The Love Series Complete Box Set (162 page)

It wasn’t worth the black eye.

Nick came up to us, two cans of beer in his hands. “Here you go, boys.” He tossed the beer and Reid popped his open, not worrying about the foamy spray that hit his shirt.

In my two years of Varsity baseball parties, I’d learned better than to protest when anyone handed me a drink. I just nodded my thanks, cracked open the beer and carried it around with me, never taking a sip from it.

I was too afraid to let my guard down. Too afraid to numb the pain. Because if the pain was numbed, then what else would I have.

“Hey!” Dylan called out to us from the beer pong table where he’d just successfully landed another shot. We walked over to him, bumped fists, and when his teammate sank the last shot, his game was ended.

“I’m up next,” Reid moved into Dylan’s spot as Dylan stepped to the side.

After tossing his empty water bottle in an open garbage bag in the corner, he walked away from me without saying a word. I could tell something was wrong simply by the way he stalked away from me. I watched him slink out the sliding glass door, into the backyard where he could be alone.

I scanned the room, took stock of everyone else, and came to one conclusion: they were all fucked up. Aside from Reid, who had only just gotten here, everyone else had a solid hour-and-a-half head start. Most of them would be throwing up in another hour. It never ceased to amaze me how shitfaced a bunch of high school athletes would get just because they didn’t have practice the next morning.

Fairly certain that no one would see me if I followed him, I slid out the same door and walked across the backyard where I found Dylan sitting under a large weeping willow tree.

I sank down next to him and cringed a little when I saw him shift away from me. “What’s your problem?” I asked, genuinely not knowing.

“Seriously?” He nearly yelled as he squeezed his hands together, draping them in between his bent knees. “You haven’t spoken to me in fucking months,” he seethed. “You cut me out of your life. We’ve made it through the majority of the season and you haven’t said two fucking words to me since you . . .” The words he wanted to say vanished into thin air as he checked over his shoulder to make sure no one else had followed me outside.

“Found out you were gay.” Quietly, I finished his sentence for him, letting the words I had feared so much actually tumble from my mouth.

“Yeah,” he sighed and hung his head in his hands.

“How long have you known?” I asked. We both stared out at the gigantic in-ground pool sparkling in the moonlight before us, neither making eye contact.

He chuckled, and even though he moved away from me a little when I sat next to him, I could still feel the vibration of his body next to mine. Chills raced up my arm as his brushed against it when he turned to face me, but the ugly sneer on his face quickly pushed them away. “Why do you fucking care all of a sudden?” He stood quickly and walked over to the pool.

I gave him a few minutes to get settled on the edge of a lounge chair before I joined him. In all honestly, I needed the time to gather my own thoughts. Was I really about to have this conversation? Was I really about to open up?

When I sank down next to him, the itchy fabric of the cushion rustling noisily beneath me, I puffed out a frustrated breath and just hoped for the best. “Because I’ve been an asshole and a shitty friend and I’m sorry.”

He rolled his shoulders, shrugging off my words with a huffed, “Whatever.” The music playing from the house doubled in volume, and through the sliding glass doors through which we exited, we could see everyone had shifted from playing beer pong to dancing.

We watched as everyone grabbed their girl, or in Reid’s case,
any
girl, and started grinding together on the makeshift dance floor. Dylan tilted his head to the scene playing out before us and said, “Sometimes, I wish I could just be normal. It’d be so much easier.”

He mistook the flippant “pfft” that accidentally came out as a snide remark and shot me a look of disgust. “Like you’d fucking know,” he sneered once more.

“Maybe I know more than you think,” I whispered, staring blankly at the pool.

He turned toward me slowly and I wondered if he was afraid to fall off his seat. “Like what?” There was trepidation in his voice, an uncertainty of whether he should continue to ask questions.

Losing the battle with my courage, I said, “Nothing, never mind.” I jumped up from my seat and stood before him. “I’m going back in. See ya later.” However, before I could turn away, Dylan reached out and grabbed my wrist, encircling it in his strong grip.

We both stared at his hand and I had to wonder if he felt the same way about touching me that I did touching him. He broke the spell first, looking up at my shocked face. “No,” he pleaded, his voice turning a touch softer. “Stay. Talk,” he quietly commanded and I had no choice but to obey. Not because he’d yelled at me, or because he forced me to stay there with him.

No, what kept me there was the look in his eyes. The one that said he would understand whatever it was that I was about to say, even if I didn’t understand it myself.

What kept me there was the single stroke of his thumb along the soft skin of my wrist—a touch that told me I would be comforted even when I thought that was the last thing I deserved.

Chapter Five

May 4, 2007

I looked down at my fingers wrapped around his wrist and my mouth went dry. Were we really going to have this conversation? I could see he was on some kind of edge, some point of no return. His admission, or self-acknowledgement, was right there, on the tip of his tongue. All he had to do was let it fall.

He had to know I’d be there to catch him.

Pulling his hand from mine, he turned away from me. “No,” he said definitively, before pulling on the ends of his hair—hair that I had somehow only just noticed was long enough to brush past his hazel eyes.

A loud crash from inside filtered out to where we were sitting and it drew our attention away from the stand-off in which we were currently locked, but, since it was followed by raucous cheering, we figured everything was fine.

I stood before him and grabbed for his wrist again. It hurt that he pulled away, but it didn’t stop me from reaching for it once more. “Come with me.” Wordlessly and seemingly defeated, by what, I was not sure, he followed me into the small pool house that was situated off to the side of the pool.

