“That would’ve left you royally screwed.”
“Yep. So…yeah. Fuck that, right?”
“Right.”
“But just because you’re not doing anything about it doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.”
“I have no idea what—”
“Meaning, the whole time I was agonizing about Miro, he was tied up in knots about me and trying to figure out how he was going to get over me.”
“Over you?”
“Not think about fucking me anymore. Is that better?”
I groaned because it was painful to talk to him sometimes.
“You don’t know if Celso’s as racked up about you as you are about him because you’ve never asked him, right?”
“Of course not. I’m not even ready to call this…whatever you think this is.”
“Oh, I know what it is,” he assured me. “You guys are dating without any of the benefits.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“The fuck you don’t,” he said before he drained the last of his beer.
“Did you even taste any of—”
“He’s your non-romantic life partner,” he stated, putting his empty bottle down on the counter. “And if you wanna leave it like that, that’s fine. It’s none of my business—”
“You certainly have a lot of opinions about something you say isn’t your—”
“—but if you want what I got,” he continued, ignoring me, “a best friend who loves meandscrews my brains out, you gotta grow a pair and have a fuckin’ conversation with your best friend.”
Ian was quiet after his rant.
“Are you done?”
He didn’t say anything, but he was obviously thinking.
“Ian?”
“You’re luckier than I was,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I didn’t have you or anyone else I trusted to talk to. And if I fucked up my friendship with Miro—I mean, Christ. He—I never had a friend like that. I never had anyone I counted on like him.”
“I know.”
“But I realized when we were on that plane together that I was outta time. If I didn’t tell him what I wanted, we weren’t ever gonna start. He was looking to sleep with someone, and I just knew that the next person who was in bed with him would realize what they had, and that would be it for me.”
“You knew all that?”
“I guessed. But you can feel somebody pulling away, trying to put distance there so they don’t get hurt anymore.”
Cel had changed plans on me lately. Not a lot, but a few. He also sat across from me and not next to me, and I knew that because I’d save him a spot when we were out with my friends, and he instead sat next to Anna or Jer or Miro. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time.
“I know it’s scary, and the timing, right now, couldn’t be worse, and, of course, since when are you into guys?”
It was true. I’d never thought about going to bed with a man. It hadn’t ever occurred to me. And I hadn’t been lusting after Cel, or watching gay porn, or fantasizing about what we would do together physically. But what my brain always came back to was that I wanted him around. All the time. I didn’t want him to go anywhere without me, and that, in and of itself, told me the most important thing. That my interest was not in men—or women, at the moment—but in Cel specifically. When I was with him, I felt right. I felt like me. Anything I could ever say to him, no matter what, no matter how strange, was fine because it was him and me. It all boiled down to the fact that I didn’t want him to spend time with anyone but me, and he deserved to know that.