9. Zander
9
ZANDER
Thankfully no one was around when I slipped outside. I leaned against the building, my eyes closed and the back of my head pressed against the stone facade.
The fall air was cool against my heated skin, the slight breeze ruffling my hair. I breathed in a few times, letting the fresh air fill my lungs as I tried to clear my racing mind.
I shouldn’t have come out tonight. I didn’t handle crowds and noise well on a good day, and even though the bar was relatively chill for a Saturday, everything was just too much tonight.
My mother’s call yesterday had messed me up more than I wanted to admit. Usually I could shrug off her outbursts, but I’d been in weird headspace for the past few weeks, and it was harder to deal with her when I had other stuff going on.
And I had two annoyingly related things currently going on—my crush on Luka and my budding feelings for Sinbin.
How in the world had I gone from never having man troubles to crushing on two guys I couldn’t have?
I probably could have gotten over my distraction with Sinbin if we’d only had the two JOI calls. We hadn’t sexted or gotten off together since the last call, but we started exchanging messages a few weeks ago that had nothing to do with our dicks.
I was surprised to find the first message in my inbox on Kinksters about a week after our last call. Sinbin shared a meme of a frazzled cartoon cat with the words “I’m fine. It’s fine. Everything is fine” under it. I sent one back of a wide-eyed and shocked-looking cat with “What do you mean a stress ball isn’t for throwing at people who stress you out?”
That had started our daily message exchanges, and while they were mostly just memes and funny anecdotes, I still got a little thrill every time I saw one of them waiting for me when I logged in to the app.
Sinbin was a mystery. I had no idea what he looked like, what his life was like, or really anything about him other than he liked it when I got my bossy on. I didn’t even know for sure how old he was, if the pics on Kinksters were really him, or if anything he told me was true. But even with all those unknowns, I liked him. I was drawn to him, and not just because we were so sexually compatible.
And if that wasn’t complicated enough, I also couldn’t shake my crush on Luka. I’d hoped that hanging out with him away from the other guys and the shop would help me see him as a friend, but that backfired epically. Especially since hanging out with him at his apartment seemed to lift the last of his reservations around me. Now instead of long silences at work, the time was filled with idle chatter, and I learned that Luka sang softly to himself when he was concentrating.
I liked that he was comfortable enough to let go and be himself, and my lizard brain really liked that I got to see a side of him the other guys didn’t.
Luka wasn’t the first straight guy I’d developed feelings for, and he wouldn’t be the last. My usual method of getting over a crush was to avoid the person until my attraction and feelings went away, but that was impossible when we spent six days a week together, most of it alone in the back of the shop.
The real problem was that I liked him. He was funny and witty and a genuinely nice person. I enjoyed talking to him, and the pull I felt toward him was impossible to ignore. We were becoming friends, but that wouldn’t happen if I couldn’t stop thinking about those baby blue eyes staring up at me. How his plush lips might look stretched around my cock.
Said cock plumped up, my balls tightening uncomfortably.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, trying to will my dick to calm the fuck down.
“Nope. Just me.”
“Shit!”
Luka’s strong hand closed over my arm, holding tight and stopping me from toppling over. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I thought you heard me come out,” he said apologetically.
“It’s fine,” I managed, my heart trying to bust out of my chest.
“You were really in the zone there.” He let go of my arm and looked me up and down, like he was making sure I was steady on my feet and not about to fall over. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I pushed a lock of hair that had fallen over my eye back and tucked it behind my ear. “Yeah, I’m good. My fault for zoning out in public.”
The corner of his mouth tilted up in a shy smile. “You looked peaceful, like you were deep in meditation or something.”
I snort-laughed. “I wish. More like I was trying to get my brain to shut up.”
He leaned against the wall next to me, close enough that our arms brushed. Little zings of electricity danced on my skin at the featherlight touch. I did my best to ignore them.
“I know the feeling,” he said, his gaze fixed on a point in front of us.
We stood in silence for a few minutes, each of us staring ahead and thinking our own thoughts.
“Are you okay? Like in general?” he asked softly.
“Yeah.”
I could feel him looking at me, and I slid my gaze to his. He was studying me intently, his blue eyes curious.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “You can talk to me if there’s something going on. That’s what friends do, right?”
A flush moved over my chest and up my neck. It was validating that he thought of us as friends too. I swallowed down the urge to tell him I was fine.
Being the one people came to when they needed someone to listen meant I wasn’t good at talking about my own problems. The only people I talked to about personal things were Ivy, Mark, Dev, and Nate.