Since there was an outside shower attached, most of the pool house was hidden in the trees, covered from the sight of our friends who partied in the main house. Once inside, we were bombarded by the overwhelming smell of the chlorine that hung heavily in the stagnant air. In addition to the bathroom and changing area that were the main purpose of the space, there was a small TV room set up in the center of the pool house. Nick’s parents were loaded and this room was a testament to that. There was also a fully stocked wet bar and small fridge.

Shane and I sank down into the sofa and wallowed in the unsettled silence for a few minutes before I finally got up the courage to say something. “What were you going to say out there?” I tilted my head to the door. Despite my best efforts at keeping my voice calm, it still wobbled, thick with nervous anticipation.

“Nothing. I wasn’t going to say anything, all right.” Since coming inside, his defensive tone had softened a little, but he still wouldn’t look at me.

Because he still refused to look at me, I moved to the edge of the coffee table that was in front of the couch. My knees brushed his, but I didn’t pull back. “That’s bullshit, Shane. You
were
going to say something.” I reached for his hand and his shoulders slumped, his head hanging low. “You know? Even if you don’t tell me, I still know, but I won’t be the first to say it. It has to be you. These are your words to say. Just know I’m here to listen.”

“I–I–” he stuttered and choked on his words. “What if? I mean, how do you?”

His mumbled incoherence might not mean much to anyone else, but to me, it meant the world. It meant that clarity was on the horizon.

“What?” I just wanted him to spit out something—give me some kind of intelligible piece of information because I was not going to drag this out of him; I was not going to lead him on and make him say something he wasn’t ready to say.

“How did you know you were gay?” His question totally stripped me bare.

But isn’t that how I’d always been with Shane? Totally and unapologetically myself. It was what made me not deny my homosexuality when he first found out about it. I released his hand and squeezed mine together, letting them fall loosely in-between my legs. “I’ve always known, I guess.”

He placed his hand on my leg and I actually inched back, more out of shock than out of not wanting him to touch me. “No, not how long have you known,” he clarified. “I mean just
how.
How do you know, for sure? Have you ever . . .”

I knew what he was getting at; I’d asked myself the same kind of question over and over in my head and written about it countless times in my journals. In that moment, I chose to be bluntly honest. “I know because,” I placed my hand on top of his at my leg and laced our fingers together; “I feel this . . . crazy, unnamable feeling every time I touch you. Every time I look in your eyes, something shifts inside of me. Every time I hear you laugh . . . it’s just . . .”

Shocked wasn’t the word I would use to describe Shane’s face. That was being too kind. Utter disbelief, that might be more appropriate. “Me?” His voice wavered with uncertainty.

“Yes, you.” I gently squeezed his hands, feeling immensely lighter as if a huge boulder had been lifted from my chest. “I’ve always known I was gay, but learning that I was falling for my best friend, that’s what really threw me off course. When you shut me out this past year, it hurt so fucking much not to have you in my life.”

I moved forward on the coffee table so that my ass barely stayed on the edge. His legs were sandwiched in between mine, and I moved my hands up to rest on his forearms, the light dusting of hair feeling foreign under my fingertips. He kept his eyes glued to my fingers as they traveled farther up his arms, gripping his muscled biceps and shoulders.

When he finally looked up at me, I saw so much emotion swirling in his hazel eyes—fear, uncertainty, nervousness, and what I hoped was a touch of excited anticipation. He swallowed hard, causing his Adam’s apple to bob in his throat. As I moved my hand from his arm to his face, gently stroking his hard jawline, his pupils dilated.

Inching closer to him, I felt his hot breath bathe over my lips in heated puffs. His tongue darted out to lick his full bottom lip—a lip I had fantasized about kissing for far too long. I didn’t know anything about this first kiss business—was it supposed to be slow and sweet or hard and fast?

All I knew in that moment was that I
needed
his lips against mine.

When our lips touched, my world changed forever. He didn’t kiss back at first; the shock took a second to wash away, I was sure. When he tilted his head to the side, I slid my hand up to his neck and into his hair, shocked by how soft it was.

I moved slowly at first, tentatively, unsure of how to measure his reaction—mine was throbbing wildly behind the zipper of my jeans. I pulled back, certain I had overstepped a line.

My breathing labored and my heart racing, I stared into his eyes once more. Shane brushed his thumb across his bottom lip before gracing mine with the same, soft touch. “Do that again?” he asked, his voice trembling.

This time, it was
not
a kiss filled with uncertainty. His lips met mine with the perfect combination of tenderness and force, hunger and need. When he opened his mouth, sliding his tongue against mine, a low groan rumbled from deep in my chest. Moving closer to the edge of the couch, he wrapped his arms around my waist, letting them travel up and down my back, before diving into the too long strands of hair at the nape of my neck.

In what seemed like a split second, our hands were everywhere—necks, hair, chests. After months of denying my feelings, hell, my own fucking identity, I couldn’t touch enough of him. It was like I was afraid he would vanish if my hands weren’t on him.

We kissed in cycles, slow and erotic before changing gears to hard and passionate, threating to devour each other.

Before we went further, I had to know something, so I pulled away from him. With our foreheads pressed together, the space between us was filled with our laced-with-lust breath. “How do you feel?” I managed to choke out through my staggered breathing.

He took a moment to answer, but when he did, his single-word-response cemented my world. “Alive.”

My face split into a huge grin, unable to contain my own happiness. “So do I.”

But before we could say all of the stuff that obviously needed to be said, before we could even begin to figure out what this all meant, we heard a group of people approaching the pool house and a few others splashing into the pool.

Fear laced through me as my heart pounded in my chest. We both shot up from where we were sitting so quickly, that we almost knocked each other out, banging our heads together.