by Jerry Cole
“Like I used to be before she died, you mean?”
Gabriel’s expression goes soft, apologetic. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says quietly, leaning forward over the table. “I like seeing you happy. I just didn’t think you would be so soon after the anniversary.” He leans back after that, flipping his menu closed.
Scott sighs, a little twinge of guilt welling up in his chest. He hadn’t meant to neglect Gabriel, even if he’s sure his friend is used to it by now. Still, it’s better late than never. Setting his menu to the side, he clears his throat and threads his fingers together.
“I’ve been a little busy, lately,” he starts, and Gabriel snorts and mutters when are you not. Scott rolls his eyes. “Not like that,” he amends, prompting an eyebrow raise from Gabriel. “I got delivered something by mistake, a book that had an address inside, and I had to return it to the owner.”
“And that took you two weeks?”
“Not exactly. I met the man’s sister and her friend, and they sort of…adopted me, I think? As their friend, I mean.”
Gabriel laughs. “Only you could be such a shut-in that people have to decide to be friends for you.”
“Isn’t that what you did?” Scott counters, with a wry smile.
“Fair enough,” chuckles Gabriel. The waitress comes, pours them both coffee. “So, you make two new friends. Did you ever find the guy you were looking for?”
“That’s the thing. I was planning on just giving the book to the girls and letting them handle it, but apparently there’s some big family drama that made him run off. His sister spent ages just trying to figure out where he lived. I only got to return it just before Thanksgiving.”
Gabriel stretches and sips his coffee. “So, you’ve been roped into having a social life again, then?”
“Come on,” says Scott, huffing good-naturedly. Gabriel doesn’t mean anything by it, Scott knows he doesn’t by the tone of his voice alone. “You know you’re all the social life I need. I’m a textbook hermit.”
“But you still stuck around anyway,” comes Gabriel’s counter. “Something in it for you, then? Got a crush on one of these girls?”
Instantly, Scott makes a face. Frances and Mitchell? Not that they weren’t both attractive. Sure, Scott has gotten to see them more as sisterly figures than anything else in the past handful of weeks. “God no,” he says, “not them. Besides, I think they’ve got their hands full with each other, whatever’s going on there.”
Gabriel laughs, slapping a hand against the table. “So, it’s the boy, then?”
That gets Scott to stop in his tracks, blinking. He’s at a loss for words.
“Who? Evan?” he manages to get out eventually. “I only just met him.”
“And?’
Scott fumbles for something to say. He doesn’t know, really. He’s not blind, he knows Evan is attractive, but something in him balks at the thought of falling into bed with him. It’s not that he’s averse to the idea of sleeping with a man, he’s had his fair share of harmless crushes even while seeing April, and after he had worked up the nerve to tell her about it, they had spent more than a few afternoons playing rounds of who-would-you-date while people-watching at the park or in restaurants. If he thinks about it—really thinks about it, the way he’s been avoiding since knocking on Evan’s door for the first time—he knows somewhere deep down that if he were to fall into bed with Evan, it would mean the end of something.
Of what, exactly, he can’t say. Maybe of his newfound friendship, still fragile in its early days, maybe of something unnamed that he’s been holding onto since April’s death. Maybe nothing at all, but he’d rather not risk it for a roll in the hay with a man he just met.
“And nothing,” he replies eventually, distracting himself with a sip of his coffee. It’s bitter, acrid, and he dumps another shot of creamer in for good measure. “It’s not like that, he’s just… he’s easy to be around, that’s all.”
“Should I be worried?” Gabriel teases, kicking at Scott’s foot under the table. “Am I getting thrown over as official best friend?”
“Never,” says Scott, and he means it.
***
He takes Gabriel to Mitchell’s coffee shop after, completely ignoring the fact that he’s already got two cups of the diner’s best in his system and he really doesn’t need to be any more jittery than he already is. Mitchell smiles when she sees him, lighting up and starting the prep on his drink before he even makes it to the counter.
