Chapter 33
OLIVER
“One-eighty,” Kyle announces, sliding another plate onto the barbell. “You ready?”
I roll my shoulders, positioning myself under the bar. The metal is cool against my traps. “Born ready.”
“That’s not an answer. That’s a bumper sticker.”
I ignore him, bracing my core and lifting the weight off the rack. The first rep is smooth—down, pause, drive through the heels, up. The second follows. By the third, my quads are burning in that satisfying way that tells me I’m working.
Kyle watches with his arms crossed, his sandy brown hair still damp from the cardio he insists on doing before every lifting session.
The fluorescent lights buzz overhead in the cavernous gym, my grunts and the metallic clang of weights echoing off the walls.
Across the room, a girl with a messy bun pounds away on a treadmill, her ponytail swinging in time with her steps.
A guy in a faded BSU T-shirt scrolls through his phone as he half-heartedly pedals an exercise bike.
“So,” Kyle says as I finish my set and rack the bar. “You and Ryan.”
I grab my water bottle and take a long drink to buy myself time. “What about it?”
“Don’t play dumb. It doesn’t suit you.” Kyle’s brown eyes narrow. “Drew told me about the shorts.”
“Drew needs to learn to mind his own business.”
“Drew’s business is everyone’s business. That’s how he operates.” Kyle adds more weight to the bar for his set. “So? What’s the deal?”
I wipe my forehead with my towel, stalling. What is the deal? Ryan and I have kissed. We’ve had what Gerard memorably called a “friction situation.” We’ve held hands under stars and shared sandwiches on picnic blankets. But we haven’t talked about what any of it means.
“There’s no deal,” I finally say. “We’re seeing where things go.”
Kyle pauses mid-plate-loading to stare at me. “Seeing where things go.”
“Yeah.”
“You made each other come in a public park.”
“It was a secluded clearing.”
“And you’re ‘seeing where things go’?” Kyle’s voice rises with incredulity. “Oliver, what the hell?”
I gesture for him to lower his voice, glancing toward the students who are definitely now pretending not to listen. “It’s complicated.”
“It’s not complicated. It’s the opposite of complicated.” Kyle finishes loading his plates aggressively, then positions himself under the bar. “You like him. He likes you. You’ve already rounded several bases together. The only thing left is to make it official.”
“Since when are you an expert on relationships?”
Kyle doesn’t answer immediately, focusing on his squat form—which is annoyingly perfect, as always. He powers through five reps before racking the bar and turning to face me.
“I’m not an expert,” he admits. “But I know that if it were Alex and me—” He stops abruptly. He’s clearly said something he didn’t mean to.
“If it were you and Alex, what?”
His jaw tightens. He grabs his own water bottle and takes a drink that lasts approximately forever. When he finally lowers it, there’s a flush creeping up his neck that has nothing to do with the workout.
“If it were Alex and me,” he says carefully, “and we’d done what you and Ryan did? I’d already be halfway to the altar.”
The admission hangs in the air between us, heavier than any barbell in this gym.
“Kyle,” I say slowly, a grin spreading across my face. “Are you saying you want to marry Alex?”
“That’s not—I didn’t—” Kyle sputters, his composure cracking in a way I’ve rarely seen. “I’m saying that if I were lucky enough to have Alex want me like that, I wouldn’t waste time ‘seeing where things go.’ I’d lock that kid down immediately.”
“But you haven’t.”
“Haven’t what?”
“Locked him down.” I lean against the squat rack, studying my friend with new eyes. “You bring him homemade soup when he’s sick. You covered his ears when Drew made a dick joke at the fair. But you’ve never actually made a move.”
Kyle’s flush deepens to crimson. “That’s different.”
“How is it different?”
“Because Alex is—” He runs a hand through his hair, frustrated. “Alex is special. He’s not like other people. He needs someone who’s going to be careful with him, someone who’s not going to push too fast or expect too much. I can’t just—I can’t risk scaring him off by coming on too strong.”
“So you’re waiting.”
“I’m being patient.”
