by Megan Hart
“I can’t do that.” He would never be able to forget it, any of it.
“Please,” Jamie said. “What do I have to do, Alex? I can’t stand it, man. You’re just fucking…gone.”
“I’ve been gone before.”
“Not like this,” Jamie said.
Alex went to the bed, a vast king-sized expanse of white sheets and fluffy pillows. He sat on the edge, facing the television set and the desk and the mini-fridge. He put his hands, loosely linked, between his knees. He studied his feet and the carpet, worn in places where the desk chair’s wheels had rubbed it free of the geometric pattern.
“We’ve both fucked up,” Jamie said when Alex didn’t answer him. “But that doesn’t have to mean it’s just over, does it? All of the years, our friendship, everything? It can’t just be gone. I won’t let it be.”
Jamie sat next to Alex, their thighs touching. He took Alex’s hand. Linked their fingers. Squeezed.
They sat like that for a while, neither speaking. When Jamie shifted to move back on the bed, tugging Alex with him, Alex didn’t protest. Everything in the room had gone misty, like in a dream. He shouldn’t give in to this. More importantly, he shouldn’t let Jamie. Alex would get over this, but Jamie…he’d hold onto it and hate himself when it was over.
“It will change everything,” Alex said as they lay on their sides, heads on matching pillows, facing each other. He slid his hand up Jamie’s arm to rest on his shoulder. One knee cocked to move between Jamie’s. “I can’t lose you.”
“You’re not going to lose me. You could never lose me. I love you.” Jamie said this as easily and confidently as he always did. His voice had edged, though, with something sharp and a little broken. “I love you.”
They clutched each other. There was more than sex in this embrace, this grasping, desperate gripping by them both. Their bodies pressed together. They kissed, yes, but more than that, they buried their faces against each other’s necks. Chests. They burrowed into each other like they were trying to meld.
Alex could feel Jamie’s hardness between them. His own cock was stiff. How could it not be? This was Jamie, his best friend, the first person Alex had ever loved. They’d danced around this desire for decades.
The kissing slowed. Their bodies, still pressed together, relaxed. They held onto each other, but the writhing and grinding stopped. Jamie nudged his head into the space between Alex’s neck and shoulder and kept it there. His shoulders rose and fell with a series of sighs, and his entire body trembled.
Alex put his arms around Jamie. He kissed the top of his friend’s head. They stayed that way long enough for the sun slanting through the window’s slatted blinds to moved across the bed.
“I love you,” Jamie said against Alex’s neck. “I want to do this with you. But not if you don’t want to.”
Alex traced circles on Jamie’s back with a fingertip. “Remember how we used to write out words like this? And try to guess them?”
“Yes.”
He traced a heart on Jamie’s back. That was cheating a little bit, since it wasn’t a letter but a shape. Jamie sighed again. His hand went to Alex’s hip and rested there.
“We aren’t going to run away together, Jamie. We aren’t going to live together, doing this. You think you want this — ”
“I do want it!”
“You don’t want to take me around to your parents’ house and tell them I’m the new Mrs. Kinney. You don’t want to explain to your boss why I’m at your side at the company picnic. You don’t want to hurt Anne, Jamie. You don’t want to lose her or your marriage for anything. Not even this.”
Jamie answered after a hesitation. “I know that.”
“If we do this, it will change everything.”
“Everything changes,” Jamie said.
Alex kissed the top of his head again. “I don’t want us to change, Jamie. I’m sorry it can’t be different. But I don’t want us to change who we are to each other. How we are.”
Sometimes, Alex thought, the words he said in times like this, in these moments of disarray, were the only honest words he ever spoke. He waited for Jamie to argue with him. Maybe, to fight him again. He braced himself for vitriol and fury and disappointment.
Jamie only kissed Alex’s throat and squeezed him hard enough to almost hurt. Then he sat up. He swung his legs over the bed, facing away from Alex. His shoulders hunched. Every line of his body broadcast his sorrow, but his voice was steady when he said, “Okay.”
