Chapter 10
TEN
Griffin
I watched him run his fingers through his thick, short curls, elbows planted onto his desk, eyes a little red with strain, and the notes from today’s lectures scattered before him.
“You’re never gonna focus on the essay if you keep looking us up,” I said, feeling like a hypocrite for lecturing him on something I was failing to do just as badly.
Lately, it was impossible to unlock my phone without a slew of slow-motion shots from Blades of Northwood edited to some cheesy, romantic song that was trending on that particular day.
Every single one of them ended with the shot of us exchanging a perfectly innocent look during our first interview together.
I racked my brain to remember if there had been more to it. We’d been talking about our friendship since we were peewees. I’d remembered the time Andrei used his hockey stick as a guitar to make fun of my misguided attempts at guitar lessons, but he’d lost his balance and fallen right on his ass.
I guess mischief made my eyes twinkle like a lovesick teenager because the number of sudden zooms into the grin on my face upon mentioning that memory was ridiculous.
Just the other day, I’d read a new story about us.
It began with the words straight out of Blades of Northwood, with the retelling of that very memory.
The prologue wasn’t particularly long. Just after the opening shot, the author cut to us changing in the locker room, and it was my gaze that wandered over the lean cut of Andrei’s torso.
The towel I supposedly wore around my waist had failed to conceal my cock entirely, and Andrei noticed it, lifting one corner of his mouth into a little smirk.
I quit there.
Not that I was so insecure and touchy that I couldn’t plow through some fan fiction that had me and my best friend doing nasty things to each other.
The truth was, they were portraying me as a plank-pulling devil—not far from the truth—but Andrei was smirking coolly far too much.
I knew my best friend. He would never have survived such an encounter looking so cool.
He would have burst into flames at a mere mention of something naughty.
Andrei didn’t do well with sex talk in any circumstances. I just couldn’t see him nodding and winking at my dick.
Not that I could see myself getting hard around him just like that. The idea was…gross. He was like a brother I’d always wanted. He was like a twin spirit fused permanently to me. He was my whole other half.
He was also a guy, I reminded myself, scrolling through a few more tags that had appeared in my notifications. Hearts fluttered all over my screen.
“I need a cold shower,” Andrei said as he pushed himself away from the desk, the rickety chair under him creaking.
He was peeling off his T-shirt before he even stepped into the bathroom. He tossed it on his bed, slipped into the bathroom, and shut the door. He hummed some song I’d never heard. The noise of water hitting the tiles drowned his voice, and I continued the scroll of doom.
There we are again, I thought, running into the images from Toby’s edit.
The fucker had posted them right after playing the reel to us, and it put him squarely on the map as part of the main cast. His profile exploded with attention, in no small part thanks to the fact that he had plugged the Griffdrei hashtag.
Just this morning, Dad called me for our weekly chat. He didn’t ask, but everything he said had an air of a question around it. And when he asked about Andrei, I could hear the expectation bubbling in his voice.
“Were you on Instagram, Dad?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” he asked innocently.
“Andrei’s fine. We’re both fine. We’re just getting the wrong kind of attention.”
“Son, there’s nothing wrong with it,” Dad said seriously, and I nearly rolled my eyes right out of my skull. It was bad enough that I’d been looking at Andrei for signs of truth in the goddamn fanfics; now my own father wanted to know if I was secretly hooking up with my best friend.
Jen Harding emailed us to book an afternoon next week for a buddy day shoot.
It would be for an episode that heavily featured the two of us.
She explained that every trope would get an episode with more focus, and apparently, the Casanova trope I’d been given at the start no longer mattered so much. We were all about Griffdrei.
Andrei stepped out of the bathroom in a pair of white boxer briefs, rubbing his hair with a towel. He opened the closet and rummaged through his clothes.
“Going out?”
“Library,” he said.
I didn’t ask more questions. It was becoming difficult to talk about the most mundane things because there was always something that would remind one of us about the virality of the thing we’d always taken for granted.
Somehow, our simple, loyal friendship was blown so out of proportion that we were almost starting to lose it.
