Chapter 26
MYLES
“So,” Rachel pauses for a slurp of the smoothie she ordered at the coffee stand where we’d left our cars before walking down the highway to the park across from the school. We’ve made it all the way to the river, where she’s perched herself on a log overlooking the water.
“You needed to talk.” She pats the log beside her. “Spill.”
Stomach turning around the chai latte I’d chugged on the way here, I drop down on the log at her side.
And goddammit, now I’m seriously regretting the way I’d gulped the damn thing down in an attempt to give myself something to do while I tried to wrap my head around how to explain my predicament to Rachel enough to get it off my chest, without actually giving away any of the parts I’m not remotely ready to confess.
Trouble is, I’m no closer to knowing what I want to say, and now, not only do I no longer have the drink to hide behind to buy time, I kind of feel like I’m going to be sick.
On the opposite bank, the trees are thicker than over here. Dark fir and cedar overhanging the water. The air is damp and cold, soothing against my clammy skin. Just like the steady rush of the river soothes my over-full brain.
“I—” I breathe out, weighing my words. “I’m attracted to someone I shouldn’t be.”
“What does shouldn’t mean?”
“A friend. Not you—” I hurry to add on. “But—” I let go another breath. This one shakes on the way out. “It’s a friend I can’t lose, and if I say anything, I know I’ll fuck up our friendship, and I just…can’t.”
“Why? The fucking up the friendship part, I mean.”
“Because they—” I cringe inside at my feeble attempt to hide the fact that I’m talking about a guy, but Rachel doesn’t flinch, and one of the many knots bunched up in my stomach loosens. “—told me that all they want is to be my friend.”
“They—” and thank god, she doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t trip up over the word. “—told you this when? Volunteered it, or have you already said something about your feelings?”
My hand is at the back of my neck, rubbing nervously at just the thought of telling Charlie about my feelings, only to have him shoot them down. “They volunteered it.”
“I’m not convinced.” She takes another noisy drink of her smoothie. “Volunteering something like that comes from somewhere. Why else are you so sure telling them would fuck up your friendship?”
“Remember when we were together, when we broke up? You said you loved me and—”
“You said you didn’t love me back.”
I wince, hard, at her bluntness.
“I didn’t say it like that. Sounds an awful lot like you’re accusing me of being an asshole.” I shake my head at her again, but she just shrugs.
“The thing is, Rach, it wasn’t that there was anything lacking in you.
It was all me. I’ve figured a lot of things out between high school and now, and I’ve realized that I’m demi and aro.
” I scan her face, watching for confusion so I know if I need to explain or not, but she just nods in understanding.
“You were the first person I’d ever felt attracted to, and I didn’t know what that meant.
Back then, I just assumed that I’d feel romantic feelings for you too, but I didn’t, and…
” I reach out across the space between us and squeeze her hand.
“I’m sorry. Not because I blame myself anymore, because I sure as hell did back then, but because I know I hurt you.
“You were wonderful, Rach, always there for me when I needed you. You listened, you laughed with me, let me rage through how fucking much I hated my dad. You were—and you are—gorgeous—everything a guy could have asked for and I—”
“You were already in love with someone else?”
A weird, dizzy prickle skates over my skin. “What are you talking about?” Except something tells me I know exactly what she’s talking about. And she’s wrong, so wrong—
Only if she’s wrong, why do I feel tears starting to choke me up all of a sudden?
“Myles, I’ve known since I first started noticing you that you were head over heels in love with Charlie Lancaster. Did teenage me hope she could win you over? Of course she did. But even back then, I knew I didn’t stand much of a chance.
“You just told me you didn’t know you were demi until after high school, but that I was the first person you felt attracted to. I’m guessing that means you didn’t feel attracted to Charlie back then?”
There’s a lump caught in my throat, so all I do is shake my head.
“See? For whatever reason, that just hadn’t happened for you yet, and so you just never let yourself step outside all the shit in your head telling you what love was supposed to look like to see that Charlie’s been it for you since the beginning.
Maybe you didn’t want in his pants yet, but you loved him.
