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I carefully think over my words. Then I start to speak while staring at my bad foot. “I … have a situation. With my best friend. It’s my fault. But I don’t know what to do.”
“You mean with Bobby?”
“Yeah, that’s the guy. Uh, and also, I wanna preface this by saying that I’m not gay.”
Trey blinks. That threw him off. “A-Alright. Noted.”
“I love gay dudes. Obviously. I’m talkin’ to you. There’s my big brother. My best friend’s Bobby. It ain’t nothin’ like that. It’s just … It’s just that I need to preface what I’m about to say.”
“That’s fine.”
Trey’s the most patient person in the damned world. This is exactly what I needed. “Alright.” I slap my thighs, steeling myself, then bring my eyes up from my feet to meet Trey’s. “So I kissed Bobby last weekend.”
Trey lifts his eyebrows in reaction. When I don’t say anything more, he inclines his head toward me. “Okay. And …?”
“I took him to a big gay nightclub. It was a bad idea. But I just wanted to, like, get Bobby out there in the world, find him a guy, make him happy, y’know? And I failed. So later that night in the hotel room, I … kissed him.”
Trey’s facial expression hasn’t changed. At all. “Okay.”
“The thing is, I think it made him go all weird. Now I made a deal with him not to kiss him anymore. And he looked relieved, I think. Fuck knows why. I mean, I’d like kissing me, but whatever, if he isn’t into it, fine. The thing is, he’s kinda cold shouldering me. Or … well, it’s more like a warm shoulder. I mean, he’s just … he’s not prioritizing our time together anymore. He’s always busy.”
Trey bites his lip in thought for a second, then asks, “He got a job down at the Cinema, didn’t he? Isn’t he just busy with that?”
“Well, yeah, but …” I stare at my foot again. “I mean, I know the difference between him being busy at work and …” I let out a sigh and stare hard at Trey. “Look, I just gotta know if I went and did something super wrong by kissing him.”
Trey shrugs. “Well, I guess that depends on a lot of factors.”
“Such as?”
“Such as, how did the kiss make you feel?”
“Good. It made me feel really good. I felt like I was his hero for a second, saving him from … his own loneliness, or something.”
“Alright. And how do you think the kiss made him feel?”
I take a second to consider it. “Uh … good at first, I think.”
“At first?”
“Well, then he got all weird.” I glance off at the closed door, my mind wandering to that night in the hotel room, then when I forced a few more kisses on him in his bedroom Sunday night. “I mean … I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t a good thing for him.”
“Why do you think it wasn’t a good thing for him?”
“I …” A stroke of worry dances through my body. “I dunno.”
“Well, let’s put you in his shoes for a second,” suggests Trey, his voice light and patient. “If you were gay, and your straight best friend kissed you …”
I snort. “Shoot, if I was best friends with a good-lookin’ guy, and I was gay and single for as long as Bobby’s been single, I’d …” My voice breaks. “I’d probably … have feelings for him.”
“You think Bobby has feelings for you?”
Now I’m staring at nothing, those words of Trey’s striking me the hardest of all, that seemingly innocent question.
“I mean …” I start to say. There’s no way Bobby has feelings for me. Not in that way. We’re like brothers. “I mean, no. No, because …” Because why? Why wouldn’t he have feelings for me? It’s obvious. “No. I don’t think he …” It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
Doesn’t it?
“I’m not trying to say anything,” insists Trey. “I’m just—”
“You’re asking me questions. And I’m … I’m answering them. And …” Is that why he’s gotten all weird? He has feelings for me, I went and kissed him, and now he’s hurt? “And I think what you’re asking me is …” Shit. “… makin’ a whole lotta sense all of a sudden.”
Trey winces. “I’m just trying to help, like you wanted me to.”
“I know.” I stare down at my lap, at a complete loss.
I hear Trey make a short sigh. He shifts in the doctor’s stool, then gently rolls up next to me. “I can’t say I got the answers, but I might suggest—as a gay man himself who has had his fair share of crushes on straight guys his whole life—that perhaps giving Bobby his space to figure things out is just what you both need.”
“He’s gotten his space,” I throw back. “Almost three days of it. What the heck else does he need to get back to normal?”
