Chapter 7 #2
“No, God, please don’t. Then he’ll know just how upset I am.” And that was the humiliating topper to all of this, wasn’t it?
He’d cared.
He currently cared, present tense.
“Seriously, who does that? Just to fool you into bed?”
“He didn’t fool me into anything,” Ren said, crossing his arms over his chest. Then realized a second later that he was actually defending Seth.
What. The. Fuck.
“But you’re still pissed,” Gabe stated. “Apparently I can’t be pissed though.”
“No, he’s just . . . he’s not a bad guy.” It was painful to admit it. Not as painful as waking up and seeing that poster opposite the bed, but close.
“You’re just pissed that he fooled you,” Gabe said.
“Well, yeah,” Ren said. And he was. It was humiliating, just thinking of all those times when he’d thought, oh, another thing that Seth and Jake have in common, and not once, not one single fucking time, had it occurred to him that they were actually the same person.
“I think,” Gabe said in a contemplative tone, standing and wandering back over to the espresso machine, grabbing the milk from the fridge, “that it’s actually kinda romantic. You wouldn’t talk to him, no matter what he did. So he figured out a way to talk to you.”
“Don’t,” Ren said. “Just . . . don’t, okay? I know you love being in love but that’s not me. That’s never going to be me.”
But he’d defended Seth, hadn’t he? He’d insisted that Gabe not kick his ass.
Not that Gabe probably could.
Gabe came back to him, stirring his coffee. “Maybe, maybe not,” he agreed. “But you’re something, aren’t you? Or else you wouldn’t be so angry.”
Angry.
Hurt.
Humiliated.
He was all of those things. And Ren realized, hating every moment of it, that maybe his cousin wasn’t wrong. Old Ren would have shrugged this off and moved on to the next cute guy.
But there was no way he was getting over this. Not anytime soon. He was going to be pissed for awhile; he could feel the anger, the way it had settled into his bones.
Nobody knew how to do pissed off better than Italians.
Gabe pissed him off sometimes, but he hadn’t been close enough to anyone else for them to truly bother him.
And he was definitely bothered by Seth.
“I hate you,” Ren said mildly. “I really hate that you said that.”
Gabe laughed. “Figured it out, didn’t you?”
“How can I trust someone who lied though?”
“It’s not easy, but you can do it. Maybe Sean never told me he was someone else, but he never told me about this huge part of his life before he came here, he never told me that he was married before. Or that his husband died, and he was still mourning him.”
Ren sighed. “Why do I think that you’re going to tell me exactly how I’m gonna forgive him for this simple, no-big-deal lie of telling me he was someone else?”
“I’m not,” Gabe said, chuckling. “I can’t. You’ve gotta figure that part out for yourself. But maybe start with . . . maybe you’re not so pissed that you never want to talk to him again.”
Except, that was exactly what he’d just said to Seth.
I’ll settle for you never saying another word to me, and never, ever looking my direction again.
“I’m guessing,” Gabe continued, “from your suddenly guilty expression that you already told him to fuck off.”
“Of course I did. What else was I supposed to say? I woke up in his bed . . .”
“Wait . . . what?” Gabe interrupted him, a shocked expression on his face. Suddenly angry all over again. “He slept with you? While you still thought Jake was a different guy?”
“No, no . . .” Ren paused. “I . . . I don’t think anything happened? I thought it would. I thought . . . I couldn’t have forgotten . . .”
“You were drunk, but you weren’t that drunk,” Gabe teased. “You’d have remembered.”
“I either forgot, or he didn’t . . .” Ren hesitated. He’d never have forgotten kissing Seth. Which meant that they hadn’t.
The alternative was even worse than Seth lying: that Ren had finally gotten a little taste of what he’d been dying for and it had just disappeared in a fog of booze.
But he could remember them getting close more than once. With all that liquor in him, he’d never have resisted. Not when what he’d wanted for so long was within his grasp. And Seth?
He’d been drinking too.
Not as much as Ren.
But enough.
They must’ve kissed, and Ren must’ve forgotten about it.
Fuck.
“If it’s possible, you look even more pissed than you did five minutes ago,” Gabe pointed out, clearly amused.
Which . . . that was fine, Ren supposed. He deserved it, for all the shit he’d given Gabe over the beginning—okay, and the middle, and the current state—of his relationship with Sean.
He absolutely deserved every second of the wry amusement in his cousin’s voice.
“There’s no way I could’ve forgotten, but I must have,” Ren said, scrubbing a hand over his face.
“Yeah, I don’t think you’ve ever slept chastely in someone else’s bed before,” Gabe teased.
Another comment he totally deserved.
Because it was true.