Literally anyone with eyes and a brain could have told you that. ”
Something in me cracks, and the ugly truth I’ve never told her bursts out. “It wasn’t my dad that made me stop talking to him. At least, it wasn’t just him.”
Rachel listens silently as I pour out the story, at last telling her the pieces I’d left out. Even, finally, what I hadn’t admitted to Charlie. “I’d wished I could feel the same way about him as he felt for me.”
I’m choking up for real now, tears pooling at the corners of my eyes, and I can’t do a thing to stop them. “I’d wished I could want him and care for him that way too. I wanted to so badly, I’d felt like it was tearing me apart from the inside out. I wanted to be able to give him that.”
“Literally nothing you’re telling me is changing my mind,” she says softly.
“Loving someone and not wanting them at the same time’s not how love and desire work for me, or maybe not even for most people, but fuck most people, okay?
You’re you, and Charlie’s the only one for you, and the only thing that’s ever been wrong with you is that you’ve been too busy freaking out about hurting him to see it, and to know that that’s the only way you ever could hurt him.
“You fucked up before, okay, Myles? You know it, Charlie knows it. But you fucked up because you loved him, so even though he has no idea how you love him, knowing that’s enough for him to forgive you.
At least I’m guessing, since the two of you are attached at the hip again.
Don’t fuck up again though, alright? The two of you belong together. ”
“But that’s what I’m trying not to—”
“By not telling him the truth?” She shakes her head, letting out a gentle scoff. “Do you love him?”
“More than anyone in the world.” My voice breaks worse than before, and I have to swallow hard to keep myself together. “But the same way I always have. Yeah, I love him now, but I loved him when we were kids too, and I wasn’t attracted to him, or anyone else.”
“So the only reason you think you can’t be in love with him is because you’ve loved him all this time, even before you wanted him?”
Miserably, I nod.
“I don’t think that’s how it works. Why should it? If you can want someone without being romantically in love with them, why couldn’t you have been romantically in love with him all this time, and only just now start to want something physical?”
My breath seizes up in my chest like I’ve had the wind knocked right out of me.
Out of everything she’s said, those words hit me in a way like nothing else ever has. Because I already know this. I know that sexual and romantic attraction do not go hand in hand for me. Never once have they.
“Tell me what it feels like to love him.”
It’s hard to make the words come, but I force them out anyway. “I don’t know, Rach, I just—” I glance around, but there’s no one here to hear us. Just the river and the trees.
She scowls at me, tapping her foot impatiently against the log as she shakes back her hair. Waiting.
“I just love being around him, alright? Like—” My hand at the back of my neck feels cold and clammy.
“—like just being near him is everything I need. We could sit and just be silent together, and I’d be happy, but when we talk, it feels like the easiest thing in the world.
No one makes me smile like he does, and no one makes me feel like I can just let go and be myself like he does.
“I’ve spent so much of my life being who the world wants to see.
” I shake my head. “With my dad. With everyone at school after Charlie left and I’d had to face the fact that there were other people in the world beyond him and me and the little bubble we’d built around ourselves.
With the posts I put online when I was traveling—all smiles and the right look and the right words to show what an amazing adventure I was having, even through those times when it wasn’t amazing but just plain sucked. ”
Guilt stabs through me as I remember how I’d done it with her too.
The act I’d felt like I had to put on to be what everyone expected from the boyfriend of the hottest girl in school.
How I’d tried so hard to have real feelings for her, I couldn’t even tell anymore what was me trying for her sake and what I was trying just so I could play the part.
“Never with him though.” My throat squeezes painfully. “Those years I spent away from him hurt, Rach. Not having him in my life felt like a piece of my heart had been carved out, and now that he’s back, I feel whole for the first time since we were teenagers.
“He makes me want to keep him safe from all the hurts life’s ever thrown at him, and it fucking kills me that I hurt him worse than anything else has ever hurt him. He’s the most important person in my life. He’s— He’s my person.”
I don’t need her soft smile to know what she’s hearing in the words that just won’t stop pouring out from me.
“I need him like I need air, Rach. I love him like I love the deep places in the forest here, where I might be the only one who’s ever been there for hundreds of years, and all you can hear are the birds and the river in the distance.
