Chapter 38
MYLES
I had not been prepared for seeing Charlie standing at his classroom door. Doesn’t matter that I’d been expecting to see him there or that I come and linger in his stretch of hallway every morning specifically to see him.
He wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary, just greeting students as they wandered in for first period, but the moment I spotted him, my brain went totally off the rails, snapping me straight back to a completely inappropriate stream of memories from this weekend.
It’s not until a couple of seventh grade boys literally crash into my back that I realize I’ve come to a dead stop, staring at him like an idiot in the middle of the hallway.
I’m dimly aware of them shouting, “Sorry, Mr. M!” but the words go right over my head as they dart away, because Charlie looks up at the sound of my name, and the moment our eyes meet, I realize how completely fucked I am.
The corners of his lips lift in this smile that lights up his whole damn face, and suddenly, all I can think about is how good those lips of his feel on mine.
How last night, the first night I’ve suffered through without him in my bed since we’ve been back from the derailed conference, I’d dreamed all night about what it would feel like if it was those lips instead of his hand on my dick—
Hell no. Not here. I will not think about sex dreams about Charlie at work. That is unacceptable.
But god, he’s just so pretty… So sexy… So…
Fuck, I can’t just stand here staring at him.
Because I don’t remotely trust myself anywhere nearer to him than I am now, I do not do what I want more than anything and head straight in his direction with some BS excuse for needing to talk to him.
Instead, I force myself to raise my hand in the fakest casual gesture of greeting ever before marching myself right down the hallway and away from the temptation that is Charlie Lancaster.
As soon as I’m safely away from his classroom and back in my own office, I whip out my phone.
Me: Do you know how hard it was not to kiss you just now? You look so sexy this morning
I know there’s a good chance he won’t see my message until later. After first period, or maybe not even until lunch, but I can’t help hoping like hell he messages me back. It doesn’t matter that it’s only been since yesterday afternoon that I saw him. I miss him.
I haven’t even put my phone down when he responds. Good thing there’s no one to see me, because the moment my phone buzzes, I’m grinning like the lovesick fool I am.
Charlie: OMG, Myles! You can’t send me things like that while we’re at work.
Me: Don’t look so sexy then
Charlie: Pot, meet kettle *kissy heart emoji*
Me: Come over tonight
I don’t give one solitary fuck how needy I’m being. Charlie and I spent pretty much the entire weekend making out and messing around. And in between, just lying in bed together, cuddling and touching and talking. It was, unquestionably, the best weekend of my life.
Going from that back to seeing him and not being able to touch him, even if it is only because we’re at work, sucks.
Charlie: What if I want to take you on an actual date tonight?
My heartrate kicks up a notch and the smile on my face ratchets straight to full-blown ridiculous. Except…
Charlie: It’s not somewhere anyone will see us.
Yeah, even from the opposite end of the school, it’s like he’d just tapped right into exactly what had been on my mind, but suddenly, I feel like a complete jackass.
What the hell am I doing, worrying about people seeing Charlie and me together?
I should be thrilled at the idea of the world knowing that Charlie Lancaster wants to take me on a date.
And instead? I’m afraid. Like a complete fucking coward, I’m scared.
I hadn’t thought twice about Charlie’s family knowing we’re together.
When he’d asked me, first about telling Gemma and then when he’d invited me to come with him to the party his family is throwing for his uncle’s sixtieth birthday in a couple weeks, any reservation about the fact that that meant coming out as bi never even registered.
As far as the Gemma part went, my only worry was that she’d be skeptical of the two of us being together, considering how much she (justifiably) hated me for all those years for what I did to Charlie.
And I hadn’t had an ounce of hesitation accepting Charlie’s invitation to come to Seattle with him. The exact opposite, actually.
That Charlie wants me there doesn’t surprise me necessarily—it’s a flashback to how things were when we were kids, just better of course—but god, knowing that he wants his family to know about us means the world to me.
The idea of people here knowing about us is a whole nother matter.
