Chapter 5 #2
“Of course! Jesus Christ. Your mouthwatering ass was perched there, two feet from my face, defying fucking gravity, and as you keep reminding me, I’m twenty-four.
Do that math, Knox.” I shook my head. “But I was trying to play it cool, since you weren’t interested. ” I paused, eyes narrowed. “Right?”
“What? No. Or… yes?” He looked exasperated. “Learn to structure a question, for God’s sake.” Knox ran one big hand through his hair. “You and I are… we’re colleagues, Goodman. Sort of. So this is not a discussion that we should even be having. And aside from all that—”
I coughed, “Bullshit.”
“Aside from all that,” he repeated—and he was right, people repeating themselves was annoying—“there’s a significant age difference between us, and with that comes a significant gap in experience. Nothing will ever happen between us because I’d be taking advantage of your youth, and I—”
I burst out laughing. “Oh my God. You’re a walking, talking logical fallacy. Age does not equate to experience, Mr. High Standards, because I have plenty of experience. Like… plenty.”
Knox’s eyes flared, and his jaw worked from side to side for a minute. “I’m not having this conversation,” he said at length. “And I am not having sex with you.”
I made a squawking noise that would have been embarrassing if I hadn’t been too outraged to care. “Who asked you to?” I challenged. “I said I liked looking at your ass. I didn’t say I wanted to claim it.”
He huffed out a laugh. “No, because you want me to claim yours. Not happening.”
I put on my pity-face. “Your loss.” I jumped off the bed, whipped off my T-shirt, and grabbed my own suitcase from the floor so I could heave it onto the bed.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Seducing you, obviously.” I rummaged through the bag until I found a polo shirt and yanked it on, then turned to the mirror and ran a hand through my wavy hair until the mess looked just-fucked instead of fucked-up.
“Later.” I grabbed my phone and patted my ass pocket to make sure I still had my wallet before heading into the living room.
“You’re going out.” Knox made the words sound half-questioning and half-accusing.
“Ding ding ding. Don’t wait up. Oh!” I wrinkled my nose. “And don’t bring anyone back here to fuck, okay? It’d just be awkward with four of us here.”
“Where are you going?” he asked as I wrenched open the door.
“A bar first.” I grinned, quoting his own words back at him. “And then who knows?”
I realized pretty quickly that there were several problems with my plan for “I’ll show Knox how fuckable I am” vengeance sex.
For one thing, though the number of available Grindr gays in Boston was exponentially higher than anywhere I’d ever lived, that just made weeding out the weirdos that much more time-consuming.
By the time I’d had my second drink in the hotel lobby—and, yes, watched Knox walk out the front door of the hotel, because I was a sap like that—I’d decided that Grindr was not for me.
Not in this town. Not at this juncture. I was going to have to do things the old-fashioned way.
So, I’d googled “gay clubs Boston,” picked the top search choice, and called a ride share, but before we’d left the curb, my driver, Nazim, had taken one look at me and pronounced that I was “way, way underdressed, sweetie” for Club Giraffe.
Instead, he’d suggested a gay bar in Dorchester called Bar-Z, which sounded far away—much further than Knox would have gone—which was about the time I realized that vengeance sex required Knox not only to know I was having the sex, but to care, and neither of those things would be true.
“Yeah, sure, wherever,” I’d agreed half-heartedly.
And that was how I’d ended up at a place that was less of a raucous hookup spot and more like a laid-back Irish bar with a DJ—one who knew how to use a mic, thank God—who spun increasingly up-tempo songs for the folks on the nearly empty dance floor.
I perched my ass on a stool next to a slightly heavyset, very drunk, bearded man named John, whose roommate Teagan had broken his heart by receiving love texts from another guy named John, except first-John didn’t get how Teagan could have feelings for other-John when Teagan spent all his waking hours with first-John, and Teagan should know first-John loved him even if he’d never spoken the words and even if other-John was the one who’d written him love texts, and…
well, by that point I’d been working on my fourth drink of the evening, and I probably looked like that meme of Zach Galifianakis counting cards, but I nodded along very seriously.
The best way to deal with the shit state of your own sex life was to worry about someone else’s, and I believed that sincerely.
“Have you tried talking to Teagan?” I suggested when he finally wound down.
“I mean, I’m no expert on relationships since I’ve never had one, but I think I’d want someone to spell things out for me.
Loudly. In tiny words that are impossible to misinterpret.
