10. Lance
Lance
I toss my keys onto the counter hard enough that they skid halfway across it before clattering to a stop. The apartment is too quiet. It makes every thought in my head louder than it has any right to be.
Fantastic.
I drop onto the couch and press the heels of my hands against my eyes like I can physically shove the thoughts back where they came from. I should be exhausted enough to pass out face-first into the cushions.
Instead, my brain has chosen violence, because the second things go still, there he is again.
George on his date.
George leaning down toward her at the restaurant table. His hand settling on her waist. Him smiling that small, unfair smile he only does when he actually means it. My brain, being a fucking traitor, immediately swaps her out.
George leaning toward me instead, looking at me like that. Those same hands on my hips instead. Thighs. Throat.
Jesus fucking Christ.
“Stop,” I mutter out loud to my empty apartment.
The apartment, shockingly, does not help.
The memories just keep coming anyway. Azure Tides slides right back in next. That night with our friends, the moment when neither of us moved away for one long, charged second. The heat of him behind me. The way my stomach tightened and stayed like that even after he stepped back.
Then my brain helpfully queues up Holloway’s boyfriend. George and I screwing the same guy at the same time, looking at each other like there wasn’t an entire other human being between us—like we were the actual thing fucking in that room.
And The Blank Spot Night. Waking up naked in his bed with no memory of how I got there or what we did. I woke up with that faint smell of him on the sheets and a pounding in my head that said I might’ve crossed a line and couldn’t even remember how.
I sit upright so fast my neck twinges.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
Being attracted to men is not a theory or an abstract concept.
I came back from that trip with more questions than answers, which is probably what happens when you do something you’ve never done before in a context you’ll never be in again.
Adrian made it feel easy, which was both a gift and a problem, because easy isn’t the same as figured out.
The experience cracked something open, then the week ended and I went home to my regular life.
I’ve been standing right at that crack ever since without looking through it.
But ‘cracked open’ isn’t quite right either. It’s more like something that was already there finally had room to move.
There was this guy at the gym I started going to when I just turned eighteen, some regular who spotted me a few times.
I remember being aware of him. The way he moved through a set, the line of his back when he racked the weights.
I told myself I was studying his form. Competitive instinct, maybe.
I never went back to that gym after he stopped showing up and told myself that was a coincidence too.
Azure Tides probably didn’t start anything. It just made it impossible to keep calling things research, or form, or coincidence.
I’ve also always known how to handle shit. See the problem, fix the problem. Crack a joke when things get heavy because humor is control and control is safety.
Right now, I’ve got no control at all, and it’s not just men in general.
It’s George. I don’t know when he stopped being just a normal part of my life and started being something I almost violently react to.
I’m feeling things I haven’t felt before around my best friend who brings me coffee, fixes my car, makes me laugh, and sometimes turns his attention to me like I’m the only person in the room.
George is on a fucking date and I’m sitting here in my apartment, trying and failing to make sense of what he keeps pulling out of me.
I reach for my phone before I can talk myself out of it. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. I need to get a grip again.
Fine. I’m into men. That’s just true now, whatever that means going forward. George doesn’t get dragged into this if it means I don’t get to keep him. I don’t know what I’d do with that.
The app store throws up a dozen options for men looking to meet other men. I download one called North, the logo a simple white compass on a dark blue background. It promises connection and community in clean, reassuring text. The logic makes sense in my scrambled brain.
It opens to a wall of profiles. Shirtless torsos, gym selfies, or carefully angled face shots. The sheer volume of options immediately overwhelms me.
Profiles flash past, each one spelling things out in blunt, no-nonsense terms. Looking for fun.
Hosting tonight. Vers bottom. Into rough play.
Discreet only. There’s no room to misread any of it.
It should feel like too much, and for a few seconds it actually works, because nothing in here is George and that’s the whole point.
I stare at my phone, frozen by the fact that I’ve got no idea what I’m doing.
The app prompts me to create a profile. I should close it, delete it, and pretend this moment of panic-driven impulse never happened. Instead, I start filling it in.
Photo: I scroll through my camera roll and find a gym selfie from two months ago. Torso only, abs visible, and face cut off at the chin. It’s basically the same as half the profiles I just scrolled past, completely generic and unremarkable.