Do I give a single shit about what any homophobic asshole thinks about the two of us being together? Hell no. But here in Riverside, even though he doesn’t try and hide that he’s gay, it’s definitely not a fact that Charlie advertises.
The two of us openly together would change everything, and I can’t lie and pretend I’m not scared of what people might say. Not about us, because I really don’t give a shit, but to us.
I don’t want Charlie to have to deal with that kind of shit, and if I’m honest, I don’t want to have to deal with it either.
It’s not like everyone here, or even most people, would be anything but glad to see us together and happy, but the glaring exceptions stand out so sharply in my mind, it feels like they overshadow everything as my thoughts spiral.
The Byron Dutchs of the world. Janice Dawson and the side eye she kept shooting us at the conference. Not necessarily hateful, but judgy and clearly hungry for gossip.
The people like my dad.
My stomach knots and squirms, and the muscles in the back of my neck tighten as his toxic bullshit from that day ten years ago floods my mind.
You’re one too? Is that what you’ve been off all this time with him doing? Fucking around with a goddamn fag?
Almost eleven years later, and those words are still a punch to my gut that has rage building in me, so hot and so fast, it’s unnerving.
What if everything had been different and my physical attraction for Charlie had already awoken back then? Or what if I’d realized how I loved him, even though there wasn’t anything sexual to it yet?
Nothing about what Charlie and I could have had would have been the filthy, contemptible thing my asshole of a father made it out to be, but the fact that he would look at us now and, as far as I know, still start spewing the same bigotry hurts.
Maybe it should make me want to flaunt what Charlie and I have in the faces of everyone, a massive fuck you to anyone who wishes us anything but happiness, but it doesn’t.
I don’t want what we have exposed to any of it.
I just want it to be us without the opinions of the world being shoved down our throats.
Guilt and shame and a heavy dose of anger have long since wiped the smile off my face, but even just glancing back down at Charlie’s text has it creeping back over my lips as I type back, As long as I get to see you.
It’s sappy and cheesy as hell, but I mean every word.
A response comes in almost immediately, a string of red heart emojis that turn my half-way there smile back into the ridiculous grin from before. A second later,
Charlie: I’ve got to start class, but I’ll come by on my planning period so we can work out the details *heart emoji*
Instead of getting to stop by my office, Charlie spent his planning period filling in for Janice, who, it turns out, hadn’t been able to get a sub today, which meant teachers rotated through covering her classes.
Her mother is doing better we’ve been told, but has a broken hip, so, until Janice finds care for her, she’s out on leave.
Bad as I feel about the situation, I can’t pretend like I’m disappointed Janice won’t be at the school for a little while.
Likely she was too distraught on Wednesday night to notice anything much about Charlie and me, but there’s no getting around the fact that what we’d been doing had been written all over our faces when we’d opened the door for her, and if she did pick up on anything, you can bet she’ll spread it all around the school as soon as she’s back.
What I am disappointed about is, instead of the midday visit I’d been counting on from Charlie (during which I’d been shamelessly planning to steal a few kisses—just to get me through the day,) he’d texted with nothing more than the instructions to dress warmly and be ready for him to pick me up at nine tonight.
I can’t even begin to guess what my rather indoorsy Charlie has planned that we have to dress warmly for at nine at night in April. Believe me, I’ve spent the rest of the day trying and coming up blank.
Even this isn’t enough to distract me from another, far more pressing question though. Only…the more I think it over, I’m not sure it really is a question at all.
I’m not ready to let you go, I’d told him. It was just about either of us getting out of bed to clean up, but the moment I’d said it, I’d known how much more those words meant.
I am not ready to let Charlie go, and I know I won’t be any more ready when summer comes and goes.
For as long as I can remember, every plan in my life has centered around getting out of Riverside.
Before I’d been old enough to think through what I wanted for myself, that had been my dad’s plan for me.
Even once I was old enough to understand what kind of thing he had in mind—the never going to happen athletic success story he wanted to push onto me—I at least agreed with the getting out of Riverside part.
For years, my plan was vague. I knew it wasn’t college football, but I didn’t know what else it was either.
