8. Chris
8
I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the way Seb kissed me in the car. My mind took the kiss and turned it over and over again from every possible angle. And then, when it had done that a million times, it provided me with fantasies about what might have happened if Seb had invited me upstairs.
I imagined his soft lips wrapped around my dick and the way his dark eyes would look as he looked up at me through his long eyelashes. I imagined the way his skin would feel under my fingertips as I explored every inch of him. I had that experience once before, but it was fuzzy through the lens of time and alcohol. This time, it would be clear as day. Something I could savor.
My fantasy played out further, and I could feel my cock thickening in response.
I could not get hard to imaginary scenarios with my fake boyfriend. That was crossing lines, blurring the boundaries we’d set up. We would be breaking up in a few days, and it would be harder to break up with him if my mind was filled with the fantasy ghosts of his moaning as he came apart. At least that part wouldn’t be fully imagined.
Okay, I had to stop.
I had to think about anything else.
My dick throbbed as my mind went rogue, teasing me further with images I did not need. Porn. I should get online and find something completely unrelated to the man I had just kissed, so that way when I got off, I could at least lie to myself and say that it wasn’t about him. I knew that was the right thing to do, the smart thing to do, but I just laid back on the couch and let the fantasies play out. I let myself imagine it was his hand stroking me, his thumb swiping precum off of my slit, his spit mixing with my precum to smooth the glide.
And when I came all over my hand, I imagined that the hand collecting my release was his.
I was so fucked.
Three days later, the kiss was still on my mind. I’d jacked off thinking about Seb at least four more times. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Every time I went to text him that it was time to pull the trigger and end our fake relationship, I found myself wishing for another excuse. Some other party or obligation that could drag this out a little longer.
I wasn’t ready for it to be over.
The realization hit me like freight train.
I thought back to every recent interaction with Seb. I’d spent more time laughing and smiling around him than I had with anyone in a long time. I wanted to get to know him better. I wanted to explore the feelings that I was starting to develop for him, and I couldn’t do that if we called it off. I also didn’t think I could do that if we were just playing pretend. I didn’t think I wanted to fake it anymore.
The problem was I didn’t know if Seb felt the same way.
I wished I could text one of my friends, ask for their advice, but that would require coming clean. I couldn’t stand the idea of that embarrassment. I didn’t want to admit that I’d lied to all of them and pulled an almost stranger into my deception. It looked like I had to do this on my own. I inhaled deeply and as I exhaled, I pulled up my text thread with Seb.
Chris
hey can we talk?
Seb
every man’s favorite words…
Chris
it’s nothing bad. promise.
Seb
call?
Chris
i think it’d be better in person. can i come over?
Seb
you know where i live
I sent back a thumbs up. I didn’t care that I didn’t look my best. I’d already changed out of my work clothes into a pair of basketball shorts and an old tee-shirt. I slid on some flip flops and drove over to Seb’s apartment before I could think about it too much. If I didn’t do it now, I wasn’t going to do it at all. I knew myself well enough to know this, and I wasn’t going to let myself chicken out.
I couldn’t.
If I let this slip away without saying anything, I knew I’d regret it.
Seb answered the door moments after I knocked. I wondered if he was just standing on the other side, waiting to figure out what I was being cagey about. Because in hindsight, not saying what I wanted to talk about was kind of cagey .
“Small talk first?” Seb asked after he’d closed the door behind me.
I followed him to the couch and sat down, angling my body toward him. “Kind of just want to get it out.”
“You realize you don’t have to do a full break up speech, right?” Seb asked with a small laugh.
Of course that’s what he’d think it was about. Because it had been a few days since dinner at his mom’s. We’d reached the expiration date on our arrangement. I swallowed hard. “What if we didn’t. Break up, I mean.” He didn’t say anything. He just stared at me blankly. That was not a good sign. It was never a good sign when a statement like that was met with silence and a blank stare. “Never mind. Of course we should—”
“Is there another thing we were invited to?” he asked, cutting me off.
Because that was the next logical question here, wasn’t it?
“No. I just—” I let out a long breath. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that kiss from the other night. And I realized that I’ve really enjoyed spending time with you. It was stupid.”
“It’s not stupid.” Seb studied me for a few moments. I watched the corner of his lips flick up ever so slightly before he spoke. “So what do you want to do?”
“I want to get to know you. As a person, not just as my fake boyfriend,” I clarified. “I want to know if the kiss was some kind of glitch or if it could be something more.”
Seb nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the kiss either, so let’s do this. Let’s see what happens if we go on a real date. Worst case we break up, right?”
