by Mia Terry
This time it was Ollie’s rowing that made the boat stutter.
“Saying good-bye wasn’t ideal,” he said, because hearing Kris’s words made his chest hurt. “Look if you are going to insist we talk about this, can we at least go somewhere warm.”
Kris agreed, and it wasn’t long before they were dragging the scull up the clubhouse boat ramp. Because they had cut their practice so short, they had the dressing room to themselves, although they didn’t bother with much more than short sentences until they were dressed and ensconced with coffees in front of them at a local café.
Kris waited until the waiter left before arching his eyebrows at Ollie. “Now you’ve got all the worldly comforts, spill?”
“It was a holiday romance. I don’t know why all the drama?” Ollie said the words like he meant that lie. He’d been unable to sleep a full night since he hadn’t had Rhys in his bed, but he hated the loss of face that came with admitting it.
“Well, if you feel that way, I will tell Jai he can add a plus one to Rhys’s wedding invitation. I think we’d all be interested to see what kind of man Rhys dates next. Probably someone hot, I mean, that boy could pull anyone.”
Ollie’s look of pain caused a short laugh from Kris, who continued. “I knew I couldn’t like you as much as I do if you were as much of a douche as you sounded before, so that’s good. Seriously mate, what happened with him?”
“Work’s offered me a promotion if I do some time in the Gulf States,” Ollie admitted.
“What did they say when you turned them down?” Kris asked flatly.
“I accepted their offer,” said Ollie. He could see Kris about to comment and continued. “Come on. You work in the corporate world, you know that when you turn down a promotion, for any reason, you’re dead in the water. Once you’re discounted as not being ambitious, you might as well say good-bye to any advancement.”
“What about when you say, ‘No I’m not interested in working for a vastly prejudiced regime.’ Because as much as I hate being a bossy bastard, it’s really the only response to that question. And if your work would ask you to move somewhere like that, it makes me think the proper response is actually ‘Thank you for the offer, but I’ve decided my talents are best utilized in another work environment.’”
“Oh, come on,” said Ollie. “Yeah, it isn’t ideal, but one reason we are friends is that you understand ambition. You can’t tell me you’d find it easy to turn down a promotion that could change your career.”
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” said Kris, with enough emphasis that Ollie believed him. “Yes, I enjoy being successful, but you are also talking to a man who leaves work on time, twice a week, to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings, something all my managing directors know about. I know that’s not exactly a boon to my career, but I do it because it is both the truth and the right thing for me. And anyway, we are friends because we like each other not because we bloody bond over being good at our jobs. God Ollie, when you talk like that, for the first time, I’m not sure if you’re actually up to be with someone like Rhys. Maybe you aren’t ready for someone like that yet.”
A weird part of Ollie felt he should have been glad someone agreed that he and Rhys made little sense. But Kris’s disappointed voice was secondary to the hurt he felt at Kris dismissing his relationship with Rhys.
His face must have reflected that because Kris reached a hand across the table. “It’s okay. You can still say no.”
Ollie held Kris’s warm grasp as if it was a lifeline. “Even if I could. Even if I did, it actually doesn’t make that much difference with Rhys. He’s in Byron Bay and I’m here, and something tells me you’re not going to get that boy away from the beach.”
Kris’s smile was rueful. “Okay I sort of hate giving this advice, because I’ve already lost Jai from this fair city, but if you’re going to be dead in the water at work why don’t you take a bit of a break and find out what you really like. And if that takes you somewhere like say Byron, well there are worse places in the world to move to in order to explore if a relationship really does have legs.”
“Oh great,” Ollie rolled his eyes. “Then I can be the full rich-boy-with-too-much-money-package when I run off to Byron Bay to find myself.”
“Yeah, well life is so hard when the biggest challenge is that you’ll end up looking like a cliché. Be careful Ollie, you could just have the world’s most over-privileged reason for not being in a relationship that could make you happy.”