“Wasn’t expecting you in today,” she says, and Scott is struck for a second by how similar she looks to Evan in that moment, with her head tilted and her bangs falling over her face like Evan’s curls do. “Who’s this?”
“Mitchell, Gabriel. Gabriel, Mitchell,” Scott says, stepping out of the way so Gabriel can reach forward and shake her hand. “This is the sister I was telling you about.”
Mitchell laughs, hardly flushing. All at once, the similarity to Evan falls away. Scott’s never known Mitchell to be shy about anything, but Evan goes red at a moment’s notice. It’s one of the reasons Scott likes to tease him so often. “I’m the sister now? I’ll have to tell Evan he ranks higher than me on your list of friends.” She sticks out her tongue childishly, and Gabriel raises a single, judgmental eyebrow at him.
“Fine then,” Scott retorts. “Gabriel, Mitchell Aldrige, best barista this side of the Atlantic.”
Gabriel raises his eyebrows, and Mitchell smooths down her apron primly. “That’s more like it,” she says, turning up her nose. “Don’t make me charge you for your coffee, now.”
Chapter Nine
He doesn’t get Evan. The girls are open books, friendly and approachable, but with Evan, Scott finds himself more frustrated than anything. Evan’s cheerful demeanor isn’t transparent in the same way that Frances is, not by a long shot. Instead, it’s more like a front that he’s putting on, and Scott can see that, he just can’t do anything about it.
Still, though, Evan surprises him sometimes, managing to worm his way under Scott’s skin while keeping him at arm’s length the whole time.
“What’s your favorite color?” Evan asks one day, his voice tinny and small through the cellphone speaker when Scott picks up. Scott pinches the bridge of his nose and checks the time. Six in the afternoon and he hasn’t eaten in nearly ten hours. With an inward wince, Scott pushes his desk chair away from the monitor and stands up, shaking the numbness from his legs.
“Yellow,” he says. “Did you call me just to ask that?”
“No.” Evan’s voice is affronted, and Scott can picture the way his nose scrunches up in distaste. “Yellow, really?”
Scott shrugs, even though he knows Evan can’t see him. “Like sunshine, I don’t know. It’s pretty.” It was April’s favorite color, he thinks, and stays silent. That’s a topic he doesn’t need to push onto Evan, not quite yet.
“You’re weird, you know that?”
“Like you’re one to talk, calling me out of nowhere to ask what my favorite color is.”
“Mine’s purple, if you’re curious,” Evan says, barreling onwards like a freight train. “Are you free tonight?”
The topic shift is jarring, and the snarky retort Scott had lined up dies on his tongue. He half wants to say no, to tell Evan that it really isn’t a good time, sorry, too much work and not enough time to finish it, but the lie feels hollow the moment he opens his mouth.
“I guess,” he says instead. “Isn’t it a little late to drive down?”
The line clicks dead without a reply, and Scott blinks at his phone in shock for a moment before the sound of a knock against his front door reverberates through the apartment. Dropping the phone, he scrambles out of the chair and to his feet, glad for once that his living room is small enough for him to cross it in a handful of steps.
Evan grins up at him when he opens the door, looking fresh-faced, with a violently purple scarf wrapped tightly around his throat. “Hullo,” he chirps, like it’s perfectly reasonable
that he’s turning up at Scott’s apartment at six PM on a weekday when he lives well over an hour away. “Frances told me you were probably at home.”
Scott hadn’t considered the fact that this might be one outcome of reuniting the two of them. Frances alone had done a good enough job of pushing into his life, dropping by to make sure he was eating and pulling him out of the apartment for fresh air once every few days, but he hadn’t thought of how much more often it would happen with Evan in on it too. He’s not complaining, exactly. he’s always more than happy to spend time with Evan. He’s just finding himself blindsided more and more often by how social he’s being, even if it’s not entirely of his own accord. Evan is still looking up at him, eyes round behind the glasses miraculously perched on the bridge of his nose. Scott has a brief flashback to the way he had tucked the glasses back over Evan’s face once, chastised him for not wearing them more often with hands shoved into the pockets of a pair of jeans that look far too tight for anything to fit into the pockets.