Like, ‘I want to fuck you over the kitchen counter, Teagan, because you’re the hottest thing I’ve ever seen,’” I nearly yelled in demonstration, making heads swivel in my direction.
John snickered, then sighed. “Yeah, but… I was afraid of losing our friendship.”
More quietly, I continued. “But you kinda lost it anyway, if he’s with other-John now. And it’s better to be honest about what you’re feeling.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely,” I said with the confidence of four heavily poured gin and tonics.
“Better that than having someone be all ‘lemme give you this look that’s so hot it’s like my eyeballs are made of molten green glass and then accuse you of being an immature teenager who wants things he shouldn’t want. ’”
I signaled the bartender for another round.
“Men are assholes,” John said loyally, even though he had no idea what I was talking about.
“Men are assholes,” I agreed, proving that I really did have a repetition problem and that I was rather inebriated.
John nodded vehemently for two beats, and then his eyes got suspiciously shiny, and he sniffled a little. “Except they’re not always, though, are they?”
I deflated. “Sometimes not,” I admitted, thinking of Knox opening up about his family on the car ride from Vermont and his happy-go-lucky smile in that picture on the orchard website. “They’re like cows that way, when you think about it. They lure you in, then bam. Murdered. Cold as ice.”
“You’re a little odd,” said John after a beat. “Would you like to dance?”
I was about to tell him I refused to be the only person out on the floor, but when I turned my head and looked—whoa, those strobe lights were something, huh? And when had they turned off the overhead lights?—it had gotten surprisingly full while I’d been talking with John.
Besides which, John was kind of cute with his lumberjack-adjacent vibe, and I felt like we were besties now.
“Sure.” I stood up and swayed a little, which was a sign I needed to slam back my fifth gin and tonic and then suck on the lime for good measure. “Let’s go.”
It had been a minute since I’d been drunk on the dance floor, and I’d forgotten how much fun it could be. The press of sweaty shirtless bodies against mine, the flashing lights, the loud beat of the music that pounded through me like a primal heartbeat.
It turned out John was a really good dancer.
His hips swayed against mine in perfect tempo, but he didn’t try to get handsy at all, which was great since I didn’t want him that way, and it was easy to let my mind float away on the rhythm to a place where I wasn’t thinking about the future, or my career, or the dizzying array of life choices in front of me and how badly I could fuck everything up.
“Oh, my God,” John cried in a panic, grabbing my arm hard enough to hurt and startling me out of my happy drift. “Don’t look over there. No! I said don’t look! That’s Teagan.”
“How am I supposed to know who I’m not supposed to look at, John?”
“Oh. Right. Redhead, navy shirt, and hoooly fuck, he’s heading this way! I don’t want him to see me.” John attempted to hide himself behind my considerably smaller frame.
“Dude, he’s looking right at you. Why are you hiding?”
“Because he must be here with John,” John moaned, which made the calculus in my brain start up again. “This is going to be awful.”
“It’s going to be fine—” I began, but then suddenly the redhead was right in front of me, peering around me to see John’s head buried between my shoulder blades.
“Hey! You must be John’s roommate Teagan!” I said super enthusiastically.
Teagan’s eyes flashed to mine for half a distracted second. “Yeah. John, are you—?”
I elbowed John lightly, and he straightened up and gave Teagan a bright smile.
“Teagan, hey! I didn’t see you there!” John leaned against my side, which was dangerous since I wasn’t feeling a whole lot steadier than he was, and draped his arm around my shoulder. “This is Gay.”
“Gage,” I corrected.
“Are you sure?”
I nodded. “Entirely.”
“Gage,” he agreed. He squeezed me against him more tightly. “He’s my new boyfriend.”
“I’m what?” I demanded.
“He’s what?” Teagan demanded.
“John,” I began, shaking my head, but Teagan interrupted.
“Did you get him drunk on purpose?” Teagan’s angry voice was loud enough that people around us began backing away. “Are you trying to take advantage of him?”
“What? No! No, no, no. God, no. He and I just m—”
“Goodman,” a voice way too close to my ear said. “What the hell are you doing?”
Jesus. Christ. Of all the gin-and-tonic joints in all the world…
I suddenly understood why Knox talked to God so much, because I was having a very strong urge to ask the laser lights in the rafters why me?
“Knox!” I plastered on a bright smile as I turned. “Hey! Meet John! I’m… He’s… We’re… boyfriends!” My voice was a little strangled and breathless with what I hoped sounded like excitement. “So you should probably go back to whatever—whoever—you were doing. Where is Myles?”
“Myles had a work emergency.”