As Andrei tossed the towel on the back of his chair, I watched the way his pec stretched and his bicep extended before curling.
He was a pale shade of bronze, summer fading from his skin, and as lean as the stories described him.
“Cut like Michelangelo himself had carved him,” one short story had said, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.
I’d always been aware of Andrei’s good looks.
This was nothing new. Sure, I’d never before noticed the way my mouth went dry around Andrei or the way I couldn’t quite tear my gaze off the curve of the small of his back or the drowning pain in my chest that flared out of nowhere at the sight of his lean torso, but I’d never been a particularly observant person anyway.
It could have been going on for years, and it meant nothing.
Andrei bent down to push each leg through his sweatpants, then yanked a hoodie down his torso, concealing the last of his bare, smooth skin before packing notebooks into a backpack and heading out.
As the door shut, my gaze lingered on the space where he had just stood.
I shook my head. I needed a shower, too. Lying in my bed and testing myself with thought experiments would get me nowhere. I needed to wash off the cold sweat that had covered me the moment Andrei had stepped out of the bathroom, drops of water still holding onto his collarbone.
I wondered what went through his head when he discovered the edits.
He was the only person on the planet with whom I could speak virtually telepathically, yet I couldn’t decipher his feelings about this.
Andrei had never been open about girls, dating, and sex. All I knew was that Andrei had stuff to do outside that I wasn’t invited to. Clearly, he didn’t want me to meet the girls he hooked up with.
I had invited him to some of the more casual dates of mine.
In high school, when I’d dated Summer Jennings for those two months leading to a disastrous prom dance, I’d invited Andrei out with us from time to time.
It had felt like a logical thing. I had wanted my best friend and the girl I really liked to get along. But Andrei had always been busy.
And I knew better. I knew Andrei’s schedule. I knew what he did in his spare time. I knew that his “busy” meant he would spend the night developing photos he’d recently taken on his vintage film camera. If he’d wanted to be invited again, he would have come up with a better excuse.
Eventually, I’d stopped trying to get him to meet my girls. I’d mainly stopped because he never wanted to, but I had also come to realize that my relationships didn’t last long enough to justify the effort.
For his part, Andrei had never invited me to meet his dates. If he were secretly married to some sorority chick, I hadn’t gotten the wedding invite.
And that was fine. It was totally fine. I just needed to keep telling myself this, and it might eventually become the truth.
I hopped out of my bed and stretched, my mind circling back to the core question. Was he grossed out by the fiction about us swirling online? Sure, he had been born here, he’d grown up here, but maybe it didn’t sit well with him that people wrote stories about him being gay.
Me? I didn’t care. I’d never been curious like that—at least, not until I’d read a particularly explicit passage that described what I felt when Andrei entered me. Show me a guy who wouldn’t freak out a little reading that, I dare you.
I pulled my hoodie over my head and tossed it over the back of my chair, then peeled the sweatpants off my legs next.
I really needed to stop letting this get under my skin.
If I wanted to go around saying it didn’t bother me, then I had to act like it.
And if it bothered Andrei, then I needed to know why.
Was it because he secretly subscribed to some primitive ideas, or was he particularly grossed out because it was us?
And if that was the case, why? We’d been friends long before anyone looked at us twice.
I strolled into the bathroom and pulled down my boxer briefs, stepped out of them, and lifted them with my right foot, grabbing them with my left hand.
I glanced at the mirror and figured I needed a haircut.
I’d needed one a month ago. My hair had always been shaggy and wild, but I was getting startled by my own reflection these days.
I turned the water on, twisting it all the way to hot so the bathroom could steam up.
I lifted the top of the laundry basket and tossed my underwear inside. The boxer briefs landed on top of Andrei’s. Black with the print of red lips. I’d bought him those as a joke. He’d gone the shade of Red Delicious and rolled his eyes.
I swear I didn’t pick them up. I had no idea why they were hanging from my left hand the next time I blinked. I tried to work some spit into my mouth, but it was dry as ash, parched like the desert ground.
My other hand was on the doorknob, turning the lock, as Andrei’s underwear hung before my face.