Chapter 2 #3
“Well, start there,” Nate suggested, much kinder than Lane deserved. “Make sure you hit all the talking points. Everyone accepts you. It’s okay to be finding yourself. Experimentation is good—”
“But not on Grindr,” Ramsey inserted slyly.
“I mean, normally,” Nate said with a shrug, “I wouldn’t even blink about suggesting that, but not if you can’t sit back and watch him actually do it. Can you?”
Could he?
Maybe it wasn’t fair to Trevor, but even the thought of it made Lane’s stomach sour.
Not just because he wanted Trevor himself, but so many guys on Grindr were total assholes.
Selfish and shitty. An effective way to figure out if you were into guys, maybe, but ultimately probably an experience that Trevor wouldn’t look back on with fondness.
And Lane didn’t want that for Trevor. Not trusting, sweet, good-natured Trevor. He deserved better; he deserved the best.
“Probably not,” Lane admitted.
“I didn’t think so,” Nate said smugly. “So, after you give him the nice supportive coming out speech—I’m assuming you do know it, even if you completely fucking failed to give it to Trevor last night—offer to be the guy he experiments with.”
Lane swallowed hard. “What if he doesn’t want me?”
“Well, first off,” Ramsey said, sauntering over to where they were sitting, propping his elbows on the counter and leaning over it.
Even with circles under his eyes and hair a mess, he was unfairly pretty.
Unfair, too, that Lane had never really wanted him.
“He wouldn’t have told you if he didn’t want you. ”
“I’m not—”
“No,” Ramsey interrupted firmly. “He’d have gone to someone else. He told you for a reason. Don’t be stupid about this.”
“Hard for him not to be,” Nate said, like Lane wasn’t right here, “because he’s been stupid about this for the last six years.”
“Ouch.” Lane grimaced. Not even sure he could argue with that assessment. He felt stupid. And whenever he remembered how he’d acted last night, he felt even stupider, humiliation swamping him.
He should fix this. He wanted to fix this. But could he find the balls to actually offer, knowing that there was a possibility Trevor would laugh at it.
“He fucking gift wrapped this up for you. Don’t fuck it up again, okay?” Nate patted him on the shoulder. “You want another coffee for the road?”
“You’re kicking me out?”
Nate nodded intently. “You have a conversation to have, and I have a New Year’s morning wake-up celebration to redo.”
“Damn straight,” Ramsey echoed.
“What should I say?” Lane asked, panicking a little. He wasn’t ready to go do this. He needed more advice. He needed Nate to hold his hand and walk him through it. Nate, because Ramsey wouldn’t be very nice about it.
Nate shot him a frank look. “Just say it, Robinson.”
“But—”
“No,” Nate said inexorably. It occurred to Lane that maybe Nate wouldn’t be nicer about it than Ramsey would. He supposed that made a kind of fitting sense. After all, they were each other’s person. Maybe Nate made Ramsey a little nicer and Ramsey made Nate a little more unapologetic.
“Fine, fine. You want me to just . . .” Lane swallowed hard.
“Yes,” Ramsey said.
Lane supposed he shouldn’t be surprised that they kicked him out less than five minutes later, shoving a to-go cup of coffee into his hands and ushering him to his car. He had woken them up really freaking early.
But was it actually early if he hadn’t been to sleep?
Probably better that he hadn’t vocalized that particular question. He was already in big enough trouble with Ramsey.
The drive back was uneventful and went way faster than it should’ve, the forty-five minutes from Nate and Ramsey’s new condo passing practically in a blink of an eye.
He pulled into the parking garage under his tower, parked, and headed upstairs in the elevator. When Lane let himself back into the apartment, it was still quiet. Slipping his shoes off, he headed into the kitchen. No more lights on. Clearly Trevor was still sleeping.
It would be nicer to let Trevor sleep, but once Lane had a plan, he didn’t want to just sit around and wait.
If he did that long enough, maybe the certainty he’d found while talking to Nate and Ramsey and on his drive home would slowly dribble out of him, leaving him the same kind of fucking mess he’d been last night.
Well. Maybe what he should do was make breakfast. In the last few months, he’d learned nothing got Trevor up like the smell of bacon cooking, though the sound of the blender mixing his protein shake probably didn’t hurt either.
