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They didn’t talk about it. There was no need. They both knew Trevor would be leaving soon. They both knew it wasn’t the kind of thing you mentioned casually to the other guys on the team.
Then one day after practice Trevor had shot him a look and he’d stayed and when they’d come together there was something more in it. More than mouths and hands and jerking each other off because it felt so, so good.
Something like a friendship of the flesh.
Before they’d parted, Charlie had kissed Trevor’s lips for no reason other than that he wanted to, and Trevor had squeezed his hand. They’d smiled shyly at each other and they’d both looked back when they were walking away.
That had made Charlie think. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Trevor after that. About how Trevor made him feel things he’d never felt before. And want to feel things he’d never wanted to feel before.
Trevor’s mother had gotten transferred, as was inevitable, and his family had moved a week before Charlie’s eighteenth birthday. At the time, Charlie had been disappointed because it would’ve been nice to have Trevor there for his birthday. He imagined Trevor’s kisses given to him like gifts—more notable for being proffered on a special occasion.
But his disappointment—and any chance he might’ve had to miss Trevor—had been obliterated by his parents’ deaths three days later.
Charlie never had the option to not think about things again.
Now, Rye’s kiss—hell, Rye’s very presence—was making him think about desires and questions that had lain dormant for twenty years. Things he hadn’t thought about because he’d been so damn busy thinking about everything—and everyone—else.
Rye’s kiss had stirred his memories and his desire. But it was what Rye said that stoked it. Rye wasn’t sorry he’d kissed Charlie. He’d wanted to do it. And so he had.
What might it be like to simply desire something, and then let himself have it?
* * *
“Let’s go over what it will take to get your house built,” Charlie said. He’d just showered after a run and found Rye in the kitchen.
Rye took a seat next to him at the table and Charlie pulled a notepad toward him.
“Now, this is just going to be an estimate, but it is based on work I’ve done for other people and the cost of the work I’ve done to my own house.”
Wary as a stray cat, Rye nodded.
Charlie made the list. Lumber, drywall, roofing, insulation, flooring, cabinetry. He wrote numbers next to each, approximating them without labor, except for plumbing and electric, which Charlie knew enough to fix but not to install.
“This is bare bones,” he said, explaining down the list. “It doesn’t include stuff like paint or bathroom tile or carpet. This is just to get a solid roof over your head and walls underneath them.”
“Yeah good plan, ceiling on top of the walls, I like it,” Rye muttered, eyes flickering over the numbers.
Charlie wrote the total estimate at the bottom of the list and circled it. It was best to show people things in black-and-white whenever possible.
“Seventy...um...seventy thousand.” Rye’s voice was a dry scrape. “Dollars. That’s...that’s in dollars?”
“It’s an estimate,” Charlie reiterated. “But yeah. I’d say that’s about what you’re looking at for materials, permits, inspections, and someone to do plumbing and electric.”
“I’m... I don’t...” Rye looked ill. “I had no idea it was anywhere near... How?”
“Well,” Charlie began. This was why you wrote things out for people. “I can get the lumber at something of a discount because of the store, but—”
Rye shook his head and pushed the notepad away, like he could banish the numbers themselves.
“How can I do this?” he choked out. “When you said we’d figure it out, I thought you meant like ten grand, Charlie. I don’t have a job. I don’t...fuck!”
Rye pushed back from the table and started pacing.
“God, I thought I had a chance here, man. I thought maybe I could finally have a place that I wouldn’t share with a hundred housemates. That I wouldn’t get fucking evicted from or priced out of, but of course it was too good to be true that some fairy godfather would just materialize and give me a house. God, I’m so stupid!”
Charlie realized he’d made a fundamental miscalculation. He’d known that Rye didn’t know what it took to build a house; but it hadn’t occurred to him how far off Rye was in his estimations. For Rye to have left Seattle and come all the way to Garnet Run, where he didn’t know a soul, he’d’ve had to believe there was a house waiting for him that was, well, habitable. If he’d lived in rental apartments, why would he know how much it cost to buy lumber or repair plumbing?
“You could get a loan for the cost of the renovation,” Charlie began.
