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Charlie’s heart started to race and his fingertips began to buzz and tingle. He had never said this out loud before.
“I don’t... I don’t know,” he croaked.
“It really is. It’s all fine, I promise.”
The shame welled up from his guts to his throat, choking him.
“No, I... I don’t know because I’ve never... I haven’t... I haven’t been with anyone. Well, one teenage fumbling. But other than that.”
Charlie broke off and squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to disappear. He wanted to go back to the moment before he had confessed that. To a moment when Rye still thought he was normal.
After moments of silence, he darted a glance at Rye’s face, braced for laughter or shock, but Rye just looked like Rye. When he spoke, he sounded just like he usually did.
“Do you mean you’ve never had sex with anyone, or you’ve never dated anyone?”
“I...both.”
Charlie swallowed acid. He scratched the edge of the couch cushion and heard the soft thlump of Jane’s paws hitting the ground. Ten seconds later she was in his lap, her black and gray fur damp from a recent cleaning. He sank his fingers into her fur and felt the vibration of her purr.
“Why?”
Rye’s question was simple and neutral, and though Charlie searched for the judgment in it, he didn’t find any.
It was a question that had once plagued Charlie, then faded, slowly, into simple fact.
“Mom and Dad died two days before my eighteenth birthday. I was a high school student on the football team who’d never fried an egg or cashed a check. By the time they were buried, I was legally an adult. I was Jack’s guardian, I had a mortgage, and I owned a business that was in the red.”
Those first six months, Charlie had woken every night around three in the morning, gasping for breath, and had felt all over again the grief of remembrance slam into his chest. He’d lie there, in his childhood bed—because even though they were gone, there was no way he could sleep in his parents’ room—no longer a child, but with no clue how to be an adult. A guardian. A business owner.
“It took me years to get everything together. A year before I could sleep without waking up from nightmares every single night. Five years until Jack left for college. Six until Matheson’s Hardware was firmly in the black, but by then I was taking any extra work I could to help Jack pay for school on top of everything else.
“By then, all the friends I’d had in high school were long gone. Hell, they’d been gone within a month. I don’t blame them. We were stupid kids. We played ball together. What did they owe me?”
For a while, he’d expected them to come. Expected Martin and Tom to stop by, or call, or...whatever. But within the month it had become clear how shallow those relationships were; what little capacity any of the guys on the team had to voluntarily march into Charlie’s grief with him. He’d forgiven them. He couldn’t say with certainty that he’d have behaved any different.
But it had still hurt. Charlie had never spent much time alone before that, always surrounded by the guys on the team and their classmates who hung around the edges. And suddenly he was more than alone. He was alone and full up with all these feelings he had no idea what to do with. Fear and anger and impatience and yeah, resentment.
He resented Jack because Jack had him. He resented his parents because they didn’t have to do any of the work. He resented his father for not being better at business. And he resented every single friend he’d ever had for being able to walk away from him when he himself was firmly stuck in the bog that was his new life.
“Fuck,” Rye said.
“After that I just kinda fell into a pattern. There wasn’t really time to think about that kind of stuff. Romance stuff. Sex stuff. It wasn’t...”
Charlie shook his head.
“Did you ever meet people you wanted to date?”
Charlie shrugged. Customers had tried to set him up with their daughters, sisters, cousins, and granddaughters often. He’d always demurred.
And the few times he had noticed someone he found attractive, it had made him think of Trevor, which had made him think of his parents dying, which...was a major anaphrodisiac.
Rye was worrying his lower lip and considering Charlie intently. Beautiful Rye. Full-of-life Rye who’d probably never been alone a night in his life if he didn’t want to be. Rye who knew what he liked. Who asked for it. Who could pick up and move a thousand miles with nothing but his cat and the promise of a new adventure.
Charlie admired him. Charlie envied him. And Charlie was viciously, gut-churningly intimidated by him. At least when it came to sex.