I didn’t like burdening people, and I’d learned long ago that a lot of people were happy to talk your ear off when they wanted support but were quick to disappear when you needed them to reciprocate.
It made reaching out to people hard, and it really hurt when people rejected me or minimized my struggles after I put so much time and effort into helping them. It made me feel invisible. And after a lifetime of having to bottle everything up and deal with everything alone, it was hard for me to open up and be vulnerable in front of people.
“My mother called me yesterday,” I said after a few beats of silence.
I couldn’t talk to him about my crush on him or my preoccupation with Sinbin, but maybe talking about my mother would help calm some of the mess in my head.
“You don’t get along?” he asked, shifting his gaze ahead of him.
“No.” I ran the tips of my fingers against the stone wall behind me, using the friction to ground myself. “She’s…difficult.”
“Difficult?” he prompted, his tone neutral.
I nodded. “She’s not a bad mom, but she’s not a good one either.”
Luka turned to look at me but didn’t say anything.
“I was an accident,” I explained. “She got pregnant with me when she was in college, and she blames me for having to drop out.”
“She blames you?”
I sighed. “Yeah. She blames me for a lot of things that have gone wrong in her life, including my father leaving.”
“What?” He gaped at me. “How old were you when he left?”
“Four months.”
“Four months?” His face hardened. “That’s bullshit. It’s not your fault. You know that, right?”
I smiled at how outraged he was, and the last of my trepidation melted away. Luka wasn’t going to judge me or get annoyed at me for dropping my problems on him. He wanted to help, the same as I wanted to help him.
“I know,” I said. “I believed it for years, but now I know she’s just lashing out because she’s angry when she says stuff like that.”
“What did she want? When she called?”
“She wanted me to help with something at her church. I couldn’t because I had to work, and she got mad that I wouldn’t take the day off. I haven’t had anything to do with the church for years, but she won’t accept that, and she tries to guilt me into volunteering because it would make her look better to her friends.”
“Are you religious?” he asked.
“Not anymore.” I snuck a glance at him. “Are you?”
He shook his head. “Why did you leave the church, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“It’s a long and complicated story.”
“I’m all ears if you think telling it might help.”
I paused. I’d talked Ivy, Dev, and Nate’s ears off about my mom and everything that led to me leaving the church, but maybe talking to someone who didn’t know my history and hadn’t lived through it with me would help. It couldn’t hurt. Unless he realized just how messed up I was and decided that being my friend was too much work.
“You don’t have to,” he said when I didn’t answer. “But I’m a good listener.”
I resisted the urge to turn away from him. Talking to the wall was easier, but if Luka was going to put in the effort to listen, then I could at least talk to him and not at him. “My mom joined her church when I was nine. Before that, she was…a different person.”
“I feel like you’re choosing your words very carefully. You don’t have to,” he said softly. “You can if it’s easier. But you don’t have to worry about what you say to me or how you say it.”
I blew out a breath. He was right. Censoring myself wasn’t going to do anything except make it harder to get the words out. “My mom had a drinking problem when I was a kid. And a problem with latching onto any man who bothered to stick around.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it, most likely remembering when I’d told him about growing up around people who abused alcohol. “Were any of these men… Did they hurt you?” he asked.
I shook my head. “They mostly ignored me or acted like it was some big sacrifice for them to put up with me. I spent most of my time hiding from them and trying to be invisible.”
“That’s… I’m so sorry, Zander. No kid should ever go through that.”
I shrugged, my eyes still on the ground. “A lot of kids go through worse.”
“That doesn’t make your experience any less. I don’t believe in the oppression Olympics. What happens in your life and how it affects you has nothing to do with anyone else. You’re allowed to be angry or upset or hurt or however you feel about it.”
A sardonic smile tugged at my lips. “Ivy has been telling me that for years. Maybe one day I’ll finally get it through my head.”
“Ivy?” Luka asked, his tone even and careful, like he was trying to not sound interested.
“My best friend.” I paused. Might as well tell him the truth. Well, most of the truth. “And my ex-wife.”
“Your ex-wife used to be your best friend?” He tilted his head to the side, his expression confused and strangely adorable.
“Yes, and she still is.”
His jaw dropped. “You’re best friends with your ex-wife?”
I chuckled at his gobsmacked expression. “Yes.”
“How does that even work? The divorced people I know hate their exes. Like, haaaaaate them.”
“Ivy and I didn’t break up because we stopped loving each other. We just realized that we only loved each other and weren’t in love.”
