Chapter 7 #2
The port is coming up around us, ships ranked in the morning light, the dock infrastructure growing larger by the minute, and the cruise is over.
Two weeks in this room and it’s over, and something in my chest collapses, soft and silent and involuntary, like a held breath finally let out.
Jai settles a hand on my back, his palm flat between my shoulder blades, and I don’t say anything. Neither does he.
We stand on the balcony, all three of us, watching the ship ease into dock.
Wyatt’s arm is around my shoulders, heavy and warm, and he’s grinning the way he does when something is genuinely, uncomplicated good.
The port is crowded with ships, activity everywhere, the distant sound of the city morning replacing the open-ocean silence we’ve lived inside for two weeks.
“We should have done this every year,” Wyatt says. He means the cruise. He might mean more than the cruise. I don’t ask.
The thought of Nassau hits me sideways. “You never played,” I say to Jai. “The golf course in Nassau. You talked about it and you never went.” A pause. “I’m sorry. We kept you in the room.”
Jai looks at me. Then he makes a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a scoff, and he pulls me into him, his arm around my waist, my face against his jaw, and presses his lips to my cheek. A kiss. Just that. Warm and unhurried, his stubble rough against my skin.
“Cade,” he says. “I don’t give a single shit about the golf course.”
I turn to look at him. My mouth is close to his.
His dark eyes drop to it, the way they do, and then we’re kissing.
His mouth on mine, finally, deliberately, nothing accidental about it, and the taste of him is different kissing-close than it is when I’m on my knees, softer, more careful, his hand coming up to cup my jaw.
I make a small, wrecked sound into his mouth that I’ll be embarrassed about later and not right now.
Then Wyatt catches my shoulder and turns me, and he kisses me too, big, warm, his mouth easy and generous. When he pulls back, his blue eyes go straight to Jai, and Jai leans past me without hesitation and they kiss, and I watch it happen from four inches away.
It’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Two beautiful men, kissing each other like it’s completely natural, like this is just what mornings are for, and I’m standing between them with the Miami port spread out around us and ships on every side and I don’t care even a little.
“Let them look,” Wyatt says, when he pulls back, glancing out at the port.
He says it the way he says everything, easy, without self-consciousness, like embarrassment is a concept he’s heard described but never experienced personally.
“I want to kiss you guys.” And he does. Me again, then Jai again, then back to me, his big hands framing my face, sharing me between them while the ship docks in the morning light.
Packing takes twenty minutes and feels like dismantling something sacred.
Wyatt’s duffel comes up from the floor, stuffed with clothes and the lube bottle and a collection of wrappers he apparently never threw away.
Jai’s bag is neater, everything folded with the precision of someone who grew up being photographed in his clothes.
My duffel sits on the desk where I put it on day one, barely touched, the book back inside it, no progress made, the hero still in his cave, the dragon unfought.
My bunk is still made up, the sheets crisp, the pillow undented.
Technically I slept up there the first few nights.
In the elevator, Wyatt takes my phone from my back pocket without asking and enters his number.
Jai does the same, then adds himself in the contacts as “Jai golf guy” and hands it back.
“We’ll be in touch,” Wyatt says, and the words are so easy, so offhand, that I don’t ask what they mean.
I’m afraid that asking will make the answer smaller than I want it to be.
I look down at the phone instead. In my head, in the quiet: maybe in my journal.
Late at night. In my room. I’ll figure out what to call them then.
The gangway is loud and overwhelming after two weeks of the same three hundred square feet.
The port smells like diesel and ocean and something synthetic, and the sun is already hot, and there are hundreds of people moving in every direction, and I follow Wyatt’s broad back through the crowd the way I’ve been following him all week.
Lucy and Lily find us first, or we find them: they’re standing by the family luggage cart with my parents, both of them looking polished and put-together in the way they always are.
Lucy’s eyes find my hands. I’m holding Wyatt’s hand on the left and Jai’s on the right, and I hadn’t thought about it, it just happened, and she looks at my face and then at the ceiling of the terminal and says, “Oh my god.” Not angrily.
More like someone encountering a plot twist they already predicted.
Lily’s reaction is a slow blink, a single exasperated exhale, and then she shakes her head and reaches for her luggage.
“Okay,” she says, to no one. They’re already moving.
They’re done with Wyatt and Jai, the exes now filed away, and they’re moving on with the brisk efficiency of two women with medical school orientation in three weeks.
My mother hugs me. Tight, both arms, the kind of hug she used to give when I was small and she had the time to give it. “I just want you to know,” she says, quietly, against my hair, “that we accept you. Whatever this is. Gay, whatever. We’re your parents. We love you.”
My father, behind her, clears his throat. “We do wish,” he says, in his measured physician’s voice, “that you wouldn’t pick those two doofuses as your boyfriends.”
My face goes molten. The blush comes up so fast and so complete that the freckles across my nose probably disappear into it.
I do not look at Wyatt. I do not look at Jai.
I stare at my father’s vacation watch and think very firmly about differential equations.
Not boyfriends. I’m not calling them that.
The word is not a word I’m using, not out loud, not where anyone can hear it.
Maybe in a notebook. At home. With the door closed and the lights off. Maybe then.
After customs, in the open air, Wyatt pulls me into a hug that lifts me half off the ground and squeezes, and his laugh is warm against my ear.
“See you soon,” he says, which is either a promise or a thing people say.
Jai hugs me after, tighter, quieter, his mouth pressed briefly against my temple, and says, “Don’t do anything boring until we call. ” Which sounds more like a promise.
They go to collect Jai’s car from the parking garage.
I watch them go. Wyatt’s broad back disappearing into the elevator, Jai’s hand on the back of his neck, the two of them already talking, already riffing, already moving through the world with the total ease of men who have never needed to make themselves small.
My mother’s voice: “Shuttle’s here, Cade.”
I get in. Back seat, window, the city beginning outside the glass. The port shrinks behind us, ships ranked in the morning heat, and I sit with my phone in my hands, their numbers already saved. Jai golf guy. Wyatt with a football emoji he added himself.
My chest aches. The specific, precise ache of someone who should have offered to ride home with them, who didn’t, and who already knows he’ll be thinking about it for the entire drive back.
I look at the contacts one more time. Then I open my notes app and type: not boyfriends.
And then, below it, in smaller letters: maybe in my journal.