Chapter Twenty
I might not have had the experience with relationships that Flynn boasted, but I still knew when a guy was flirting with me.
Not that Flynn was laying it on thick. Occasional glances over the top of his menu, his expression knowing; the smile, which suggested he couldn’t look at me without thinking of the fact that we’d just had sex.
I hid my own grin behind the rim of my coffee mug. Letting him see it felt like I’d have spoiled the game, somehow.
“So, why this place?”
He looked around us. “All-day breakfasts, the food is good... and it doesn’t feel...” A shrug. “Pretentious, I guess.”
“It feels like somewhere back home.”
“Maybe that’s the real reason, then,” Flynn conceded.
I smiled at the middle-aged waitress who topped up my coffee. Waited, until she’d moved on to the next table, before I carried on. “You’re allowed to miss it, you know. It’s not all... difficult.”
He made a face, too many emotions in there to tease out any one sentiment. “I know. And it’s not like I hate it, or the people who live there.”
“Oh, good.”
Flynn rolled his eyes. “Present company excepted, obviously. You’re the worst.”
“Truly terrible,” I agreed, still smirking.
He twisted his mug on the table, watching the ripples inside. “It’s just, well, you’ve seen how they are, when I come back.”
“Your parents?”
A nod. “It’s great that they’re proud of me, but most of the time it feels like they’re actually proud of some guy called Flynn that I don’t really know. Certainly not the one I feel like myself.”
“You could try telling them the truth? That you’re not happy, even if you look like you’re doing well.”
“Going back now, it’d feel like accepting defeat.” He made an unhappy face, like the very thought of it was sour. “Like saying I tried, and I failed, and I had to come scurrying back with my tail between my legs.”
“Because that’s where all the losers live.” I couldn’t quite keep the acid edge from my voice.
Flynn looked up. “You know I don’t think that. I’m not talking about anyone else but myself, Oli. Come on.”
I knew he wasn’t, knew I was being unfair - intentionally misinterpreting his words - only the frustration wouldn’t die down. Like my brain needed to at least attempt its old defenses, convince itself I wasn’t totally adrift in the way it felt when I was with him.
“Staying there, living there, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure.”
His stare sharpened. “I never said it did.”
Frustrated, at him, but just as much at myself, I turned away. The silence stretched out.
“Why are you so angry at me?”
I sucked in a breath, to say something sarcastic and bitter. Only there was something in his tone which gnawed at me, which stopped the sharp words in my throat.
“Do you think we’d have dated; if you’d stuck around, I mean?”
I wasn’t sure where my question came from, why my brain had retreated there after deciding it couldn’t give in to knee-jerk resentment.
“Because we were the only two gay guys in town, you mean?” Flynn raised an eyebrow.
I shook my head. “I was working under the assumption that we actually found each other attractive. Not just convenient. But, if I’m wrong...”
“You’re not,” he said, quickly. “And I don’t know. It would’ve required both of us pulling our respective heads out of our asses, first.”
“You mean like actually talking, rather than just glowering at each other?”
He chuckled. “You do most of the glowering, I think. I was referring more to the fact that we’d have actually needed to tell each other we liked guys.”
“Oh, that.” I knew he wasn’t wrong, which was the most annoying part. “I mean, can you imagine what people would say? If we’d started dating.”
“Would it matter?” The look on Flynn’s face suggested the question was sincere.
“Some people would have a problem.”
“Maybe.”
“And even the ones who didn’t, or who said they didn’t, you just know they’d be all up in our business.”
“Small town life,” Flynn said, smiling softly. It didn’t sound like he thought the idea of that was entirely awful.
“And with all that, if it goes wrong, where do you go? When it’s on your doorstep?”
His forehead creased, the very slightest frown. “I mean, you move somewhere else. Try again.”
I glared at my coffee. “Run away, then. Admit defeat.”
His laugh was loud, louder than I expected. It dragged my stare up, to meet his eyes.
“Your idea of defeat is leaving. Mine is coming back.”
“Funny,” I said, sourly.
He sighed. “Not really.”