Alex pushed himself up against the headboard and drew his knees in to his chin. He rested his forehead there. He closed his eyes.
“I came here to do whatever it took to make sure we were good again. That’s all that matters to me,” Jamie said.
Alex looked up to see his friend staring over his shoulder. “I want us to be good again, too.”
“Good.” Jamie’s smile didn’t reach his eyes, but it was still a smile.
For one instant, Alex regretted this choice. He wondered if was always going to do that, try to do the right thing and be sorry for it. He could change it. Jamie’s face told him that. He could reach for his friend and pull him close. Undress him. Kiss him, suck him, fuck him, come with him.
But he could love Jamie without all that, too. It would last longer and be better for both of them. So instead of giving in to desire, Alex submitted to love, that long-term goal, the best thing and only thing he could offer.
Chapter 14
“Come to Cleveland. See the show with me, like old times. That’ll be okay, won’t it?” Jamie looked anxious.
They’d slept together in that king-sized bed, their bodies touching. Alex hadn’t slept without dreams in so long it felt like he’d drowned. He woke in the darkness to the sound of Jamie in the bathroom. He had a flight to catch, leaving early. He needed to get on the shuttle.
But first, this.
“I’ll treat for the tickets, even, how’s that?” Jamie added a smile that seemed a little more genuine.
Alex nodded. “Sure, man. That sounds awesome. But I’m not coming back home for a while. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, sure. That’s fine. I don’t blame you for that.” Jamie paused and moved awkwardly to embrace him. He let go too fast.
Yesterday’s intimacy had been shoved into the background again, but Alex could hardly be upset, could he? He’d been the one to make sure of it. Alex took a step back to put even more distance between them.
“Will she be there?” Alex asked.
“Yeah, sure. Of course she will.” He’d said it sort of like a challenge or a test, and a little like he expected Alex to fail it. His expression didn’t so much as twitch. “Is that cool?”
Alex gave Jamie a long and steady look. “Yeah. It’s cool.”
They parted ways in the hotel lobby with a handshake. No embrace. What had happened had not ruined them, but it had changed them.
Chapter 15
Jamie had told Alex that Anne was going to be at the concert. Alex hadn’t thought to ask him if Jamie had told her. He should have. They’d agreed to meet for dinner and drinks, first. When Alex walked in, it was obvious Anne hadn’t expected him to be there.
“Hey, fucker.” Jamie stood to greet him.
They hugged, slapping backs, knuckling biceps. Alex thought about kissing Jamie on the cheek, but did not. Everything was still too raw, too new. The memory of Jamie’s hard cock against him twisted his insides almost worse than the sight of Anne’s face as she saw him for the first time.
She had not known, and if Alex could have turned on his heel and disappeared without her seeing him, he would have. Her eyes lit, burning, then skated away from his like the sight of him made her sick. Her lips pressed into a thin, grim line. Her expression fucking killed him, a slaughter made more painful because he could tell she thought keeping the secret had been his idea. He took the seat across from her, aware of how close their knees were to brushing, even more acutely aware of how they did not.
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��First round’s on me,” Jamie said. “You can pick up the rest of the tab, moneybags.”
Alex had not had a drink since before the day he’d met Jamie in that airport hotel room. It had not been a conscious decision, this sobriety, but the longer it went, the better it felt. Facing things without the haze of booze or drugs, or hell, even the afterglow that fucking brought wasn’t easy, but he supposed nothing worth doing could be. If he didn’t exactly greet every dawn with a war cry, at least he was doing his best to make some changes in his life. Tonight, though, was not a time to be sober.
“Gin Rickey,” Alex ordered.
Jamie waggled his hand with his little finger extended. “When in doubt, pinky out. Since when did you get to be such a fancy motherfucker?”
“How many have you had already?” Alex shot back.
Jamie laughed and slung a casual arm around Anne’s shoulders. His wife, Alex forced himself to think. To remember. Anne was Jamie’s wife. “A few.”