Okay, that might be one reason he’d wanted to be friends with Kris since the day they met. Biting honesty and clear-as-hell thinking. Because the truth was Ollie could finally see he had been sounding like a whiny over-privileged baby, and he needed to be called on it.
“I better go,” Kris said, smiling as if he hadn’t made a killer blow. “My bosses might be understanding about the whole I-used-to-be-a-drug-addict thing, but I feel like they would be less than thrilled if I blew off a major client meeting this morning.”
Ollie let Kris go ahead of him on the light rail with sincere thanks and promises of ringing him at the end of the day. He sat back down and ordered another coffee. If he was really thinking of going in there and blowing up his career, he might as well not worry about dirty looks over a late arrival.
As it turned out, blowing up your career took more effort than advertised. Ollie wasn’t sure if it was his last name or his previous five years of sterling work, but even turning down the Gulf promotion didn’t make it any easier to get his boss to accept his resignation. The firm offered him a reduced workload, a pay increase or even a sabbatical. However, as this had come after a significant guilt trip for him not taking the Gulf States opportunity, Ollie actually stood firm and resigned from the whole show. The truth was, he had the means to not work, and when he came to terms with using those means he realized how working for a company that was enriching some pretty awful individuals and regimes was possibly not the principled choice he’d been pretending it was. Maybe living off his trust fund for a while really was the lesser of two evils. Though as a well-paid merchant banker, whose family had paid for a majority of his holidays, his own savings account would last for a rather long time before he would have to dip into family money.
The call to his father was rather more difficult. His father had made all his money through finding a path and sticking to it, so he wasn’t someone who had much truck with equivocation. Luckily, though, despite the bluster, and once he understood how deeply unhappy Ollie had been to be asked to live somewhere where his sexuality was a crime, he came around much more quickly than Ollie had dared hope. This was the distinct advantage of being an adored millennial child. What Ollie’s father couldn’t understand, though, was Ollie’s reluctance to communicate any future plans.
* * *
“Well, it’s obvious,” Kris said, two weeks after their initial conversation, as Ollie sat at his and Billy’s kitchen table. “You’ll move to Byron and convince Rhys that you aren’t a miserable bastard who dumped him for a well-paying soulless job.”
“Unfortunately, he did dump him for a well-paying soulless job, so that could be a hard sell,” Billy added with a smile. He was obviously still getting back at Ollie after he’d dismissed his advice when they were in Byron.
Kris was a bad enough friend to laugh at his boyfriend’s comments, before focusing his attention back on Ollie. “Luckily, you’re good looking, charming, and rich. Also, you’re not a douche most of the time, so I have confidence in your ability to win Rhys over. Don’t forget we spent many an hour seeing with how much adoration that man looked at you.”
Ollie hoped Kris was right. Now it had been three weeks since Ollie had seen Rhys, and he could only hope Rhys still felt that connection. Ollie certainly hadn’t forgotten him. Memories of Rhys were the only thing getting him through the last few weeks, and remembering those moments that were his first time falling in love had him both terrified and euphoric. He was unsure enough of his welcome to put up a protest. �
�Are you sure I should move to Byron? Mightn’t that freak Rhys out if he doesn’t feel the same way about me?”
Kris looked at Billy. “Being so good at matchmaking means we’ll end up with absolutely no friends left in this city.” He turned to Ollie. “You had both feet out the door last time you were with Rhys. This time he deserves to know you are there for the long haul.”
As soon as Kris said the words, Ollie was on his phone looking through the property listings. Kris was right, it was time for Ollie to put himself on the line. Even if Rhys wasn’t sure when he first came back, Ollie owed to it to both Rhys and himself to stay and try to convince him Ollie was worth his trust. Ollie needed to show him that, by committing to being in the area, because he knew it was Rhys’s home and he had no intention of leaving.
