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I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t mean because there’s something wrong with you. I just got out of a shitty relationship. I’m not eager to jump back in. But I…”
“Need a friend,” he answered for me.
“Exactly.”
Declan ran a hand through his hair, which immediately fell onto his forehead again. “The thing is, I’m not good at that kinda thing. Fucking I can do. Friendship is a whole other situation.”
“What about Parker, Marcus, and Corbin?” I asked, which I probably shouldn’t have. It sounded liked I was jealous or…hell, like I was trying to be to him what they were. We’d also never even had a conversation about me listening to the show. I was surprised when he didn’t call me on it.
“They’re different,” he answered honestly.
Jealousy wrapped its ugly fist around me, twisting up my gut. I’d never had that. Christ, in my whole life, I’d never had the kind of friendship he had with those three men. Just listening to the podcast, it was clear how close they were, even if they spent half of it fighting, but the resolution in those two words—they’re different—nailed home the truth.
“They’ve stuck by me since I was…eleven? Twelve? They forced their way into my life even when I didn’t deserve it. Plus, they don’t give me a choice. I couldn’t get rid of them even if I wanted to.”
“I highly doubt that.”
“No, I assure you, they’re stubborn little assholes.”
“I meant that there was never a time you didn’t deserve it.”
Declan groaned, then rubbed a hand over his face. “You’re infuriating.”
“How?”
“You just are.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, well, you’re not so easy yourself.”
“Not the first time I’ve heard that.”
We were quiet again, just walked barefoot in the sand. He had sexy feet, if I was being honest. Not that I hadn’t seen them before, but they were well proportioned and veiny.
It was killing me not to ask him why he thought there was a time when he didn’t deserve his friends. Why he didn’t think he was good at friendship or, more likely, didn’t want to be. That he didn’t want to let anyone in other than those three men because it was hard to let himself trust anyone else.
How could I have known him this long, and yet there were so few things I actually knew about him?
“I grew up in Idaho…I’m sure you knew that. We were a close-knit family—my parents and my brother and sister and I—still are. Lower-middle class. Not poor, but we definitely weren’t comfortable, but I loved my parents and always knew they loved me. They supported my dream of becoming an actor even though it was out of their wheelhouse and they didn’t understand it. We ate dinner together every night, that kind of thing. I was a teenager when I realized I was gay, and I was scared to death of losing them, that they would find out and walk away from me, so I hid that part of myself. I felt like a liar, a fraud…”
“You weren’t. You were surviving the best you could. Many of us didn’t get to be our authentic selves when we were young. We didn’t get to be honest, and that’s fucking shitty. It’s nothing you should feel guilty about.”
“Yeah, I know, but I still feel bad about it sometimes. They know now, clearly, and they’re great. We’ve dealt with it. What I mean is…it was hard for me to truly get close to people because I was keeping that part of myself hidden. Then I moved here and did the same. You were the first person I told that wasn’t a face on an app. You were the first person to know that part of me. I don’t mean that in a creepy, I-really-am-stalking-you kind of way, but it’s true. And you kept my secret. Then it was all about my career and getting swept up into this world that was so different from where I was from, and people who were so different from what I was used to, and trying to find my place in that, trying to fit in with them. Now I look back and realize I kept myself at arm’s length even then. It’s sobering that I have so very few people I consider friends, and one of them was secretly fucking my boyfriend.”
I was quiet for a moment, trying to sort through my thoughts, and Declan gave me that time.
“I can’t imagine telling any of my so-called friends that I don’t know if I want to act anymore. That I feel like I’m lost in the life I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember.”
“You just told me.”
“That’s my point. I’m trying to understand it, if it’s just because I was able to trust you from the start. That once I made it big there weren’t any articles out there from the guy who took Sebastian Cole’s virginity and—”