“For how long?”
The question seems to strike Kyle somewhere vulnerable. He turns back to the squat rack, adjusting the weight clips that don’t need adjusting, avoiding my eyes.
“As long as it takes,” he says quietly.
I should probably let it go. Kyle’s private about his feelings in a way that makes extracting information not dissimilar to pulling teeth.
But something about this conversation—about him calling me out for not defining things with Ryan while he’s been pining silently for Alex—strikes me as deeply hypocritical.
“You know,” I say, moving to spot him for his next set, “you’re giving me a lot of flak for not making things official with Ryan. But at least I’ve actually done something about my feelings. When’s the last time you even tried to move things forward with Alex?”
Kyle positions himself under the bar, his grip tightening. He takes a breath, lifts the weight, and descends into his squat. His voice comes out strained as he pushes through the rep. “You and Ryan are already physical. You’ve crossed that bridge. Alex and I haven’t even—we’re not—”
“Not what?”
Kyle racks the bar with more force than necessary, the clang echoing through the gym. “I haven’t had sex since freshman year,” he says flatly. “Not since I met Alex.”
I blink. Process. Blink again.
“Wait, what?”
“You heard me.” Kyle crosses his arms, defensive.
“You think your nine months of abstinence before the championship were impressive? Try three years, Jacoby. Three years of nothing but my hand, sometimes a dildo—which you will never tell a soul I own—because the only person I want is someone I’m too chickenshit to actually pursue. ”
Well, slap my ass and call me Gerard. Sarcastic, prickly, takes-no-prisoners Kyle Graham has been celibate for three years because he’s in love with Alex Donovan.
“Kyle,” I say carefully. “That’s—”
“Pathetic? Sad? I’m aware.”
“I was going to say intense.” I shake my head, still processing. “Three years. You’ve been into Alex for three years, and you’ve never said a thing?”
“What am I supposed to say?” Kyle’s voice cracks slightly.
“‘Hey Alex, I know you have crippling anxiety, and I’m your only real friend on this campus, but also I’ve been in love with you since the moment we met, and I think about you constantly, and sometimes I jerk off imagining what it would be like to hold you? ’ Yeah, that would go over great.”
“Maybe not in those exact words—”
“There are no words.” Kyle slumps against the squat rack, his usual rigid posture crumbling.
“Every time I think about telling him, I imagine his face. The fear. The confusion. He’d probably think I was only being nice to him because I wanted something.
He’d pull away, and I’d lose him entirely, and I can’t—” His voice breaks.
“I can’t lose him, Oliver. He’s the best thing in my life. ”
The clatter of weights and hum of treadmills seems to fade away, leaving only the sound of Kyle’s uneven breathing and the distant thud of a basketball bouncing somewhere on the other side of the building.
I move to stand beside Kyle, leaning against the rack shoulder to shoulder.
We’re both sweaty and probably smell terrible, but this feels like a moment that requires physical proximity.
“For what it’s worth,” I say, “I don’t think you’d lose him.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No, but I’ve seen the way he looks at you.” I nudge Kyle’s shoulder with mine. “At the fair, when you were recovering from the Gravitron? He was rubbing your back and whispering to you like you were the only person in the world. That’s not how you treat someone you just want to be friends with.”
“Sometimes I let myself hope. But then I remember all the ways it could go wrong, and the hope feels dangerous. Like if I let myself believe too much, the disappointment will kill me.”
“Kyle.” I grip his shoulder, forcing him to meet my eyes. “You’re scared. I’m scared. Everyone’s scared. That’s not a reason to stay stuck. That’s just the price of admission for giving a damn about someone.”
Kyle stares at me, his brown eyes searching my face for something. Whatever he finds there causes some of the tension to drain from his shoulders.
“Come on,” I say, gesturing toward the weight rack. “We’ve got two more sets. Then after we hit the showers, we’ll go to the beach and earn back the calories with some ice cream while you tell me more about this three-year dry spell and share some porn links.”
“I hate you.”
“Love you too, Graham.”