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"What, you mean with that guy who was giving me hassle at the bar?" she asked. She still sounded defensive, and I couldn’t blame her. After the way I had acted, she had every right to be doubtful about what my intentions were here.
"No, about...I wanted to talk about what I said afterward," I confessed. Fuck, this was tough. I wasn’t used to speaking about my feelings like this, it just wasn’t the kind of person I’d ever been, but I knew it was what had to happen. It was the only way I was going to make sense of this.
"Oh, yeah?” she replied, her jaw tightening slightly. "You seemed pretty pissed..."
"Yeah, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have stormed off like that," I replied. "I didn’t mean to be such an asshole."
"Yeah, I didn’t know you’d have such a problem with me talking about you and Avda like that," she remarked. "Unless..."
She let that word hang in the air between us for a long moment. Shit. If I was going to come clean with her, then it had to be now – it had to be this. I couldn’t keep ducking and diving to the point, not without her figuring out there was something seriously wrong.
She leaned in a little closer, seemingly able to sense how doubtful I was about coming clean about this.
"Look, you can talk to me about this if you want, Sasha," she told me quietly. "I know...I know it’s not easy for you guys, talking about what goes on in your heads, it’s not exactly the line of work for that..."
"You can say that again," I agreed, with a sigh. She was right. There was so much macho bullshit in the Bratva world, sometimes, it felt like having a single emotion was going to get you hung out to dry. I tried not to let it get to me too much, but it was hard not to take in at least some of that.
She stared at me, those sweet green eyes on mine – and I felt something shift inside of me. Everything I had been trying to keep back all this time, everything I had been trying to contain, came bubbling to the surface faster than I could control it.
"Do you have feelings for Avda?" she asked me softly, her voice low enough that I knew nobody else would be able to hear her. No, this was just between us, completely and utterly. And yet, still, I wanted nothing more than to shut this down. I had worked so hard, for so long, to try and ignore the desire I felt for men, there was a part of me screaming to just take it back, screaming to walk away from this conversation before it had a chance to go any further.
"It’s not like that," I replied, my voice catching at the back of my throat. She shifted a little closer to me.
"But it...it has been, right?" she asked me. "With guys, I mean?"
My shoulders tensed.
"Yeah."
There it was. Those words, finally out of my mouth. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed almost surreal, putting that out into the world. All the shame, all the doubt, all the questions I’d thrown at myself – all the close friendships I’d had in high school that had tipped over into something more, the real want, the real need. All of it, rising up inside of me, and distilling into this moment, a moment I knew I wasn’t going to be able to take back.
She reached for my hand, giving it a light squeeze. Her touch brought me back down to Earth, grounding me once more.
"You’re so brave for saying that," she murmured to me. I shook my head, and drew my hand away from her.
"No, I’m not," I muttered. "It’s just...it’s just a passing thing-"
"Yeah, maybe," she agreed. "But it might not be. And if it’s not, you know that’s fine too, right?"
I lifted my gaze to look at her. She was being so kind about this, and I couldn’t figure out why, especially after how I had brushed her off the day before.
"Why are you...why are you talking to me about this?" I asked her finally, the words stunted as they escaped my mouth.
"Because I know how hard it can be to keep a secret," she replied, her eyes dropping slightly. "And I...I got the feeling that was why you acted the way you did yesterday. Because you were having a hard time with your feelings. And you were holding something back."
"Shit, you’re good," I joked, and we both laughed, some of the tension lifting at last. I gazed up at her for a moment. I felt so vulnerable, so exposed, but at the same time, so sure she would do nothing to hurt me with this – she wasn’t going to turn this around on me and use it to strike back at me later down the line. She just didn’t hit me as that kind of girl.
"You’ve had these feelings for a long time?" she asked me gently. I nodded.
"Since I was a teenager," I admitted. "I’m still into women, don’t get me wrong. I love women. But I...I felt like there was something I was missing with a lot of my male friendships, you know? Like so many of them were...closer than the ones everyone else seemed to have. Like most guys just saw their friends as friends, but I got jealous about them, I got possessive. I wanted them all to myself. I didn’t want anyone else getting close to them, not like I was..."
"You ever act on it?" she wondered. I shook my head.
"No, never," I replied. "I never got the chance. And, working in this business, it wasn’t as though I could let anyone know about that..."
"No?" she replied, cocking her head with interest.
"Oh, hell, no," I shot back. "They don’t take well to that kind of shit here. It’s old-fashioned, a lot of the Bratva guys come from religious families, and that shit...it stays hidden if it happens at all."
