding.

She was sitting at the kitchen table in the
dark like she’d been waiting in a courtroom for a verdict, one hand
wrapped around a mug she wasn’t drinking, her face lit only by the
glow of her phone.

“Where is your father?” she asked.

“With Kim,” I said, voice flat.

Her mouth tightened. “Of course.”

I dropped my backpack on the floor. “You told
me not to come back.”

“I told you if you left,” she said sharply,
“you left our family.”

I laughed, and it came out broken. “No. You
tried to make me choose.”

Her eyes flashed. “Because you are my son.”

“And I’m still your son,” I said, the
words shaking now despite my effort. “I didn’t stop being your
son because I—”

“Don’t,” she snapped, voice cracking on
the edge of something dangerous. “Don’t say it.”

I stared at her in the dark, and suddenly I
understood something that made my chest ache in a new way: she didn’t
want to hear it because if she heard it, she couldn’t pretend it
wasn’t real.

I swallowed hard. “I’m not doing this,” I
said quietly. “Not tonight.”

I turned toward my room.

She said my name like a warning.

“Moon.”

I paused but didn’t turn back.

“I saw,” she said, and her voice wasn’t
anger anymore, it was something tight and brittle, “the way you
looked at him.”

My stomach dropped.

Not because I was ashamed.

Because she had noticed.

She had really seen me.

And part of me had always thought that if she
ever truly saw me, she’d love me less.

“I’m sorry,” she added, and the words
were so unexpected I almost thought I’d imagined them, “that you
think I hate you.”

I turned around slowly.

She stared at the table. Her hands trembled
around the mug.

“I don’t hate you,” she said, like
forcing the sentence out past a wall in her throat. “But I don’t
know what to do with this. I don’t know what it means. I don’t
know what people will say.”

“There it is,” I whispered.

Her eyes snapped up, furious and wounded. “You
think I care about strangers more than you?”

“I think,” I said, voice shaking now, “you
care about a version of me that never existed.”

Silence.

Her face twisted, and for a second she looked
like she might throw the mug across the room.

Instead, she stood up so abruptly the chair
scraped loud against the floor.

“Go to bed,” she said, voice cold again,
the armor snapping back into place. “We will talk tomorrow.”

Tomorrow felt like a threat.

I went to my room anyway, closed the door,
leaned against it, and slid down onto the floor like my bones had
decided to quit.

Only then did I check my phone.

And that was when the Gen Z apocalypse started.

Because it wasn’t just my mom calling.

It was everyone.

Group chat notifications stacked like dominoes.
Missed calls from people I hadn’t talked to in months. Instagram
DMs. A text from Hannah that made my blood turn cold.