He blinked a few times. “Either you’re the world’s greenest green flag, or there’s more to this story.”
My chest tightened. He wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t tell him the real reason we broke up.
“Our relationship is complicated, and it ties into why I left the church,” I said, sneaking a glance at him.
His face was full of earnest interest, like he really cared and wanted to hear my story.
“The reason my mom joined the church was because she got into some trouble,” I continued. “She drove her car into a mailbox after having a few too many. No one was hurt, and it was her first offense, so they offered her a plea deal. If she did a twelve-step program and got sober, they’d drop the charges against her. She took it and went to meetings at a church near where we lived. I guess the religious aspect of the program really appealed to her, and the church became her whole life.”
Luka gave me a small nod when I glanced at him again.
“Ivy grew up in the church. We met at a youth event when we were ten, and we’ve been best friends ever since.” Absently, I scuffed the toe of my sneaker against the rough pavement. “When we were fifteen, everyone in our lives decided that we couldn’t just be friends anymore and we had to start dating. Her father basically told me that if I didn’t ‘do right by her’”—I made little air quotes with my fingers—“then I wasn’t welcome around her or the family anymore. And my mother said the same thing, only she made it seem like Ivy was the problem and I was the one who needed to be done right by.”
Luka grimaced. “That’s so weird to me. My parents made a huge deal about putting friendships before relationships when my sister and I were teenagers. And my mother still goes full berserker mode on anyone who makes those sexist comments or jokes about kids. You know, the ones about toddlers dating because they’re opposite gender friends, or calling a four-year-old a ladies' man, or telling a little girl that she’s going to be fighting boys off with sticks when she’s older. It’s crazy to me that they’d force you to date.”
“Bet you’re going to think it’s really crazy when I tell you that they pretty much forced us to get married too,” I said with a smirk.
His eyes rounded comically. “They what ?”
I raked a hand through my hair, flipping the long strands to the other side. “My mom kicked me out when I was eighteen, right after I graduated from high school.”
Luka’s expression was full of sympathy, but there was an undercurrent of anger that validated my own and helped me keep talking.
“She gave me a choice. I could marry Ivy and she’d help support us while we got on our feet, or I could just get out and figure everything out on my own.
“Ivy wanted out of her house even more than I wanted out of mine. She has four younger siblings and her parents put a lot of the responsibility of raising them on her. Her parents also offered to help support us if we got married, so we figured it was the best way for us both to escape.”
I couldn’t stop the wry grin that stretched over my lips. “We didn’t realize that we’re not…compatible until after we were married.”
“Compatible, like…in the bedroom?” he asked tentatively.
I nodded. “I love her, and I’ll always love her, but that part of our relationship never worked. We struggled for years to try and fix it, but eventually realized that we’re into different things and it couldn’t be fixed.”
Well, not that different since we both only like men .
I ignored that thought and glanced at Luka again.
He looked thoughtful now. That had to be a good sign, right? I wasn’t talking too much?
“How long have you been divorced?” he asked.
“Almost eight years.”
“I think it’s amazing you were able to work through that. I’ve known so many people who weren’t able to go back to being friends when they broke up. And that was only dating, not being married.”
“I think a big difference with us was that we only got married, only dated, because it was forced on us. Even when we were together, we acted like friends. There was no passion, no real lust or desire for either of us, but because of the church and what we were taught about relationships, we thought that was normal—good, even—because it meant we wouldn’t be tempted to have sex before we were married.”
Luka huffed out a laugh. “That’s another thing I never understood. Forcing people to wait until after they’re married to see if they’re compatible in bed. I know it’s a control thing, but it’s so counterintuitive. You don’t buy a car without test-driving it. Why would you marry someone you’ve never slept with?” He winced. “My mom and sister would kick my ass if they heard me comparing women to cars.”
I laughed softly, feeling lighter than I had in months.
Nate, Dev, Ivy, and her husband were the only people who knew the truth about our marriage. The guys at work knew I was divorced and that my ex-wife and I were still best friends, but that was it.
It was freeing to tell Luka, even if I couldn’t tell him the whole truth. It made me feel seen, and it was a relief to let go of one more secret that always felt like it was weighing me down.
“I’m sorry you had to deal with all of that.” Luka shifted and pressed his arm against mine. “Thank you for telling me, for trusting me.”
The heat radiating off his arm seeped into my chilled skin, warming me from the inside. Butterflies exploded in my stomach, and my heart did a weird sort of skittering beat.
“Thanks for listening,” I said, my voice gruff with emotion.