“What,” Scott says, creatively.
“I used to live here, you know!” Evan repeats, like that’s any sort of explanation. “You haven’t eaten yet, have you? I’m starving.”
“Uh.” He’s nailing the conversational skills tonight. “Not since I woke up.”
“Great, I think I’m feeling Indian food tonight. Or Thai. It’s up to you.” He’s like a train at full speed, rambling on faster than Scott can keep up, and all Scott wants is for Evan to just slow down a minute so Scott can figure out why he’s here, of all places. “Aren’t you cold in here? It’s freezing.”
“Um,” Scott repeats, feeling a little bit like he’s just time-skipped ahead to a point where this should make sense, but he’s still trying to catch up. “Thai, I think. Why are you here?”
That makes Evan pause for a second, cocking his head ever so slightly. “Frances said you were getting too caught up in your work again. She doesn’t want you hiding out in here like a hermit.”
You’re one to talk, Scott wants to say, but stops himself. Evan is here, after all, making the effort to drag Scott out of his little cave of solitude and back into the real world. It’s a nice sentiment, even if Evan does blow through his apartment like a hurricane, picking things up off the shelves and putting them back down in different places. Scott watches as he picks his way through the miscellaneous things in his kitchen drawers, sorts through his screwdrivers and old receipts and spare batteries.
“What’s this?” he asks at one point, narrowly avoiding a collision with the overhang of the countertop as he stands back up. He’s holding a camera in his hands, a cheap little disposable film thing that Scott had forgotten even existed.
It’s old, something he probably never bothered to get developed, and he waves it off quickly. “Nothing important, probably,” he says. “Keep it if you want. Food?”
“Food,” Evan agrees, and sticks the camera into one of his coat pockets.
***
It’s like this that Scott finds himself squeezed into the back corner booth of a little mom and pop Thai restaurant, long legs and knobby knees brushed up against Evan’s underneath the too-small table as he tries very hard to stare at his menu and not at the boy in front of him.
He still isn’t quite sure how to hold himself around Evan. Somehow, he always finds himself overstepping his own boundaries, stumbling closer into Evan’s little personal bubble than he means to. Evan never seems to mind, either, and that makes it even easier for Scott to slip up. It’s like Evan has some kind of strange gravitational pull on him. Scott finds it hard to keep himself away from Evan when Evan seems to actually want him around.
It’s easy when Frances and Mitchell are involved, or easier, at least. The first time Scott had dragged Evan along to his weekly coffee meeting, Evan had been too busy trying not to guilt-cry all over his sister in public that Scott barely even had a chance to interact with him. At times like this, though, with Evan close enough that Scott can catch the faint hint of vanilla from his shampoo, Scott is beginning to find it harder and harder to keep Evan at arm’s length.
He isn’t even sure he wants to.
Evan eats like he talks, expressive and excitable, digging into his plate of noodles like he hasn’t eaten a meal in days. Scott finds himself laughing at it, his own plate completely forgotten as he gets caught up in Evan’s attempts to make conversation with a mouthful of food, doubling over wheezing when Evan has to stop to clear his throat after nearly choking.
“You’re nothing like I thought you would be,” he admits halfway through the meal, a glass of water halfway to Evan’s lips and the restaurant chatter around them beginning to dwindle as the clock ticks on into the evening. Evan quirks his head, pauses with his brow furrowed and his lips pulled to the side in confusion.
“What did you think I would be like?”
Scott has to stop and think that over for a moment. “I don’t really know,” he admits finally. “More posh, maybe? Definitely more pretentious.”
A loud wheezing sound reaches Scott’s ears, and it takes him a moment to realize Evan is laughing. “What, me?”
“I don’t know!” Scott says defensively. “You’ve got the whole brooding artist thing going on. Plus, you disappeared on the girls for five years. You’re mysterious too.”
