Chapter 19 #2
Charlie shifts against me, and I’m up and off the couch in a second flat, angling my body away from him.
Even though I feel like absolute shit—head throbbing, stomach churning, nose so stuffed up, my throat’s raw from a whole night of breathing through my mouth—I’ve also got the worst case of morning wood ever.
Considering how I’m pretty sure I’d had my stupidly hard dick pressed right up against him, I can only hope Charlie wasn’t awake before me, because otherwise, I’ve just gone and made everything hella weird.
For whatever reason, now that I’m really processing it, what we’d been doing doesn’t actually feel weird—apart from the situation in my sweats.
Maybe it should—cuddling all night long on the couch isn’t exactly a normal activity for adult men to do with their friends—but it doesn’t.
Charlie is my person, and sleeping with him like that when I feel like such crap was comforting beyond words.
If I’d been alone on the couch or even up in my bed, I know I would have been up for hours, tossing and turning my way through a sick, stuffed up night.
“You okay, Myles?”
Keeping my body still turned safely out of his view, even though being up and on my feet is making me dizzy and kind of nauseous (which is at least helping deflate my untimely boner) I look back over my shoulder.
Charlie’s hair is all messed up as he pushes up to sit. There’s a crease pressed into the side of his cheek from where his head was resting on the arm of the couch, and his eyes look a little out of focus, which means he must have taken out his contacts last night.
It’s gotta just be because of being sick, but suddenly it feels like my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth, and it takes me two tries and clearing my throat to be able to rasp out, “Yeah. Just—bathroom.”
Before I can get caught up staring any longer at how sleepy and, oh fucking hell, that word again—adorable he looks, I turn and head for the bathroom to pull myself together.
CHARLIE
“I think this weekend broke me, Gem,” I groan into my phone on Sunday night, miserably aware of the fact that it’s my house and not Myles’s that I’m getting ready for bed in.
Tonight, there will be no questionably accidental falling asleep together on the sofa. No waking up and pretending to be surprised that the two of us are all tangled up, still together, sharing that one, very narrow little space.
At least, I was pretending…
Myles? He had to have been actually surprised. He can’t have been pretending.
Can he?
“How am I supposed to fall asleep in my own bed, knowing that I’ll probably never get the chance to sleep with him like that again?”
I’m whining. I know I’m whining, and I know Gemma doesn’t have the answers. Does it stop me? Nope.
What she does have though is sass. A full, totally deserved helping of it. “Charlie darling, did I not tell you on Friday night that this is what would happen should you not listen to my advice and go back for more snuggles with your straight friend?”
She did tell me this. Repeatedly. I just really hadn’t wanted to listen.
“You were the one,” I can hear her glaring at me now, “who assured me that you knew that it meant nothing. And now, here you are, devastated that the snuggling is over, just like I knew you would be.”
“You were the one who didn’t believe me,” I grumble. Grumbling is better than whining, right?
“I didn’t believe you really believed yourself,” she sighs, and I can hear her sass giving way to sympathy. “And I’m still not convinced. Exactly how much of the weekend did the two of you spend snuggling?”
“Just the nights.”
Like that’s any less incriminating evidence of my total lack of willpower or the fact that I very probably took advantage of Myles being sick by shamelessly indulging in two nights of questionably consensual cuddling.
“And what were things like between the two of you during the days?”
“Normal?”
“Why is that a question?”
“Because I don’t really know what normal is between him and me,” I pitch forward onto my bed, burying my face, and the phone, in my pillow.
With a trilling chirp, Cyril, who loves bedtime and clearly missed me the two nights I was away, stiffly trots over, butting his head against mine like he’s eager to prove that I won’t have to sleep totally alone tonight.
“He was sick,” I tell her, rolling onto my side to better pet my now loudly purring cat.
“We watched a lot of movies. I made him food. He argued and tried to help and do things for himself. Then I’d tell him to go lie down or I’d start trying to strip the nasty old wallpaper off the dining room walls for him, and he’d laugh, and then cough, and then he’d go lie down like I told him to.
“Things were good. They were easy and comfortable and felt like we’d never not been friends. Only…”
“Only?”
“I’m being so stupid,” I whisper. This time, it’s the softness of Cyril’s side I tuck my face into, careful not to crush him.
The vibration of his purring calms me a little, but it doesn’t do a thing to take away the truth of what I’ve gone and let myself do.
“Gem, I’m letting myself start to…hope.”
Before she can ask what I mean, or more likely, since it’s probably pretty darn obvious, start telling me off, I rush on, “Not like really actually hope, hope, but just like in the back of my head, I can’t stop thinking that maybe things are different between us.”
“Oh babe.” She sighs heavily. “You’re not stupid. Look, Charlie, I know I’ve been hard on you about Myles.”
The fact that she’s calling him by his actual name, not some weird, Frankensteined together combination of insults is shocking, but I don’t let it distract me from the way I’m hanging on her every word. Is she telling me I’m not stupid because she agrees that maybe there is something there?
“I’m just worried about you. For so many reasons right now.
You’ve been in love with the guy for over half your life.
” There’s a tone in her voice that warns me not to interrupt and argue, much as I want to.
Never mind the fact that what she’s just said is one hundred percent true.
“Of course you’re going to hope that he has feelings for you too.
“Am I happy I was wrong and he’s not the assface douchenoggin I thought he was?
Of course I am. And I’m so, so glad that you have your friendship back with him.
But he’s straight, Charlie. You’ve told me this.
So please, please tell yourself that too.
Because I think you’re the one who really needs to hear it. ”