I wasn’t sure that was the worst case, but he was right. We didn’t have a lot to lose by trying, but it felt like we’d have a lot to lose by not trying.
I didn’t stay at Seb’s very long that night. We talked a little longer and started making plans for our date, but then one of his friends called with some kind of crisis. I told him to deal with his friend’s crisis and leave the final date plans to me. I left without a goodbye kiss, and I promised myself that if our real date went half as well as our pretend ones had, I’d get that kiss on Friday.
The rest of the week passed in a uneventful blur. Seb and I texted more than we had in the weeks leading up to our fake dates. The conversations flowed naturally. For the first time, we weren’t asking one another questions about the people we were meant to be convincing of our relationship. We weren’t getting to know the people in our lives through each other. Instead we were getting to know each other .
And everything I learned about him only made me like him that much more.
By the time Friday evening rolled around, I’d built our date up in my head to something much bigger than I should have. It felt like a make it or break it moment, and I was grateful that I was good in times like that. I had always worked well under pressure, if you excluded that morning at the coffee shop when I panicked and pretended Seb was my boyfriend. That might not have been my finest moment, but maybe it was one of those moments that had to happen.
Which was me building this whole thing up a little too much again.
I had to talk myself down, and once again I found myself wishing that I had someone I could talk to about this. I thought about calling my brother and coming clean to him. The worst that would happen with him was relentless teasing, but I didn’t want to deal with that. It was the burden of being the little brother, and I’d given him enough reasons to tease me in my life.
I didn’t want to think about the level of teasing fake boyfriend would earn. It didn’t matter that he’d be easier to talk to about this than any of my friends. Besides, if I told him the truth, then there was a chance that it would leak out to my friends. It could leak to Seb’s mom, who knew at least one of my friends.
So I was on my own. I had to pick out my outfit for myself and hype myself up for this while at the same time talking myself down from inflating it into something bigger than it was. Needless to say, there was a lot of talking to myself that made me very glad that I didn’t know my neighbors. I didn’t know if our walls were thick enough to hide the fact that I was having full blown conversations with myself. If I’d known my neighbors, it might have been embarrassing.
I arrived at Seb’s place five minutes before I was due to pick him up. I texted him that I was downstairs and waited. He came downstairs with some curly haired blonde guy. I watched as he gave him a hug before they separated and Seb walked over to my car. He climbed into the front seat, and I drank in the way he looked. He was wearing a light green button down, and damn did it look good on him.
I was pretty sure that shade of light green was my new favorite color. At least it was better than just green .
We made small talk as we drove toward the restaurant we’d chosen: a quaint place by the beach that he’d once mentioned being a perfect first date location. I had never been, and I’ll admit I was a little wary. It was a seafood heavy restaurant, and I wasn’t big on seafood. But I’d looked at the menu online, and there were a few non-seafood options. I could figure something out, and I really did want to impress Seb on this date.
I was building it up again .
“Are you okay?” Seb asked as we got closer to the restaurant.
“Yeah,” I answered, my voice a little too fast.
He opened his mouth like he wanted to say something, and then he shut it. Then he let out a small sigh and opened it again. “It’s just… your knuckles are really white right now.” I looked down at my hands. He was right. I was holding onto the steering wheel for dear life. “When my best friend, Jonas, gets anxious, he does that. So I ask again, are you okay?”
“I’m nervous,” I admitted. “I want this date to go well, and I may have gotten into my head a little about it.”
“Why?” His blunt question shocked me a little. I was about to answer when he spoke again. “I mean… We’ve gone on a few dates already. Why are you nervous about this one?”
“Because this one is real.” All of our other dates had clear boundaries. We knew what those dates were. They were all a means to an end: putting on a show for my friends or his mom. They didn’t have any stakes beyond the ones we’d assigned to them. They weren’t dates that could lead anywhere real. This one was, and I wanted that.
I felt the weight of his hand on my thigh followed by a light squeeze. It was the same reassurance I’d tried to offer him under the table at his mom’s house. “This one is real,” he agreed, “but it’s just a date. We already know that we can do dates really well. You don’t have to try to impress me, Chris.” I heard his words, but I was having a very hard time believing them. “I mean it. I already like you, remember?”
He did?
That was news to me. Good news, but still news. I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise. If he didn’t like me, I didn’t think we’d be going on a real date. He would have kept the lines between fiction and reality clear.
He also wouldn’t have kissed me in the car.
“Okay.”
