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It scared me. Our friendship was sacred, the thing I cherished most in the world, and I’d never wanted to risk it, so I kept my mouth shut and my thoughts to myself.
My hands were unsteady as shit, so when Devon touched my shoulder and gently took the tools from me, I let him. I lit a cigarette with a blowtorch, wishing Xavi were around to give me gum instead. He hadn’t come home last night, and he didn’t show up for work this morning, and now I didn’t know how to fucking function in a world where we didn’t get along.
All my days started with Xavi. Coffee and bullshit over the counter, sometimes boners we tried but failed to hide. We worked together, lived together, did everything together, and the past eight hours without him were a sign that I was codependent on him without even realizing it. A wake-up call of emptiness I didn’t want.
But it was my fault. Who the fuck was I to blow up on him for feeling the exact same way I’d been feeling? I’d never thought he’d reciprocate, and I couldn’t even take the time to be happy about it because I’d messed it up so badly.I failed, just like I failed at everything.
Deep down, I knew the only future I was entitled to was the same fate as my dad. I might not have tried as hard as Devon not to become him, but when push came to shove last night, I threw Xavi on his ass like he wasn’t the most important person in my life. I disrespected him for being honest. Such a Jim Sawyer move that it made me dry heave around the filter of my cigarette.
“Talk, asshole,” Devon said, standing to wipe his greasy hands on his jeans. “You don’t usually shut up, and this is throwing me off so hard.” He opened the bay doors, letting in all the sunlight when I just wanted to hide in the dark like a sad vampire. Devon tilted his head outside, and I followed him with my smoke.
He lit one and sat on the top of a picnic table, squinting at me.I put on my sunglasses to hide my feelings.
“Your dumbass gene is genetic because I was a dumbass.” I hated myself for it.
“Dumbass how?”
“He said he had a thing for me.”
Devon’s eyes widened and he muttered something about a bet, but then he squinted again because of the sun. “A thing? That’s good, right? Weren’t you waiting to confess that shit to him?”
Yeah, and that was the fucked-up part. He beat me to it. He said it like it was a natural thing to say, when in my reality, it was the biggest deal of my life.
“I don’t think he meant it like I mean it.” Because maybe he just meant he wanted to get sexy and fool around or something. Up until he’d said it, I half wondered if that was all I wanted, too. But the truth hit me in the chest—it was more than that. It was a gut instinct that Xavi was my person, and the turmoil I had felt by realizing it had been swept away by him being so calm about it.
“Wait.” Devon stood up. “Don’t tell me you flipped out on him, Nate!You?You and Xavi don’t flip out!”
I turned my back on him because I already felt like a piece of shit about it. Yeah, hair-trigger reactions, anger, and violence weren’t things I did when it came to Xavi. That wasn’t how we communicated with each other. I couldn’t even remember a time when I’d yelled at Xavi unless it was during a drunken ramble or because of excitement. Not rage. Not shame. Not guilt.
Devon walked up and grabbed my shoulder. “Fix this.”
What an asshole. After all the meddling, deep conversations about his feelings for Maddox, and the times I’d literally picked him up off the floor, that was all the advice he could give me?Fix this?Not even my brother took me seriously.
“Yeah. Thanks for the fucking TED talk.” I took my smoke and walked away, but Devon caught up.Didn’t even know what a TED talk was.
“That’s not… just stop. Jesus. You’re worse than I was.”
Not even close.
“I don’t know how to help you,” he admitted.
“Yeah, I figured.”
“It’s not like that. It’s like… all my life, you and Xavi were the most solid thing I knew. I don’t know how to fix you guys because you’ve never been broken before. So, let’s talk it through. How do you guys get out of a fight? Wait, have you ever been in a fight?”
No, we’d never fought like this.
We didn’t fight, and we didn’t make up. We were those two idiots who got thrown into shitty situations, and if we couldn’t laugh them off, we worked them out together. I couldn’t laugh this off. After his phone died, I’d tried to calm down, get my shit together, and look at this as good news. It was what I’d wanted, right? But as soon as he walked in the door, all my pent-up worry, shame for having hidden feelings for him, and the confusion of it all came at me hard, and I snapped at him. It was too late to come back from that, so I’d have to own it and try to explain that I’d just been feeling dumb, but I didn’t know how to start that conversation.
“You know what you two are masters at?” Devon asked, and I already knew what he was going to say. “Talking. You chatty fucks never stop, so go. Go to our place and make him talk.”
“We have work.”
“Oh?” Devon scoffed at me. “Can’t sell the pieces of a broken heart, Nate.” He grinned.
Fuck me for being so good at giving advice that it came back to haunt me.
* * *
