Chapter 34
RAFE
I’m not expecting a response from Brent. I stare at my phone, waiting for him to read it. Minutes go by as I walk toward the opposite end of campus toward Enfield and Xavi’s house. He doesn’t open it. Doesn’t read it.
My next words are right there in the text box. ‘I miss you.’ I don’t send them. Shutting down my screen, I stuff my phone into my pocket, my hands following. I’ve barely seen Brent since we returned from holiday.
He’s avoiding me, and it fucking stings. I’ve gone through the day in my head a hundred times. We wake up wrapped around each other, and everything is fine. We shower together, wrapped around each other, and everything is fine.
Yes, we’re quiet. We don’t talk. The end of an amazing holiday hangs over us, and I think we both want to extend it. Silence stretches between us all morning as we say goodbye to my family. As we pack. As we drive to campus.
Did he think I was ignoring him? Is that why he’s upset?
In my gut, I know what it is. We crossed the sacred line between friends, and now there’s a fucking canyon between us that we can’t cross. I want to. I’m dying to. But Brent disappears from dawn until I’m already fast asleep at night.
I feel sick to my stomach. My chest hurts. Not gonna lie; I feel like crying. Now that I acknowledge it, I really fucking need to.
I hold my breath as long as I can to keep all my emotions inside and practically run into the nearest unlocked building in search of a single stall bathroom. Once I find one and am alone, I lean against the door and let my tears fall.
I don’t know how to fix this. Do I shove all my feelings down and apologize so we can be friends again? Can we be friends again, or have we shared too much? Did it become too personal?
Digging the heels of my palms into my eyes, I struggle to breathe through the weight on my chest. This is not how I imagined falling in love with someone would go. It’s supposed to be dreamy. Like a damn movie. Especially since it happened during the most magical holiday of the year.
It should not end with me hiding in a bathroom sobbing. It shouldn’t result in me losing my best friend.
Why can’t this be a movie, and we fall together in the middle of the street, both teary, and confess our fucking love? He’d have to feel the same way to have the movie ending.
I let my tears run their course, but I remain where I am until my eyes are dry. I look at my reflection periodically, noting the progress of my blotchy skin. Only when I’m relatively certain I don’t look like I was crying, do I leave the bathroom.
I’m tempted to text Enfield to tell him I got caught up and I’m on my way, but I can’t bring myself to look at my phone. To see that Brent still hasn’t opened my message.
Or maybe he has and left me on read.
Or maybe he responded with ‘Leave me alone.’
It’s difficult to swallow around the lump in my throat. My phone weighs heavily in my pocket, but I ignore it. It’s not there. I didn’t bring it. Everything is fine.
I repeat this mantra in my head for the rest of my walk to my cousin’s house.
Everything is fine. I can’t let it look like something is bothering me.
Everything is fine. To admit that it’s not means I have to admit the whole of it, and I don’t want to.
I don’t want to admit that it was all fake.
Fabricated to save myself from having to meet a bunch of young women I wasn’t interested in meeting.
It was supposed to be easy. Meaningless. Fun.
Damned mistletoe fucked everything up.
Enfield and Xavi live in a nice house a couple blocks from campus.
This entire area, for several miles in diameter, was filled with wealthy mansions a couple hundred years ago.
The college took over several of them, managing to refurbish and repurpose many into administrative buildings with little to no true structure modifications.
The large plots of land between them, once belonging to the old mansions, were now where the class buildings, sports fields, and other complexes were built. The massive gardens are all mostly gone, but the atmosphere is preserved.
Enfield and Xavi’s house is one of the few in the area still in private hands. It’s one of the smaller mansions, hovering somewhere around six to seven thousand square feet. Not as enormous as the frat houses, for sure.
Most of the land that once belonged to their house has been sold off in smaller parcels over the decades, but they have a wonderfully ornate backyard and smaller but no less beautiful side yards. I stare at the front of the house for a minute and let its peace settle over me.
The neighborhood is picturesque, not just in its beauty but in its calm and quiet.