All through dinner, Alex barely heard a word his old pal Jamie had to say. He was too focused on the way Anne’s hands shook when she picked up her silverware. She wouldn’t look at him, and all he could do was drink in the sight of her. If yearning was flammable, his would have set the table on fire.
By the time they were ready to head over to the concert, he and Jamie were pretty lit. When they crossed the street from the restaurant to the club, Alex automatically reached for Anne’s arm to make sure she didn’t stumble. She didn’t yank it away. She didn’t make a scene. But she pulled away and gave him a disgusted look.
“Hey,” he said, stupid and too drunk for this early in the night, trying to make nice. Wanting desperately for her to not only look at him, but to see him. “It’s all good. We’re good.”
She didn’t answer him.
General admission. A surging crowd. The opening act had already gone through half their set by the time the three of them found a spot toward the back, near the thick black-painted pillars that held up the balcony. There was a little more breathing room here, but not much. Alex was too conscious of her presence so close to him.
“Shots,” Jamie said with a flick of his fingers toward the bar. “Babe, you want anything?”
Anne shook her head. “I’ll stay here.”
Jamie linked his arm through Alex’s as they headed for the bar. He’d been talking nonstop since they sat down at the restaurant, and he wasn’t stopping now. They got in line, and Jamie leaned in to whisper into Alex’s ear.
“I’m glad you’re here.”
Alex bumped Jamie with his hip. The drinks had gone down smooth and easy, the way they almost always did. “Fuck you.”
“Fuck you harder,” Jamie agreed with a grin.
Jamie leaned in. Alex turned his head to avoid the kiss. This wasn’t the kind of place where two dudes could make out, not without fear, but Jamie didn’t seem to notice or care. He had a straight man’s confidence in his invulnerability and his right to do whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted to do it.
Jamie frowned at the rebuff. “Yeah, fuck you, man.”
By that time, they’d reached the bar. Jamie ordered shots of whiskey, because nobody fucking ever did shots of gin, and they both tossed them back with identical grimaces. Jamie’s few seconds of anger seemed to fade with the burn of the liquor, and he was back to grinning and blabbing as they ordered plastic cups with other drinks and pushed back through the crowd to find Anne.
The lights came up when the opening act left the stage, and the bass thumping of a recent club hit started pulsing. The crowd wasn’t drunk enough to start dancing yet. Anne leaned against the pillar with her arms crossed, watching her husband as he spoke so animatedly that he sloshed his drink over his hand and onto the floor.
“And this fucker,” Jamie said abruptly with a grand wave toward Alex, “says he’s not coming home again.”
Startled but fuzzy from the drinks, Alex knew he ought to have a retort to that, but all he could do was look at Anne to see what she thought of that. The slash of colored lights over her face disturbed him. It looked like blood. Her eyes were vast, deep pools of nothing.
“Why would he?” Anne directed the question at her husband, but her gaze had finally rested on Alex’s.
Jamie blathered an answer that neither of them seemed to hear. Alex downed the last of his drink and went to the garbage can to toss it. When he got back, Anne was gone.
“Bathroom,” Jamie said, although Alex hadn’t asked.
“I never said I wasn’t going home again.” Alex had to shout over the sudden surge of the music. “I said not for a while! I never said it would be forever!”
Jamie held a hand up to his ear, acting like he couldn’t hear what Alex was saying. The lights went down, and there was no more time to talk because the band came on with their trademark thrill of guitars. The lead vocalist kicked a high-heeled boot toward the audience as she launched into the first chords of one of their top hits, Deadly Kiss of Poison. Her voice followed a moment later with the lyrics, and the crowd went wild.
Everyone was dancing now. And there in the crowd, Alex found himself next to Anne. Shit. Like it was an accident, except he’d seen her come out of the bathroom and he’d pushed his way through the rest of the people surrounding her to make sure he put himself there.
It would be okay, he told himself. He didn’t need to touch her. He could simply be next to her, behind her, near her; he could watch her watching the band and see the lights dancing across her face, and that was all he had to do.