I tried to rip him out from my heart. I tried to forget and move on because I was so sure I’d never get another chance, but—”
My next breath is raw and aching in my chest. It gets as far as my throat before it catches at the same moment as tears well in my eyes. “I just couldn’t do it.” Furiously I scrub at those tears. “But what if all this just fucks up our friendship all over again?”
“He doesn’t know any of it, does he?” Her voice is patient. So much more than I deserve.
Swallowing a shudder at the idea of Charlie ever finding out any of what I’ve just told her, I shake my head.
“Then you’ve got to tell him.”
“Hell no. Rach, he’s told me he only wants to be my friend. He—”
“You are a fucking idiot, Myles.” The corners of her lips twitch up as she scoffs. “He’s trying to do exactly the same as you are. Look, as far as I know, as far as he knows, you’re straight. Right?”
Slowly, I nod.
“You just told me he spent ten years thinking you ditched him because you’d worked out he had feelings for you, right?”
“But I told him—”
“Yes, yes you told him,” she huffs out in irritation.
“But even if he believes you, do you really think the worry that you still might freak out if you knew he’s been in love with you forever still isn’t tattooed across his brain?
So why would he tell you he’s head over heels for you too?
Wouldn’t the most obvious thing be to tell you that all he wants is to be your friend? ”
“How can you know that?” There’s no way to hide the emotion raging through me. My whisper’s full of it, all hoarse and broken.
She shrugs, taking a long sip of her smoothie.
“I don’t. But unless something changes, you’re here for what, four more months?
Five? And what happens after that? You’ll talk to him online.
Call when you can. Maybe visit sometimes.
You’ll never have another chance to have something with him, even if it isn’t forever.
“Yeah, you might totally blow everything up by telling him, but honestly, Myles? Do you really not know him well enough to trust that, even if I’m wrong and he really does only want to be your friend, that he’d write you off because now it’s you who wants more?
It's not like I know the guy, but nothing you’ve told me and nothing I knew about him back in school screams asshole, and that’s what he’d have to be to pull something like that. ”
“But what if he doesn’t feel the same? You’re right that he’d never be an asshole over it or anything, but it could still make everything weird between us. It could still ruin everything.”
“And what if he’s sitting wherever he is right now, thinking literally the exact same things you are, and you’ll never know? Besides, your poker face is shit. Now that you know, he’s going to know something’s up. Do you really want to leave him to make guesses for himself?”
“God, I hate that you’re right right now.”
“Nope,” she shakes her head. “Not true. You’re scared that I’m wrong. But I promise I’m not, okay?”
I’m not so sure, but that has no bearing on the sincerity of the hug I pull her in for, and it’s only once she’s hugging me back that I realize I’ve just (unintentionally) come out to her.
The first person to know. If it really even is coming out, considering how she’s apparently known for over a decade already what I’ve been too fucking blind to realize.
“Thank you, Rach. For listening. For telling me what I needed to hear.” My eyes are prickling again, and even though I don’t even know when I’m planning to talk to Charlie yet, there’s enough adrenaline pumping through my system to give the world around me a weird, unreal sort of shimmer.
“It’s going to be okay, Myles. I promise.” She squeezes tighter before pulling away a bit. “Thanks for trusting me with this. It means a lot.”
“It means a lot to me too, Rach.” I duck down and press a kiss on her forehead before letting her go.
“You’d better text me and tell me what happens as soon as you talk to him,” she arches her eyebrows expectantly.
“I promise. But don’t hold your breath, okay? I’ve had less than twenty-four hours to process any of this about Charlie, and only a little longer to even wrap my head around the fact that I’m not straight. It’s gonna take me a minute to sort out what I’m going to say to him.”
“Don’t take too long,” she warns as she jumps down from the log.
“Unless there’s more you’re not telling me and you’ve changed your plans for once you’ve got your dad’s house fixed up, you two are on borrowed time before you’ve got to pick between ending things between you or long distance, halfway across the world or wherever you end up next.
Better explore this now, while you’ve got time. ”