Lane grabbed food from the fridge—bacon and eggs and the bagels he had shipped from New York that he saved in the freezer for special occasions—but on cue it was only when the bacon was almost done in the oven and his protein shake was finishing up its blend cycle that he heard footsteps, and when Lane lifted his head, there Trevor was, brown eyes sleepy, wearing only a pair of ratty shorts and a threadbare T-shirt.
“Breakfast?” he asked hopefully.
“Yeah, give me a minute to make some eggs,” Lane said, turning back to the stove.
For a minute Trevor was quiet, but the eggs were almost done being scrambled when Trevor spoke up again. “So what’s the big occasion?”
“Who says it’s a big occasion?” Lane had made breakfast before.
Most days in fact, they rotated around each other in the kitchen.
Sometimes Lane would make extra of whatever he was cooking, or vice versa.
It wasn’t that unusual. Lane told himself he hadn’t been too obvious.
Besides, he was trying to be obvious. At least this time.
He was going to have to sit across from Trevor and say, hey, you wanna experiment? Experiment with me.
“You made your super special bagels,” Trevor pointed out dryly as they popped up from the toaster.
Lane swallowed hard and divided the eggs up between the two plates in front of him.
“New Year’s Day?” Lane offered even though it was dumb to pretend.
Don’t be stupid, Ramsey’s voice echoed in his head. But maybe it was more like, don’t keep being stupid.
“And,” Lane added, before he had no choice but to turn around, fussing with the bacon on the plates, making sure that Trevor had all the super extra crispy ones, just the way he liked, “you came out last night. That’s a big deal.”
Trevor groaned immediately, but not in the super sexy way Lane wanted to someday pull out of him.
“What?” Lane asked, having no more excuses to keep plating up food. He turned and slid the plate with the extra crispy bacon in front of Trevor.
“I should’ve guessed. You totally blue-screened last night. But then you what, spent all night thinking of what you should have said instead?” Trevor sounded annoyed but also a tiny bit fond about this.
Lane grabbed on to that sliver of affection with both hands and ignored the rest. “Exactly,” he said, knocking his knee against Trevor’s, and for the first time in forever, didn’t immediately force himself to ignore the shiver of sensation that lanced through him at even the incidental touch.
“I should have . . . well, I should have said a lot of different things. That’s part of what this is about. ”
“And what’s the other part?” Trevor asked.
He got up and grabbed the orange juice—the super pulpy shit that Lane wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole—as well as the cream cheese.
Lane was being so supportive he wasn’t even going to give him crap about ruining his good bagels by slathering cream cheese all over them.
“We haven’t even made it through the first part yet,” Lane complained.
“Well, get it out, then,” Trevor said, sighing impatiently, which told Lane that he knew what was coming. But that didn’t matter. The words still mattered. They could still make a difference.
Just because you expected someone to tell you that you were loved and accepted no matter what didn’t mean that wasn’t something you actually needed to hear.
“Whatever you are, whatever label you want to give yourself, you’ve got a spot here. Here, in this apartment. And on this team. We don’t judge. I definitely don’t judge.”
Trevor raised an eyebrow. “Appreciate it. But you kinda seemed like you were judging last night.”
“That wasn’t . . .” Lane took a deep breath and ate a slice of bacon. It helped, because bacon always helped. “That wasn’t what it looked like.”
“Okay, so tell me what it was.”
Lane missed the days when Trevor had been so sweet and unassuming.
Back then it had been pretty easy to get him to drop things.
The Trevor who’d come to Toronto was still essentially that kid, but he was stronger too.
Tougher. In so many ways Lane was screwed because this older Trevor who took less bullshit was even more attractive than the younger, more pliant version.
“Um, well, you know that advice I gave you?”
Trevor might’ve rolled his eyes, but Lane was currently having an anxiety-related out-of-body experience, so he told himself he’d imagined it.
“Sure,” Trevor said. “The other half of your really great response.”
“Sarcasm is not helpful,” Lane said.
But Trevor just laughed, taking a big bite of bagel and cream cheese. A crumb lingered on the corner of his mouth and Lane wanted to lick it off.
He’d never been so close to actually being able to do that, and yet so far.
“Just freaking say it,” Trevor said, because clearly he had no idea what was coming. Or what was twisting Lane up—what had twisted him up for what felt like a million fucking years at this point.