Name: I type “L.” My brain can’t conjure something cool right now so I’ll just roll with that.
Age: 28.
Looking for: Friends, dates, see what happens. Yes, I write down the vaguest possible description, noncommittal to the point of useless.
About me: “nurse.” That’s all I have in me right now. I’m not about to write “currently having a sexuality crisis, please advise.”
I save the profile and stare at it, this sanitized version of myself that reveals nothing and somehow still feels too exposed.
“Congratulations,” I mutter to my dark apartment. “You’re really branching out today, Bradford.”
It takes less than a minute for the app to prove it works.
First up is some guy named Raymond. Thirty-three, lives four blocks away, hits me with a basic “hey” and a wave emoji attached to a beach photo where he looks like he wandered out of a fucking Ralph Lauren catalog.
His bio says he teaches kindergarten, hikes every weekend, and is willing to throw hands over the correct way to load a dishwasher.
He seems…nice. Perfectly fine.
And approximately a foot shorter than George. I close out of his profile.
More keep coming. One opens with a nursing pun so catastrophically bad it somehow loops back around to being impressive.
Another asks for my height, then replies to my answer with nothing but a thumbs-up emoji, like he’s running me through some secret compatibility algorithm and I just passed the first round.
They barely do anything. I scroll through faces and torsos and one-line bios and feel nothing shift, not even a little. The not-feeling-anything starts to feel worse than feeling too much would.
I try answering a few of them, aiming for funny and flirty the way I know how. That’s when I discover something deeply unfortunate.
I have absolutely no idea how to flirt with men.
Flirting with women has always come easy.
I know the rhythm, the timing, the little cues that make it flow.
With men, it feels like I’m walking into a conversation I’m not yet sure how to navigate.
Every single word feels forced. I have to stop, think, rewrite, and second-guess before I hit send.
I want this. I want to explore this side of myself more than I’ve let myself admit out loud. But right now, it just feels awkward or unnatural. It doesn’t feel right.
The whole thing leaves me uneasy and unsettled.
I drop the phone on the coffee table and stare at the screen like it might bite me.
Here I am, throwing myself headfirst into something new while George is probably out there living his best fucking life, completely unbothered by any of the mess currently twisting me up inside. The thought stings more than it should.
I pick my phone back up because apparently, I enjoy suffering.
Then Elliot messages me. Twenty-nine, three miles away. He’s an architect who says he’s here to actually meet people, not just collect matches he never speaks to.
His message pops up.
Elliot: You’re a nurse? Because you just took my breath away and my ability to come up with a decent opening line. Stat.
It’s cheesy as hell, but for a second I forget what I’m doing here and just enjoy that someone’s trying.
His photo shows a clean-cut guy in a linen shirt and a nice watch. Polished, put-together, someone who probably has his whole life color-coded and planned out six months in advance.
He’s about as opposite to George as a person can get while still belonging to the same species.
We trade a few messages. I study his picture and wait for some kind of spark, some pull, anything.
But nothing comes. He’s attractive. I can see how this is supposed to go, but it never moves past that.
I realize what I’m actually doing is holding every single one of these guys up against George without meaning to, and every single one of them loses.
I don’t know what to do with that fact except to keep scrolling like the answer is one more profile away.
After a while, I close the app. The icon sits there like it’s already bored of me. Everything I look at after that hits the same invisible wall. I’m starting to get annoyed with myself.
I let my head fall back against the couch cushions.
“Wow,” I mutter. “I might have let a six-foot-four mechanic with the emotional range of a concrete wall completely reset my standards.”
The clock on my phone reads 8:47 PM. My head is starting to throb and my chest just getting all too tight for my liking. Not me having a myocardial infarction at this age over a man I don’t know how I should treat now with all this realization kicking in.
There’s some knocking on the door.
I sit up so fast my phone falls off my chest and hits the floor. It’s 8:49 PM. No one else just shows up at my apartment unannounced.
The knocks get louder, more insistent this time.
My heart is pounding as I stand up and walk to the door, my mind racing through possibilities. Package delivery at almost nine? Wrong apartment? Or worse, did someone die?
I unlock the door and pull it open.
George is fucking standing outside my front door.