He could love her, and it would all still be okay.
Alex had loved Jamie since they were kids. He’d loved other women, in his own way, although he knew it was doubtful that any of them would’ve believed they’d ever had anything close to love from him. But Anne, Anne, oh, Anne, it was so different with her and had been from the start. Sex. Lust. Love. Guilt. Everything had become all tangled up inside him, and whatever Alex might have thought about himself, he knew for a fact that he was a selfish prick.
He wanted to touch her.
He moved up behind her and slid a hand into the thickness of her hair. He meant to cup the back of her neck, but instead wrapped his fingers in the fall of auburn curls and tugged her back against his body. She moved. She molded herself to him, her ass pressing sweetly and perfectly into his groin. What they did could barely be called dancing, not with the crowd pressing in from all sides preventing any kind of real movement. Jamie was two feet away, bouncing and throwing up the devil horns, mouthing the lyrics. Alex and Anne moved together for a minute or so, and all he could do was soak her in.
Until she turned, that look of disgust back on her face. She put her fingertips on his chest, over his heart, and shoved. Hard. It hurt. Not just the physical touch, her fingers digging into the meat of his chest, but the way she did it so vehemently. She was pissed, but worse, Alex saw the flash of tears in her eyes and the corners of her mouth turning down. She was crying. He’d done that to her. All he’d wanted was to touch her again, even if it could only be for a minute or two or ten, and instead he’d been a colossal asshole and hurt her.
Again.
“You are so beautiful,” he said, half-hoping she wouldn’t be able to hear him.
“You,” she said, and he had no trouble hearing her even over the music and the cacophony of the crowd. “I don’t trust you.”
There was more drinking after that. Dancing. The band played on. Alex danced with Jamie and by himself, but he gave Anne a wide berth.
When the concert ended and the DJ had stopped spinning, it should have been time to go back to the hotel. Jamie, however, insisted that the three of them stop for pancakes. Two in the morning, and that motherfucker wanted pancakes. Alex didn’t want the night to end, and Anne kept her mouth shut on the subject. A whole bunch of other people had the same idea, it seemed, because the place was crowded. They ended up at a tiny table crammed toward the back.
This time, their knees were definitely touching.
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Jamie ordered for all of them. Too much food. The pancake place specialized in weird combinations, stacks layered with kids’ sugary cereal or candy. Anne picked at hers. Jamie devoured his. Alex took a few bites, hoping he wasn’t going to regret this in a few hours.
There’d been music playing the entire time they were there, but in the background. Nothing Alex had paid attention to. At least, not until this song came on. Anne, who’d been smiling at something Jamie said, stopped smiling. Everything else seemed to stop, too.
It wasn’t a song she and Alex had ever listened to. Too recent for that. But he’d heard it before. Currently popular on the radio, it was a typical breakup song about lost love, not wanting to go through it again, not going back to the person who hurt you again.
“New room,” the vocalist sang. “Same view. Nothing I can do, except stop loving you.”
Jamie didn’t seem to notice the way Anne turned inward, shrinking away from Alex. Her entire body tensed. She stared into the mug of coffee she’d cupped between her hands. Her expression went blank. Sterile. When she looked at him, Alex realized it was better when she wouldn’t. Seeing what he’d done to her was like watching her set herself on fire. He couldn’t stop it; all he could do was watch her burn.
The hotel where they’d all booked rooms was also walking distance from the pancake house. On the way back there, Alex was careful to stay on his own side of the sidewalk. He was sobering up a little, but Jamie was pretty trashed. He put his arm around Alex’s waist on one side, over Anne’s shoulders on the other.
“My favorite people in the whole world. My favorite friend. My favorite wife.”
“You’re going to be a very sad dude in the morning,” Alex told him as the three of them staggered through the lobby and into the elevator.
Twenty minutes after they parted ways to go to their separate rooms, she knocked on his door. He let her in. Of course he did. Some stupid part of him hoped that she was there to fuck or forgive him, and he’d have settled for either.
