Disclaimer: I am not Stephenie Meyer and therefore I do not own Twilight or the wonderful characters I screw with.
A Bit About Garrett
August 10th, 2011
He hung up the phone with Seth and closed his eyes.
He'd grown up knowing he was different, though he didn't figure out he was gay until he was thirteen. Ironically enough, it had taken having his eighth grade math teacher, Mr Greene, show him special attention to get him to figure out just how different he was. He never did anything with Mr. Greene aside from talk to him, but it was still where he learned who he really was. He often wondered to himself if Mr. Greene had seen something in him which he hadn't realized was visible.
He'd always sworn to himself he'd never be that type of guy, but that was twenty-three years ago and Seth wasn't a little boy. Also, Garrett wouldn't even contemplate going after Seth if he was one of his students, but Seth wasn't his student. He did seem to be getting an associates degree in the art department, but it was extremely rare for a student who did drawing and painting to also go into clay.
Garrett knew he was trying to over justify his choices but he couldn't help it.
Garret had had several relationships over the years, including a brief fling with Laurent Bernard when he was fourteen... his mother's boyfriend at the time. He honestly couldn't blame his mom for kicking him out when she found out, though the fact that she didn't kick Laurent out at the same time honestly irked him.
His first steady boyfriend had been a boy the same age as him named Charles. Charles and he had went out for four years, from the time he was fifteen until he was nineteen. They'd spent the first year together at the University of Washington and then Charles had been scouted and transferred to Duke University for his sophomore year to play basketball. They'd never officially broke it off, instead they just slowly drifted apart over what would have been their fifth year of dating. They went from calling each other every night to once a week to once a month and eventually the calls had stopped.
He was twenty-one before he dated again. The man he dated went by an extremely innocent name of David or sometime DJ when he wanted to be cool. They were together for only about three month, but David never bothered to tell Garrett health information which he should have known from the start.
It wasn't until they broke it off and he got checked at the doctor that he found out how extremely screwed he was, because he'd tested HIV positive. It had taken him the better part a year to come to terms with the knowledge.
Fifteen years ago, he'd started out taking two pills every day plus a handful of different vitamins and a shot every two weeks at the doctors. Now, he still took those same two pills... and another three. And he still had to go to the doctors every two weeks for the same shot.
If his little brother hadn't had to move in with him within a couple months of him moving back to Forks after getting his Masters in art studies, he probably never would have been able to pull his act together. The need to take care of a lost sixteen year old was what drove him to push his own fears to the side.
He was lucky, because when he'd come down with HIV back in 1996, it wasn't something that had a long life expectancy and he'd honestly expected it to turn into AIDS, but by some miracle, fifteen years later it was still only HIV...
Still, it had taken precious years before drugs like Truvada and Isentress had been released and approved by the FDA... He could sometimes go months without feeling the effects the disease reaped on his body, but occasionally it would hit him hard and when it did, it sometimes lasted days.
He'd kept the disease hidden from both of his brothers along with his mother as he couldn't stand to see their reaction to it if they ever found out. He figured they'd find out when it killed him, though sometimes he did wonder if Emmett already knew with the way he mothered him. The thing was his little brother never brought it up and Emmett wasn't exactly known for being able to wait someone out when it came to secrets so he was relatively certain he didn't know.
On the other hand, he was always honest with the men he dated, because there was potential risk involved if safe sex practices weren't heeded to. Some of his relationships took the news better than others.
Sadly, his most recent boyfriend, Randal, hadn't taken it very well at all. Randal hadn't come out and said he'd had an issue with it, instead, he'd simply left after one date and never came back or called him ever again.
Now, as he contemplated getting close to Seth, he also worried Seth wouldn't be able to handle it at all, which was why he wasn't going to tell him immediately. He'd tell him before it got physical though. He'd have to.