“Something tells me you don’t have a lot of people in your life who do that,” he said, his eyes filling with an intensity I couldn’t place and liked way too much. “Listen, and not just talk.”
I couldn’t answer. He didn’t need me to.
“You said your mom called yesterday,” he said, breaking our momentary silence. “And that’s why you’ve been off?”
“Right.” I shook my head. I’d completely lost the thread of our conversation during my tangent about Ivy.
“You don’t have to tell me more about it,” he continued. “I just want you to know that you can.” He pressed his arm a bit harder against mine. “Any time.”
I cleared my throat, trying to get rid of the lump that had formed. I’d already said so much tonight, no point holding back now. “It was the same as most of the calls I get from her. She knows my work schedule but acts like it’s a big shock when I can’t do what she wants because I’m working. Then she gets mad, and when she gets mad, she gets mean and says things she knows will hurt me.”
“That’s not okay.”
“No, but it’s who she is. Who she’s always been. She’s selfish, and it’s easier to blame me for everything that’s wrong in her life than it is to acknowledge that her choices have consequences. Usually it’s not a big deal, and I can brush it off, but she said…” I shook my head; Luka didn’t need to hear the details of my mother’s call. “She went for the jugular. And she woke me up, so I was still groggy when she laid into me. And I’ve got some other stuff going on, so it hit extra hard.”
Silence descended on us, but it wasn’t strained or uncomfortable.
“Are things better with your friends?” I asked, needing to change the subject.
He snort-laughed. “Not really.”
“No?”
He leaned his head against the stone wall behind us. “They’re all at a party right now, and I wasn’t invited.”
“Because your ex fling will be there?”
He nodded. “The stupid thing is I’d be okay with all this if we had a bad break up. Or if we’d been super serious and broke up. But we only hooked up for a few months, and it was supposed to be casual. I wasn’t the one who changed the rules, but everyone’s still acting like I’m the bad guy here. And it really sucks that my best friend just goes along with it. I love Dean like a brother, but I can’t take much more of this crap. I don’t want to walk away from my friends, but I can’t figure out if that’s because I want to stay friends with them or if it’s because the idea of not having friends scares the piss out of me.” He looked so broken and defeated that I wanted to wrap him up in a hug and protect him from everything that was weighing him down.
Instead, I pressed my arm against his. It was the chastest contact ever, but it still sent a zing of awareness through me.
He relaxed, some of the tension leaving his shoulders, and gave me a small smile. “I don’t handle rejection well, and being abandoned is one of my biggest triggers. It’s made me willing to put up with a lot, and they have no problem using that against me.” He sighed heavily. “Making friends as an adult is hard.”
“It is,” I agreed.
“You know, I was really hurt earlier when I found out everyone was going to that party, and I wasn’t even invited,” he mused. “But now I’m really glad I didn’t go. Hanging out with you is way better than any party.”
He smiled shyly. I knew he meant “you guys” and not “you” like me, but it still made my chest tighten and my stomach swoop.
“I’m happy you’re here too.” I cleared my throat. “I’m not happy your friends are being assholes, but I am glad you came out with us.”
He beamed, and he was so beautiful I had to look away so I didn’t say something stupid.
“It’s a nice night,” I said, just to break the silence.
Good job, Zander. Way to not say something stupid.
“It is.” He tilted his head up and looked up between the buildings at the night sky. “And it’s really nice that it’s not cloudy. Sometimes I forget what stars look like because it’s always overcast.”
I chuckled. “Yeah. Jesse is really into space, and he’s always complaining about how it’s always overcast or raining whenever celestial events happen.”
He huffed out a soft laugh. “My dad used to say the same thing. I remember this one time, when I was eleven, there was this giant solar flare or something, and we were actually in the right zone to see the northern lights. But of course it rained the first night, and it was cloudy the second night they were supposed to be visible. My dad and I sat outside for almost four hours that second night, hoping to catch a glimpse of them through a break in the clouds.”
“Did you?”
Luka smiled. “Yeah. Not for long, only about thirty seconds, but he got to cross it off his bucket list.”
Another silence fell over us, but like before, it was comfortable. Companionable, even.
Slam .
We both jumped as the door to the bar swung open and crashed into the wall a few feet from us. A group of women stumbled outside, laughing and holding on to each other so they didn’t fall.
With the silence disturbed, Luka and I looked at each other.
“Ready to head in?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Luka,” I said as he stepped away from the wall.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for listening.”
He smiled, his cheeks flushing soft pink in the dim light. “Any time. I mean that.”