Traffic moves slowly and inconsistently.
There aren’t any through streets, so it’s only residential traffic in this area, which keeps the noise down.
There are mature trees rising everywhere, with their long branches creating stretching shadows like fingers across the ground.
Sighing, I climb the stairs and knock on the door.
While I wait, I turn to continue admiring the neighborhood.
Across the street is a beautiful blue house with a wrap-around deck.
There’s a turret on the side with a piano in the windows of the top floor.
I’ve been here before when someone is playing.
When someone is playing the piano, it feels as if we’re transported back in time.
“Hey.”
I turn to look at Enfield and smile. Hopefully, it looks convincingly happy. “Hey. Sorry I’m late.”
“No worries. Everything okay?”
I follow him inside and kick off my shoes just inside the door. “Yep. Got caught up.” In my feels.
Enfield nods.
Xavi is sitting on the couch when we enter the living room. Or den. I’m not entirely sure what this room is or was. Since they have half a dozen everyday gathering rooms, it could very well have been a closet at one point.
A very large closet.
Xavi smiles. “Where’s Brent?”
Of course. Why wouldn’t that be the first question? “Asleep. He’s not feeling well.”
“Awe. Does he need anything?”
Maybe his own room, so he can stop staying up so late and getting up so early to avoid me. If he is, in fact, not feeling well, it’s probably from lack of sleep.
I don’t share any of that as I shake my head. “Just sleep.” That’s the truth, at any rate.
“If you’re sure.”
I’m not sure. I’m not sure what to do.
I rub my face and drop into a chair facing them. I’ve never been one of those people upset by the relationships of others. PDA doesn’t bother me. I’m not someone who gets jealous easily.
But I can’t look at them together. Happy. In love. Not when my chest aches.
“What’s wrong, Rafe?” Enfield asks.
I shake my head, but his stupid question makes stupid tears sting my stupid eyes.
Ugh. I thought I got all these out. Holding my breath doesn’t seem to be helping right now, though.
Sighing in frustration, I lean forward and drop my face into my hands, elbows on my knees, and try to breathe through it.
I jump when I feel hands on my back. I don’t have enough breath to protest as they climb into the chair with me and somehow wrap me up in their embrace. I feel tangled. It’s comical enough that I laugh, despite the way I hurt.
Neither asks me what’s wrong again. They don’t talk at all. Enfield holds me to him, and Xavi gently runs his fingers through my hair.
I don’t have the breath in me to stop the words as they begin spilling out.
“Mom wanted me to meet some girls, and I didn’t want to, so I asked Brent to pretend to be my boyfriend.
If I’m in a relationship, Mom will drop it.
It was supposed to be easy. Just some hand-holding.
Googly eyes. Sappy shit that sounds convincing while we secretly laugh at the shared secret. ”
Xavi kisses my cheek.
“Then he stood under a damn mistletoe, and someone was in there. Was it you?” I glare at them.
Enfield laughs. “No.”
“They pointed out the stupid mistletoe and Brent standing under it. If he’s my boyfriend, then I shouldn’t be bothered about kissing him, right? So I do. It’s just a kiss. It’s not a big deal at all. I’ve done more without it meaning shit. And we’re friends, so… that should make it easier.”
“Uh-oh,” Xavi murmurs.
“So we kiss. And we kiss and kiss and kiss. I don’t know what happened. I’ve had good kisses before. This wasn’t the same thing.”
“It wasn’t good?”
I ignore Xavi, though I appreciate him trying to make light of it.
“I—everything feels different after. We get into bed, and I ask if we can kiss again. We make out for ages. We wake up and fool around. Things escalate. We fuck. A lot. But it’s more than that.
We share things and talk, and… he’s already my best friend, but somehow, it feels like we’re getting closer.
It feels intimate. Important and big and different. ”
When I close my eyes, I see Brent hiding under his blanket, barely acknowledging me. The hurt in my chest takes my breath away, and fresh tears sting my eyes.
“Then we get back, and he won’t talk to me.
