Epilogue
Six months later, I live three blocks from the clinic.
Garrett’s apartment, technically, though it stopped feeling like just his the week I moved my stuff in. Small, two bedrooms though we only use one, a kitchen he actually knows how to use unlike me, morning light that comes in gold through the blinds every day around this time.
Madison and I had already been over for three months by the time I walked into that clinic, which feels almost funny now, in hindsight.
She broke up with me over a word I hated at the time and have since come around to finding weirdly accurate.
Passionless. I never told her how right she turned out to be, or why.
I don’t think I owe her that. But I did text her once, months later, just to say I hoped she was doing well, and she wrote back a single line that made me laugh out loud sitting on Garrett’s couch: glad you figured yourself out, Tyler.
Told my parents a month after that, my dad quiet on the phone for a long time before he said he loved me and that was that, easier than I ever let myself believe it could be.
My mom cried, but the good kind, she told me later, the kind that comes from relief instead of disappointment.
I hadn’t known there was a good kind until she said that.
I still don’t have a tidy word for what I am.
Straight never fit right, but gay doesn’t quite either, not the way people mean it, not for someone who spent his whole life never once looking at another guy and then fell apart on an exam table the first time one touched him right.
I’ve stopped needing the word as badly as I used to.
Garrett says labels are for people who haven’t figured out yet that the label was never the point.
I think he’s probably right, the way he’s been right about most things since the day I walked into his waiting room with a clipboard in my lap and no idea what was about to happen to me.
Garrett’s still asleep beside me, one arm heavy across my waist, and he sleeps like the dead every single morning, the one place in his whole life where his composure actually drops completely.
I watch him for a while. Then I slide down under the sheet and wake him up with my mouth, an echo of that first time on my knees in his office except easy now, practiced, no shaking hands left at all.
He wakes with a groan, hips already rocking up, one hand finding my hair.
“Fuck, Tyler,” he manages, voice still thick with sleep.
I take my time with him, learning nothing new anymore, just enjoying what I already know works, and when he comes it’s with a hand fisted gentle in my hair and my name breaking rough on his lips, same as always, same as the first time except nothing about either of us shakes anymore.
After, tangled together with morning light spilling gold across the blankets, he pulls me up against his chest and presses a kiss to my temple.
“You know you still technically have that follow-up appointment,” he says. “Never did reschedule it.”
I laugh into his shoulder. “You’re not my doctor anymore.”
“No.” Certainty in his voice. “I’m not.”
A pause, and then, quieter: “Best decision I ever made, referring myself out of that one.”
“You referred yourself out?” I lift my head to look at him properly. “I thought that just happened.”
“Nothing about the last six months just happened, Tyler.” He tucks a strand of hair back from my forehead, easy, the way he’s always been.
“I made a choice the second I realized what I was feeling wasn’t professional.
I could’ve handed you off to another doctor in the practice and never seen you again. I didn’t want to.”
I think about that for a second, two decades of steadiness deciding, deliberately, to risk all of it on a straight kid who walked in complaining about hemorrhoid pain. “You could’ve lost your license.”
“I could have.” He says it plainly, no drama in it, the same flat honesty he’s brought to everything since that first exam. “I decided you were worth the risk before you’d even said a full sentence to me. Took me a while to admit that to myself.”
“Twenty-two years,” I say again, quieter this time, the way I keep saying it like turning it over enough times will make it stop feeling like the strangest, best thing that’s ever happened to me.
“Feels like nothing now.” He kisses my forehead, unrushed. “Feels like it was always going to end up here regardless.”
Downstairs I can hear the coffee machine he set on a timer last night, the smell of it starting to drift up through the apartment.
Outside, somebody’s dog is barking at the mail truck.
Ordinary sounds, an ordinary Tuesday, except six months ago I couldn’t have pictured any version of this, waking up in this bed, in this life, with this man who still looks at me like he can’t quite believe his luck either.
I get up eventually, because the coffee’s going to burn if I don’t, and because some small domestic part of this still feels new enough that I want to be awake for every second of it.
Garrett stays sprawled across the bed, watching me pull on one of his shirts instead of my own, not bothering to hide how much he likes the sight of that.
Downstairs, coffee poured, I stand at the kitchen window for a minute looking out at a street I’ve come to know better in six months than I ever expected to.
There’s an old woman two doors down who waters her garden at this hour every single morning, rain or shine, and a mail truck that always seems to arrive at the exact same time.
Small, ordinary things that somehow feel like proof of something, that a life can just quietly continue on after it changes completely, that the world doesn’t stop to acknowledge how much everything’s shifted.
Garrett comes down eventually, hair still a mess, pulling on sweatpants at the bottom of the stairs, and takes the mug I hand him without a word, like six months in this hasn’t dulled the easy comfort of it at all.
“What are you thinking about,” he asks, catching me still staring out the window.
“Nothing important. Just, that first day. The waiting room. I was so sure I was walking into the most boring appointment of my life.”
He laughs, low, and presses a kiss to the side of my head. “I remember exactly what I was thinking, watching you fill out that intake form. Something along the lines of, this is going to be a problem.”
“Was I a problem?”
“The best one I’ve ever had.” He wraps an arm around my waist, and we stand there together at the window for a while, coffee cooling in our hands, in no hurry to be anywhere else at all, the kitchen light left burning behind us. For both of us.
The End
I hope you enjoyed the story.
Ratings and reviews are greatly appreciated.
Love,
Adrian.
Best Friend’s Older Brother is free when you sign up for my newsletter.
I’ve slept at his house a hundred times. But I never expected to wake up to his older brother standing over me in just a towel.
He’s bigger. Hairier. Hung like he knows it.
And when he says, “You keep staring, I’ll give you something to really look at,” I don’t even pretend to say no.
Because it’s not like anyone has to know what happened that night.