I had nothing to say to that. Was rescued by breakfast arriving. “This looks good.”
“Told you so.”
“Shut up and eat your damn food,” I scolded him, then took my own advice.
#
“Are you going straight home?”
I wanted to think Flynn’s expression was hopeful, but perhaps he was just satisfied by the amount of food he’d just consumed. After all, I was fighting the urge to rub my full stomach, contentedly, as we faced each other on the sidewalk.
“Why, were you hoping I’d come finish cleaning up your apartment?”
The shrug was awkward. “Something like that.”
“I’m meant to be opening the shop tomorrow morning.”
“So call and tell them you can’t do it.”
A spark of annoyance, deep in my chest. “I’m the manager, that’s not an option. Look, just because it’s a thrift store...”
“I wasn’t saying it’s not important,” he interrupted. “But you have staff, right? Volunteers? It doesn’t always have to be you. There could be times you get sick, or...” His voice trailed off.
“Or decide that having sex is more pressing than doing my job?”
I wasn’t even sure whether I was annoyed any more. Or, for that matter, what I thought my answer to that question actually was.
“If you don’t want to stay you can just say that.”
There was no holding back my sigh. “It’s not that.”
“Okay.” Flynn didn’t sound convinced.
“You could come back with me.”
He frowned. “I have work in the morning.”
I stared at him, until he grimaced. It didn’t take long.
“Fine, yes, okay. I get it. You made your point.”
I had, but it didn’t feel much like victory.
“I should... I mean, traffic. You know.”
Flynn nodded.
“I had...”
“Thank you,” he said, interrupting. “For turning around. I shouldn’t have called you, but that doesn’t mean I’m not glad I did.”
My smile was awkward; Flynn made it sound like I was some sort of selfless friend, whereas I wasn’t entirely convinced that my motivations were so pure. “Are you gonna be okay?”
His smile didn’t look much more natural than mine had. “Drive safe, okay?”
He was warm when I wrapped my arms around him. After a moment, Flynn squeezed me in return.
#
For an over-thinker, the drive home was a blessing and a curse. Or, at least, that was how it should’ve been. Just myself, the dull drone of wheels on asphalt, and maybe the radio buzzing away to itself in the background.
Instead my brain felt like a grey balloon. Inflated to near-bursting point in my skull, and the terrifying sense that if I entertained one more thought it might rupture altogether.
The problem was, Flynn was great sex, and - despite the years of resentment I’d felt - a decent guy, but there just wasn’t a way that I could see for us to be anything more.
It was entirely possible that I was getting ahead of myself, anyway.
Putting ideas, projecting possibilities, where they hadn’t naturally sprouted yet, if they were ever going to.
Flynn might be keen to reconnect simply because of our shared childhood history.
The fact that we’d had hooked up, well, that could just as easily be put down to post-breakup angst, rather than anything more meaningful.
So no, I couldn’t say conclusively how he felt, where his interest actually lay.
All I could do was look at my own response to him, pore over my reactions this past weekend, and try to backtrack from there to the motivations I didn’t seem capable of understanding yet.
Like the memory of that goddamn afterglow, as we’d clung to each other and our sweat cooled, and the knowledge that no, I’d never felt like that before after a hookup.
Usually, sex felt like the ending of something, the culmination.
Of flirting, of teasing. Only with Flynn, my treacherous mind kept seeing it like a beginning piece: an acknowledgement even, that the physical connection was there, and that it might be safe - if you dared - to move on, and risk your emotions.
If the sex had been bad, life would’ve been so much easier.
Because, no matter which way I cut and juggled it, the truth of the matter was that Flynn wasn’t going to leave the city, and I couldn’t bring myself to abandon home. A reality we both seemed to intuitively understand, too, even if we were equal in our willingness to ignore it.
The gray ballon swelled and creaked inside my cranium. It felt like the mother of all headaches.
Thinking about Flynn as anything other than an old friend I was happy to reconnect with was, as Catherine would say, a false economy. Investing into something which had no hope of paying off; only building myself up for a disappointment, and one which I’d have nobody else to blame for, but myself.