Watching Billy and Kris here tonight, as they cooked dinner, would convince anyone that love was worth fighting for. They moved around the kitchen, synchronized—sharing looks, smiles and touches. There was so much charm to their interaction that Ollie had to bite back a pang of loneliness when he watched the casual way Billy dropped a kiss on Kris’s neck as they debated the ingredients of a salad dressing they’d seen made on TV. He’d never had that casual intimacy with a partner. Until Rhys, he hadn’t been able to see a future when that level of knowledge and affection for a partner was possible.
“Worth it then?” Ollie asked Kris, as they said good night on the doorstep. He knew the answer but wanted to see the smile of happiness that flooded Kris’s face.
“Absolutely worth it,” Kris replied. And just like he had predicted that smile was incandescent.
In that minute, Ollie couldn’t wait for the moment when he could see Rhys again. He couldn’t wait for when he’d have the chance to beg for the possibility of starting to build a future.
Chapter 18
It had been four weeks since Rhys last saw Ollie, and you’d expect by now he’d have stopped thinking about the man roughly every ten minutes every day. No, that was a lie. At night, or in the shower with his dick in his hand, he thought about him constantly. He should never have let the bastard sleep in his bed because now there were too many memories imprinted in his room.
At the same time as regretting the memories he allowed to form, he also regretted stupid things like washing his sheets. If he didn’t have the hoodie he had leant to Ollie, he might have forgotten his scent altogether. Each time he gave in to the nostalgia and wore that hoodie to bring him closer, the scent mixed with his own and he worried soon he’d forever lose the smell that was uniquely Ollie.
As much as he resented his seemingly never-ending loop of memories, he was grateful to them. In the space of a week, he had gotten to know fun, funny, complicated Ollie and no matter his current level of pain he couldn’t regret the days spent with the man.
Their last night together kept on passing through his brain. When they’d been having sex, he’d never felt so seen and so wanted. Unfortunately, when Ollie had spoken to him afterward, he’d also never felt so hurt. When he’d been planning a future in his head, thinking about how to manage a long-distance relationship, Ollie had been still thinking his life would go on like normal, ready to turn Rhys into a presumably fond memory.
One of the worst things was that Rhys didn’t feel like Ollie’s future was heading for happiness, he seemed as determined as possible to run his ambition up the flagpole and sacrifice everything else. That might satisfy some people, but in Ollie, Rhys had sensed a loneliness and a need to connect. The path Ollie was heading down wouldn’t bring him what he wanted, and for that Rhys was sad. Rhys had fallen in love and not only was he not going to get the man he wanted, but he feared the man he wanted was choosing the wrong life path.
Pulling himself out of the thoughts that had been plaguing his head for the last month, Rhys reluctantly got out of bed. He had a surf lesson this morning, booked through the website, and needed to meet his new student at the beach.
* * *
When Rhys walked onto the sand and saw the familiar figure in front of him, he knew he’d been had.
“Seriously Ollie,” he said when he got close enough to be heard. “John Robinson? Was John Smith just a little too on the nose?”
He was glad his voice sounded steady because he sure as hell didn’t feel it. Ollie was looking so damn Ollie, beautiful with his slightly wind-ruffled hair and immaculately neat board shorts and polo. His hands were stuffed into his pockets, and his eyes were squinting at the light, Rhys wanted to both hug him and punch him, and neither was a feeling he was comfortable with.
“I’m sorry,” Ollie said, not sounding particularly so. “I needed to see you but turning up on your doorstep didn’t seem right under the circumstances.”
“Don’t tell me that was too creepy for you but tricking me into meeting you for a professional appointment seemed like a great idea.”
“Okay,” Ollie held his hands up to concede the point. “Maybe I’m not thinking super clearly at the moment. I’m nervous, and to be honest I haven’t really slept well for the last few days thinking about this moment.”
Rhys snorted. He hadn’t slept well for the last month trying to get over Ollie, so there was going to be no sympathy on the sleepless night front. “Whatever you need to say, let’s get it over and done with.”
Ollie pointed to the softer sand where a picnic basket was planted between two low beach chairs. “I’ve got some coffee up there and some things to say. Can we sit down for a minute?”