He stays up late, so I’m asleep when he comes in.
He leaves before I wake up. He doesn’t answer my texts.
He doesn’t even open them. He’s pretending that I don’t exist, but I don’t know why.
I’ve gone over that last day again and again, and I just… I don’t know what I did wrong.”
“Let me see if I understand this… he agreed to be your fake boyfriend, but things got real, and they were good right up until you got home, where the fake boyfriend agreement ended. Am I right?” Enfield asks.
I nod. “I keep thinking I should talk to him. Promise him that it was nothing, so we can be friends again. He’s my best friend, Enfield. I can’t lose him.”
“I love you when I say this,” Xavi says, “but I think you’re being dumb.”
Frowning, I twist a little to look at him. He’s giving me a sympathetic smile. “How am I being dumb?”
“Have you considered that it wasn’t fake for him at all?”
“That was the agreement, though. How can it not be fake when we’re really not together? I don’t follow your logic.”
Xavi sighs. “I think his feelings for you were real all along, and when you two started to move into real shit, it got too much. So when the agreement ends and you’re back in the real world, he now has to deal with that.”
I’m shaking my head. “He’s never once given me any indication that he’s interested. We’re friends.”
Enfield chuckles. “Rafe, you’re being na?ve.”
I open my mouth to argue, and then I remember the day we arrived at my house.
I remember further back when I proposed this scheme to him.
He didn’t know I’m bisexual. Maybe he always thought I wasn’t an option.
In the same way I didn’t consider him an option because he’s my best friend. Same thing, but different motivation.
“You really think that’s what’s happening?” I ask, still skeptical.
“Yes,” they say at the same time.
“It sounds to me that he doesn’t play pretend as well as you do, and now he doesn’t know how to deal with his emotions,” Xavi says.
“But…” I shake my head. “I didn’t think…” Everything I’ve been struggling with the last few days at home, and this last almost week since coming back. It changes things. I didn’t think he was interested in me, so he’s been putting space between us to drive the point home.
Does it make sense that he does feel the same way and he’s struggling because he doesn’t think I do? Wow, how melodramatic of us.
“You should talk to him,” Enfield says.
“I’d love to, but I think you missed the part where I said he’s never there and I have no idea where he vanishes to,” I grumble.
“Find him,” Xavi says, as if it’s that simple.
Find him. I know where he is right now. I don’t need to find him. My heart races. It’s fear. Fear that this is going to end very, very badly.
“What if you’re wrong?” I ask.
“What if we’re right?”
“No. Don’t do that. I need an answer. What if you’re wrong?”
“If we’re wrong, you’ll still have spoken to him and will have had the chance to get on the same page,” Enfield says. “It won’t erase anything. You’ll need to work through it and find a new balance.”
“Either way, I’ve lost my best friend,” I say and let my head drop.
“No. I don’t think you have. It feels hopeless right now because you’re hurting. No matter what the outcome, I think you’ll make it through it together. In what capacity depends on how he feels.”
That’s the end of the conversation. I stay with Enfield and Xavi until it’s late. We talk about nothing important, which is good since my brain is focused on Brent. Can they be right? Did I completely misread the entire week with him?
No matter how I think of every interaction and every conversation, I’m simply not sure. It’s hard to see our interactions through a different lens when all I can feel is my own aching heart. I feel his absence. His avoidance. His pretending that I’m not there.
It would hurt no matter what. But it hurts extra now.
What if Enfield and Xavi are right, though? What if he’s hurting too? What if we’re both being stupid because we’re both stuck in our own heads, thinking the other one doesn’t feel the same way?
I don’t remember walking back, but the next thing I know, I’m staring at Brent asleep in his bed.
Yep, I’m being a creeper. I watch him sleep for a minute as I work up the courage to wake him and demand a conversation.
What do I say? Where do I start? With a fucking confession or an apology or a question?
I’m not sure how to protect myself in this situation, but maybe that’s not what I need to do. Maybe it’s time to be vulnerable with this man one more time. This time, it’s for all the cookies.