“Your knuckles are still saying that it’s not okay.” I glared at him and he laughed. The sound of his laughter relaxed me more than any of the words he’d said. “See, now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Where we’re getting is the restaurant,” I teased as I pulled into the parking lot. I found a spot close to the front, and we went in.
It wasn’t busy, despite the fact that it was a nice Friday evening. We were seated outside with only a ten minute wait. I opened the menu and quickly found something that wasn’t seafood that sounded good. To my delight, it wasn’t chicken tenders. There had been too many times I’d been stuck with chicken tenders at restaurants just because I didn’t like the restaurant’s specialty. It was the pity food of every menu, and there were only so many times I could eat chicken tenders without feeling like a child.
They also weren’t date food .
Our server came and took our orders. I went with the chicken pasta I’d found, and Seb ordered a salmon dish that he looked a little too excited about.
“Do you not like seafood?” he asked once the server had stepped back inside.
“Not really.” Understatement, but I was still trying to impress him.
He looked incredulous. “Then why would you take me to a seafood restaurant?”
That answer was simple. I reached over and squeezed his hand. “Because someone said that this was his dream first date restaurant, and I wanted to impress him.”
Seb rolled his eyes. “Next time, don’t take me to a restaurant you’re not going to like.”
“We don’t know that I won’t like it.”
“You don’t like seafood.”
“The chicken pasta sounded really good.” It was better than chicken tenders by a mile, and I would have taken the chicken tenders if it meant impressing Seb. Wasn’t that the whole point of a date? Impressing the person you liked while you got to know them in hopes that they might like you back?
“Next time, you’re choosing the restaurant,” Seb declared.
That was the second time he’d said next time. That was a good sign, given that we’d only just ordered food. Maybe he was just being an optimist, but something told me that wasn’t the case. It was a combination of the tone, the twinkle in his eyes, and the fact that I had gotten to know him in the time we’d been playing pretend. He could be an optimist, but he didn’t strike me as someone who would say next time if he didn’t mean it.
I relaxed more.
By the time our food came, we’d exhausted all the usual date topics and had moved onto things that felt more intimate. He gave me an update on the crisis he’d had to deal with the day I’d come over. His friend, Matt, had been contacted by an ex-boyfriend who was moving back to town. From what Seb told me, it seemed like they’d had some epic high school romance and Matt had freaked out a little that the guy was coming back into town.
Eli, the curly haired guy he’d been with earlier that night, had come over to talk about it that night too. And to help him get ready for our date.
“He also wanted to try to sneak a peek at you to report back to the other guys, but I shooed him away. Trust me, he’s not the one you want to meet on a first date.”
“Is it a first date though?” I teased.
“First real date,” he amended. “Eli’s cool, but he can be a lot.”
“He wouldn’t have scared me off. Besides, I have met him, remember? ”
I’d met all of his friends very briefly at Goliath that first night. I didn’t really remember anything about them, but I had met them.
“You didn’t meet him. You said hi to him, and I’m not even sure if he was still at the table when we left. If he’d come over to the car, you’d have had to deal with actually meeting Eli, and that’s not for the faint of heart.”
“Why?”
“You know how some people have a filter between their brains and mouths that tell them that something is inappropriate to say?” I nodded. “Eli either wasn’t born with that or figured out a way to completely disengage it. He’s very blunt, and a lot of people don’t appreciate it.”
“I can’t wait to meet him.” I meant it. He sounded like he’d be fun in conversations. “How’s… Jonas, right? He’s the one who moved in with his boyfriend?” The one whose anxiety had given away my own on the drive over.
Seb told me the latest about Jonas and his boyfriend, Silas. Then he asked about my friends, listening as I told him the latest goings on with them. Conversation flowed as we ate, and by the time we’d paid, I didn’t want it to be over.
I suggested a walk along the beach just to prolong our date. There was something romantic about walking with him, hand in hand, as the sun set over the water. I suddenly understood why people put the cliche of long walks on the beach on their dating profiles. I understood it a lot more when he stopped by the water and kissed me. It wasn’t the same tentative kiss that we’d shared in the car.
This kiss had some heat behind it. It was the kind of kiss the original kiss had evolved into in my fantasies, and I had to pull away from it before I did something crazy—like attempt to take things further on a very public beach. The sound he made when the kiss broke and the way he chased my lips made me want to take him home and get him undressed. Which wasn’t very gentlemanly for a first date, but like he said… it wasn’t really our first date.
“Do you want to head back?” Seb asked, pulling me out of my dirty thoughts.
I looked at him and saw the same hunger I was feeling reflected in his eyes. “Yeah,” I exhaled. “My place or yours?”
“Mine’s closer.”