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“Back then?” I cut him off. “You … You seriously thought we were a thing back then?”
He stares at me like I’m the biggest idiot in the world. “Dude. Everyone thought it.”
I can’t seem to close my mouth. My throat’s gone all dry.
“No fuckin’ way,” I spit back at him, glassy-eyed. “You’re just dicking with me. No one was thinking that. It was just you because you’re a dumbass.”
Parker lets out another tight-throated dry chuckle. “Wish I could say that, but … I’ve had whole conversations. It definitely wasn’t just me. I mean, you two were fucking glued to each other. And I don’t mean like … just best friends or buddies. Even your ex-girlfriends talked about you guys. Like, it was a thing. We all thought it. We all came to terms with it. We all were okay with it.”
“Okay with it?” I spit at him incredulously. “There wasn’t a thing to be ‘okay’ with. Nothing happened between us.”
“Alright! Okay! No big deal.”
I have about a hundred and one furious thoughts charging through my brain, all of them questioning what my teammates were thinking all those years. They thought we were both gay? They thought we were a couple?
“It doesn’t make sense,” I hear myself saying. “If you guys all thought that, why didn’t any of you bring it up? We had girlfriends over the years. None of them even—”
Then I’m struck by something an ex of mine from sophomore year actually did say to me, something that I let roll right off my back and didn’t think much of at the time. Jess. She had curly blonde hair and was rich—annoyingly rich—and when I dumped her two weeks before the homecoming dance, she spat these words at me: “Maybe you could’ve given me more notice than just two weeks so I can find myself a real date for the dance. Enjoy going with your butt buddy Ryan. Hope you’re happy together.”
It never meant anything more than just a last jab at me before we never spoke to each other again. Now, the words come back to me as sharp as glass, cutting me now—a decade later—where they never cut me then.
Is that all that was said to me? Is there more that I’m not yet remembering? Did everyone think that about us the whole time?
“Look, I didn’t mean … to start a whole thing,” Parker tells me, his voice softer. “I … I honestly thought it was no big deal.”
“So you’ve thought this about me?” I’m obsessed now. I need to know everything. I need his point of view. “All these years?”
“Dude. You never married or even had a serious girlfriend.”
“So?”
“So it makes people think. I’ve always … wondered.”
I shake my head and stare off, growing increasingly numb to the whole thing. I can’t even process what all of this means. I feel like someone just pulled the rug out from under me, and then I discovered there’s not even any floor beneath it. I’m freefalling without a parachute.
“Seriously,” Parker goes on. “It’s no big deal. I don’t care at all either way. Gay, not gay. A thing, not a thing. It didn’t bother me then, doesn’t bother me now.”
I’m chewing on my lip and trying not to scowl. I realize, perhaps a bit too late, that I shouldn’t be all pissed and angry. Acting mad about this whole thing is a rather odd and hypocritical reaction to be having, considering how many jackasses I’ve beaten up my whole childhood who ever bullied—or even tried to bully—my best buddy Ryan, whom I care deeply about.
And what’s the big deal, anyway? I always figured that Ryan was gay. Did I really give everyone so much credit to assume that it’s okay for a straight guy and a gay guy to be best friends without people jumping to conclusions?
I’m the one who’s been naïve. Of course they’d assume.
“Anyway, Lindsey’s about to get back soon,” notes Parker as he rises from his chair, “so I’d probably better clean up the plastic for the day and get it all, uh, rolled up.”
“I can help,” I tell him, standing up and heading inside to start the clean-up.
Everything is all put up, and I’m back in my truck in twenty minutes. But I don’t leave just yet. I’m staring at the wheel with thoughts tumbling around my brain like clothes in a dryer.
Like a baseball uniform in a dryer.
Tumbling. Tumbling. Tumbling.
I finally crank the truck into drive and pull away from his house, then meander my way under the speed limit as I give my thoughts some time to sift down into something I can grasp.
Something like: it really doesn’t matter if everyone thought I was gay.
Something like: who gives a shit if Ryan and I were perceived as some gay power couple back then.