I’d never told Charlie, but all the time he was in Riverside, I’d always just taken it as a for granted thing that wherever I went and whatever I did, it would include him.
At the time, I didn’t see it as a romantic thing. When I look back now though? God, how did I not see it?
I’d had this idea in my head of the two of us living together. What we’d do or where we’d be, I didn’t have any clue. It was always just the thought of us together in some house or apartment somewhere, going about our lives together. Every time I’d thought about it, I’d smiled so damn much.
And then Charlie’s family moved away from Riverside, and I came so close to ruining everything.
It was when Rachel dragged me out of the depression I’d fallen into that I’d latched onto the idea of traveling. I wouldn’t just leave Riverside, I’d get as far the fuck away from the place and from my dad and from all my memories as anyone could possibly get.
Have I fallen in love with traveling? Hell yeah.
It’s incredible, seeing places in the world that are so absolutely nothing like the ones I’ve known before.
Smells and sights and sounds that make me have to stop and freeze in place so I can take them in because they’re so freaking incredible or surprising, I’ve got to give myself that minute to process.
How the air feels different in every corner of the world.
I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving that rush.
But it had started as running away.
I’d known it then, and somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten.
Now, I don’t have a reason to run anymore.
Fuck, now, I have a reason to stay.
If only that’s what he wants too.
A decade is a hell of a long time to spend convincing yourself something is your one and only version of the future though, and the thought of settling down somewhere is throwing me off.
Especially because I know that there’s really only one place I’d ever want to settle, and it just happens to be the only place I’d always sworn up and down I’d never lay eyes on again.
It wasn’t just Charlie I’d broken my heart missing.
The day I’d arrived back in Riverside, I’d fed myself a whole crock of lies. Any Pacific Northwest forest would do when I needed a fix. Any river. As soon as dad’s house was cleaned up and sold, I’d be able to turn my back on this place for good.
All complete bullshit.
Riverside has been a part of me since before I was born, and there’s nowhere else I’ve ever been that comes close to feeling as right as it does. Just like there’s no other person I’ve ever met who comes close to feeling as right as Charlie does.
I’m telling myself I’m thinking it over.
Such a lie.
I know what I want. I knew it the moment it hit me, with Charlie all warm and sweaty, draped over me with his head resting on my shoulder like it just belonged there and the sticky slickness of our combined cum trapped between our bodies.
He’d had his arms wrapped tight around me like, just like me, he’d been talking about so much more than just getting out of bed when he’d whispered back, I’m not going anywhere.
It was fear that kept my mouth shut.
Fear that staying would be wrong. A mistake. Trapping myself in Riverside, just like my dad. A whole list of stupid, irrational bullshit that I can stare straight at and call out for the crap it is, and yet still can’t manage to shut off as it circles through my head.
Then there’d been the flipside. More fear, but this time, one that I can’t as easily call out as bullshit.
What if telling Charlie that I want to stay—for him—ruins everything?
Just like telling him that I don’t just have feelings for him but that I’m in love with him and have been for fucking ever feels too soon and like it could maybe be just…
too much, what if telling him I want to throw all my plans out the window and turn my life upside down just so I can be with him feels like too much?
What if I’m wrong and he’s only ever had a crush on me but never loved me? What if he did once, but, after the way I broke his heart, those feelings have cooled to something less?
Sometimes over the past couple days, I feel like I’ve looked into his face and seen all my own feelings shining back from him, lit and sparkling in the distractingly bright green of his eyes and the sweetness of his smile.
It could all just be my imagination though.
The rose tinted, heart-shaped glasses of my own love for him making me see things I only wish were really there.
One month.
Last night as I’d tossed and turned in my bed, pissed off with myself for my own fears and restless because being in my bed just felt wrong without Charlie’s warmth pressed against me, I’d told myself I have one month. No more, no less.
And when that month’s up, if I still feel the same way—that, just like I once thought staying in Riverside would kill me, now it’s the thought of leaving that feels like it could—I’ll tell him.