Rhys followed him to the picnic setup and lowered himself carefully into the low chair. “Bloody hell Ollie, did you choose these just so it would take me half an hour to get out of them to run away?”
Ollie laughed, and hearing the sound for the first time in a month made something unravel in Rhys. “I wish I’d been smart enough to be that strategic, but this is pretty much all they had at the camping store yesterday.”
Rhys rolled his eyes. “Such a rich boy. Rather than calling someone up to meet for coffee at a café, you had to have a plan that involves a furniture budget and a prepaid surf lesson. You know these lessons are nonrefundable and I don’t care if you get in the water or not.”
Ollie waved a hand, exactly as Rhys expected he’d do. “Yeah, well, I needed to make sure I’d actually see you. After the way I left it last time, I knew there was a chance you wouldn’t answer my text.”
“Maybe that should have given you a clue,” Rhys said, almost but not quite under his breath. Even a sip of his coffee and realizing Ollie had remembered the way he liked it, couldn’t breach his sarcasm.
“And I deserve that,” Ollie replied, his smile sad. “I was a dickhead when we spoke that last night. Actually, I was a dickhead, full stop. I knew I was falling for you, but my life plans seemed so set in stone, I felt like I couldn’t get off that particular freight train.”
“You know I didn’t want to put an end to all your dreams. Okay maybe except for the ones that put you in danger. I just wanted a chance to be in your life,” Rhys said. He would have said he didn’t want to rake over old ground again, but if they were going there, he wanted a chance to defend his needs. Especially when Ollie sat there looking more strained than he’d ever seen him before. There were possibly a few extra lines near his eyes and a furrow in his brow that Rhys wanted to reach over and smooth out.
“I know,” Ollie said in reply. “It was time though for me to reevaluate what my dreams were. Turns out they weren’t making a shitty regime more money, or even working for my miserable bosses.”
With that statement, Ollie stopped and began rummaging in the picnic basket for something while Rhys sat there and stared at him blankly. Ollie pulled out two bundles wrapped in white grease paper. “Do you want a pastry?” he asked.
“A pastry,” Rhys repeated and then shook his head in exasperation even as he took the bundle offered. “Ollie cut to the chase here and tell me why you’ve come.”
Ollie smiled at his impatience. “And I even got the good pastries
from the French bakers. I was totally up early.” He paused for a moment, before taking a breath on a shaky inhale. “So, I’ve left work and rented a house not all that far from here, and I’m here today to see if there is a chance you’d be interested in some dates with a man who is very sorry for his previous actions.”
“And what if I’m not ready for some dates, or if I’m dating someone else,” Rhys replied, because he was the one who had been left rejected and miserable the last month. He’d been the one left with no power.
He could see the hurt in Ollie’s eyes, but he could also see the determination. “Then I’ll be renting that house and hanging around. Because as much as I don’t deserve it, I’d be hoping you’d change your mind. I know I’m a dickhead, but I would bet on the connection we shared.”
Rhys was hurt, but Ollie was right in saying the connection they shared was strong. That was why Rhys leaned forward and almost brushed his mouth against Ollie, before thinking the better of it and leaning back.
The groan that came from Ollie’s chest was real and frustrated.
“That actually wasn’t punishment,” Rhys told him. “Or at least it wasn’t just a punishment for you. I just thought that maybe I’d think about public indecency because it is possible once we kiss, a month of sexual frustration might spill over.”
He could see the moment of relief in Ollie’s eyes, a relief that maybe Ollie didn’t deserve to have yet, as he made the calculation that Rhys hadn’t been with anyone during the time they’d been apart.
It eased his own moment of discomfort more than a little when Ollie leant forward and said, “Probably a good point. A month with only my hand for company and your lips might make me forget we’re in family-friendly terrain. So, do you want to check out my new house?”
Rhys was almost tempted to see what real estate deal Ollie had managed to conjure up, but not quite tempted enough.