“Ugh,” Ren groaned. “What am I gonna do?”
“You’re not going to like it,” Gabe said, patting him on the back, reassuringly. “But I think you might have to actually go grovel.”
Ren’s head whipped up and he glared at his cousin. “Grovel? Me? Why?”
“You did tell him to fuck off, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Ren hesitated. “Not in as many words. But yes.”
“And now you want to take it back. You don’t want him to fuck off.” Gabriel waved a hand. “Some groveling is probably going to be necessary to perform a complete reversal.”
“I . . . don’t . . . grovel,” Ren enunciated each word clearly, just so there was no mistake.
Gabe laughed. “So what, you thought you’d just show up and he’d be so grateful that you aren’t pissed anymore that everything would go back to normal? What is normal? Is that even what you want? I thought you wanted to get over the guy. Move on to someone else.”
“Yes,” Ren said through clenched teeth. He hated that Gabe was right; he’d expected exactly that. “And that was when . . . well, when I thought I was moving on to Jake.”
“But now Jake is Seth. And you aren’t over him at all.”
Ren refused to acknowledge that, and he slid off his stool, heading to the espresso machine. Somehow his head was pounding more than it had this morning.
“What do you want?” Gabe asked. Continuing to be a massive pain in Ren’s ass. “You can’t go over there and say, whoops, never mind, I might’ve overreacted, and not have any idea of what you want.”
“Why not?” Ren challenged.
Gabe sighed. “Well, of course you could. But this changes things, doesn’t it? You want to fuck him, rather desperately, and you also like him. Or you liked Jake.”
“I still don’t know whether he and Jake are really, well, the same,” Ren argued. Even though he already knew they were.
Ren had said it himself. Seth was still a good guy, and he had his version of honor. Even if he was going to go out of his way to tell Ren he was someone else, he wouldn’t have lied about who he was.
“Really?” Gabe sounded skeptical. “He doesn’t sound like the catfishing type, honestly.”
“Well,” Ren said, adding hot water to his cup, lightening up the espresso only the tiniest bit, “he is.”
Gabe had the fucking nerve to laugh. “Maybe don’t lead with that when you’re groveling.”
“I’m not groveling,” Ren argued. “I have zero intention of doing any groveling.”
“He may not want to see you, if you don’t,” Gabe said.
This was so patently ridiculous, that it was Ren’s turn to laugh.
Which hurt.
“Yeah, I’ll take my chances,” Ren said, and then drowned the rest of his Americano. “I’m gonna take a shower.”
“Just in case . . . what . . . you don’t have to grovel at all, but he grovels for you?” Gabe said, following Ren towards the bathroom.
Instead of answering, Ren shut the door in Gabe’s face. He could hear him laughing on the other side as he flipped the shower on.
The thing was, he couldn’t even conceptualize Seth groveling. Either Seth or Jake—and why was he still thinking of them as two separate people anyway?
Neither of them would grovel then, and that was fine. Totally one hundred percent okay.
It was unsurprising, maybe, but guilt gnawed at Seth all day.
From the moment that Ren walked out of the bedroom, betrayal written all over his beautiful face, to when he scrubbed the stove, scouring the already clean surfaces like he could scrub away all his remorse, to scrubbing the toilets, regret bubbling up inside him like vomit.
He finally dumped his rubber gloves in the cleaning bucket and tucked it away in his tiny little laundry room, and headed towards his bedroom to change for a run.
But he stopped in the doorway, brought to an abrupt halt by the sight of the bed, sheets and blankets still rumpled from when Ren had slept in it the night before.
Maybe if he’d known that it would all blow up in his face, that last night was his only chance, he wouldn’t have let Ren go to bed alone.
No, he still would’ve.
Ren was drunk.
He’d never have taken advantage like that.
Seth turned towards the closet. After he got back from his run, he’d wash the sheets and the blankets, erasing Ren’s presence from his room and his bed, and he’d try to get over it.
Maybe he would. Maybe he wouldn’t.
But whichever he ended up living with, he knew that Ren would never forgive him.
He’d humiliated him.
Fooled him.
Lied to him.
Seth yanked off his t-shirt, deciding that maybe he didn’t deserve to be forgiven. He’d only wanted to get to know the man, to get a chance to woo him without all the rules that governed Ren’s normal hookups.
He’d wanted a different way in, and it was almost worse that it had been working. Otherwise Ren wouldn’t be so fucking pissed off at him.
But that didn’t make him feel any better.
Not when his chances were lying shredded in a heap on the bedroom floor, and Ren’s words were still echoing in his ears.
I’ll settle for you never saying another word to me, and never, ever looking my direction again.