“Mysterious, my ass,” laughs Evan. “I spent my whole life trying not to be as much of a prick as everyone around me wanted me to be. If my family had their way, I’d be just like them, dolled up to the nines and brownnosing every member of London upper society just like my father. Before I came out to America, I didn’t know a single person that wouldn’t rather have me behind museum glass than behind a camera.”
“Except Frances?”
“Except Frances.”
Scott takes a second to think that over, spearing a piece of broccoli on his plate and popping it into his mouth. Evan seems at ease here, but Scott can still catch a hint of that frightened deer look in his expression whenever Evan thinks he isn’t looking. If this is what he’s like now, back with his family and friends, Scott can hardly imagine his posturing around people that want him to be something he so clearly isn’t.
“London upper society, huh?” he asks finally, a feeble attempt to change the subject that Evan latches onto immediately. “What are you, a duke or something?”
Evan scoffs. “God, no. I hope your knowledge of England doesn’t come exclusively from TV dramas.”
It does, but Scott doesn’t say that.
“No, no,” Evan continues, shaking his head. “My father is a businessman. A fairly rich one, too, not that you’d know it with how stingy he can be with his money. I’m… I was set up to inherit.”
“You were?”
Evan looks down, avoids the question as if he hadn’t heard it in the first place. “Excellent chicken, this,” he says eventually, turning back to his plate. Scott takes it as the end of the discussion, but still, curiosity burns low at the back of his mind.
***
They find themselves at Mitchell’s coffee shop eventually, Evan walking through the door and perching himself on one of the tables like he owns the place. Which, really, isn’t too far off the mark. The new barista—a scrawny, gangly boy that looks like he can’t be far out of high school—calls something unintelligible through the door into the back room, and Mitchell comes out a heartbeat later, untying her apron from around her waist.
“Evan,” she says, a wide smile stretching across her face. Scott doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to the way the trace of Evan’s accent slips into her carefully curated American voice every time she talks to him. “You know we’re closing in ten minutes, right?”
Evan makes a face at her, sticking his tongue out like a child, and Scott has to stifle a laugh at the absurdity of it. “Not too late for a coffee, is it?”
“I’m giving you decaf, you animal,” she laughs, and Evan flings a hand over his heart with a gasp of mock-affront. She’s still laughing as she passe
s the order along to the new barista. Her laugh sounds the same as Evan’s, bells over water. Absently, Scott wonders when he became so familiar with the sound of Evan’s laugh.
She comes back with two drinks a moment later, a plain coffee for Evan that he immediately dumps five packets of sweetener into, a white mocha for Scott, same as ever. Belatedly, he realizes Evan’s never seen him order anything at Mitchell’s. He raises an eyebrow at the drink in Scott’s hand.
“Isn’t that a little sweet for you?” he asks as Mitchell is distracted with reorganizing the sugar rack. Scott’s chest does a funny little thump-thump-thump. he hadn’t expected Evan to remember how he took his coffee, after making it only once. Then again, his brain reminds him, he knows how Evan takes his coffee, not that it’s easy to forget someone who drinks pure black sludge overflowing with artificial sweetness.
“She thinks it’s my go to,” he whispers conspiratorially, ignoring the pang in his chest at the memory of why he ordered the drink in the first place. “I never bothered to correct her.”
“You don’t want to?”
Scott chuckles, sheepish. “Don’t tell her, please,” he says, keeping his voice a low whisper. “I wouldn’t want her to feel bad, and it’s good coffee, all things considered.”
When Mitchell turns back around and asks why they both look like they’ve got something to hide, Evan waves her off with a smile, and Scott blames the sudden warmth in his chest on the coffee.
It’s a secret, it’s their secret, and somehow that fills him with an excitement he hadn’t expected to feel in a long time.
Chapter Ten
One afternoon in early December, Scott finds himself at Evan’s again, an unexpected heat wave lifting the temperature just enough that it’s bearable to be outside for more than a few minutes at a time. The sun is out, harsh afternoon light reflecting off the waves in beams, and Evan seems to find it absolutely necessary to run back inside the house for his camera to capture the image. Scott gives him teasing complaints, turning his head this way and that as Evan fumbles with the focus on the camera.
