“Yeah, I’m bad for that. I’m—” He winces.
“You were about to apologize again, weren’t you?”
He nods sheepishly. “Like I said, I’m bad for that.”
“Why do you do it?”
He shrugs. “Habit, mostly. I learned pretty young that apologizing for stuff that isn’t my fault or doesn’t really need an apology is an easy way to avoid confrontation and de-escalate things.”
“It also shifts responsibility onto you,” I point out. “Every time you apologize for something someone else does, you’re taking ownership of their actions instead of letting them deal with the consequences themselves.”
“Yeah, I know.” He absently toys with one of the drawstrings on his hoodie. “But everything always ends up being my fault anyway, so why not avoid the yelling and just nip things in thebud?” He furrows his brow. “Is that how it’s said? Or is it nip it in the butt?”
“It’s bud,” I tell him. “With a D.”
“Does that make more sense than saying nip it in the butt?” He looks so confused it’s kind of adorable. “I mean, do either of those actually make sense? Like, nip means bite, right? So you’re biting something’s bud? But then again, saying that you’rebitingsomething’s butt doesn’t make it any better. That actually opens up a whole other can of worms.” He shakes his head. “Great, now I’m also wondering what cans of worms people are talking about when they say that.”
“Nip it in the bud just means to suppress or destroy something early,” I tell him, a smile tipping the corners of my lips at how confused he looks. “Before it has a chance to take hold and become a problem. Like cutting off the bud of a flower before it can bloom. And the can of worms thing just means that whatever is about to happen is going to be complex and messy, like how fishermen used to get literal cans of worms and they’d be all tangled up and in a big clump when they opened them.”
“And now I have that visual in my head. Gross.” He wrinkles his nose. “Idioms are weird.”
“They are.”
“How did you know what they mean?” he asks. “I feel like most people just say these things and have no idea where they came from.”
“My dad and I have this thing where we do trivia and try to outdo each other with our knowledge of random facts,” I tell him. “He’s got history down, but I can usually get him when it comes to language since English isn’t his first language.”
“It’s not?” he asks, looking surprised.
“He spoke Italian at home. He learned English at the same time and spoke it at school and with everyone else, so he’s fluentin both, but he doesn’t really have a deep understanding of how English evolved because it was technically his second language.”
“Do you speak Italian?”
I nod.
“Are you fluent?”
“The people I speak to in Italian think so,” I say in Italian.
“I know people say that French is the sexiest language, but it has nothing on Italian.” His cheeks flame bright pink, but he doesn’t look away or drop his gaze like he usually does when he says something that could be interpreted as flirty.
I have no idea if West knows that I’m not straight. I don’t purposely hide it, and I’ll tell someone if they ask me point-blank, but I don’t advertise it. And since no one at school really talks about my non-existent sex life, and they either assume I’m straight and just picky as fuck, or I’m ace like Rath.
And no one has ever talked about West not being straight because, for the most part, he’s really good at hiding his attraction to men. From what I’ve seen over the years, he only ever seems to drop his guard around me.
I don’t know if that’s because I’ve been messing with him and doing Schrödinger’s flirting with him since freshman year, or if there’s something about me in particular that disrupts his usual facade, but I don’t hate it.
In fact, I fucking love that I’m the only guy he can’t keep up his charade with, same with knowing I affect him so much he can’t control his reactions when he’s become an expert at pretending when he’s with others.
“So, if I wanted to seduce you, all I’d have to do is read my to-do list in Italian and you’d melt into a puddle at my feet?” I ask teasingly.
“Your to-do list, the instructions for how to use a highlighter. Hell, you could read the phone book, and I’d melt into a puddle.”He lets out a breathy laugh as his cheeks flush soft pink. “Not that you needed to know any of that.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to use my powers for good and not evil,” I tell him.
“I appreciate that.”
Silence stretches between us, and he pulls his phone out of his hoodie pocket and flips it around in his hand in a move that’s clearly a way to fidget. “So, I assume you’ve heard what everyone on campus is saying?” he asks, trying, and failing, to sound casual.
