Chapter 254 254

Chapter 254 254
Alejandro's POV:

I did not get weird about my best friend. That was what I told myself for two weeks, standing in my own hallway, listening to myself knock on a door.

It happened in my head once, on the Sunday, and then it would not stop happening.

If Kevin had been gay his whole life, then he was gay in a dorm room in September of freshman year when I walked in on him changing and stood there for six minutes telling him about my flight. He was gay on every bus I had ever fallen asleep against him on. He was gay in Vermont when there was one bed and I put an arm over him at four in the morning and he did not move it. He was gay in a hallway weeks ago when I turned him around and hit him across the ass hard enough to sting, because he looked good and I wanted him to know it.

And I did all of that without asking him one time whether he wanted it.

That was the whole thing. That was the entire content of my brain for a whole week. Not disgust. There was never one second of anything like that and there was not going to be. What there was, at two in the morning on a Sunday and then every hour after it, was a picture of myself as a guy who had been putting his hands on somebody for four years on the assumption that it could not possibly mean anything, and finding out that the assumption was mine, and that I never once checked it with the other person in the room.

So I started checking.

And I knew it was wrong while I was doing it, which was the part nobody would believe. There was a half second in it every time, a tiny administrative half second where some new department in my head said hold on, is this okay, and by the time the department got back to me the moment was gone and I had already left four inches on a bus seat like an idiot.

An entire week of that. A knock on a door I had never knocked on in my life. An apology for a collision that had never needed one in four years. My legs coming halfway up onto him on a Thursday night and going back down on the floor, which was not a decision I made, that was where my legs went, and I sat there for two hours with my feet on the ground like a man at a bus stop.

He noticed all of it. Of course he noticed. He even noticed when I used a different mug.

And then Saturday I walked in on him in the shower and apologized like I had broken into a hotel room, and he came out into the hall with a towel and asked me what was different, and I told him nothing was, which was a lie, and I did not lie to Chen. The reason I said it was that the true answer would have taken twenty minutes and I did not have it organized, and every second I stood there he was getting colder and wetter in our own hallway.

He shut his door. I stood in the hall for a while. I did not put the speaker on, because it was nine thirty and he was going to bed, and for the first time in my life the idea of filling the apartment up felt like something I would be doing at him.

I called Connor on Sunday and asked him to come get lunch, and he said he would come to me, which meant he had already decided something.

We went to the place five blocks down with the bad coffee he did not drink. He got a water. He always got a water. He put his phone face down on the table before he sat, which was new. I got the eggs and did not eat them and talked for nine minutes without stopping, which was a normal amount for me. Connor sat there with his forearms on the table and let me do it, and when I finally ran out he took a drink and put the glass down and looked at me.

"He told me he is gay and I'm trying not to make him uncomfortable," I finally said.

"Okay... so that is what's been going on between you two. I get it now but, who's uncomfortable?"

I opened my mouth.

"Alejandro." He turned the glass a quarter turn on the table. "You've known him four years. Did he change after he told you?"

"No."

"Did you?"

"That's not—" I stopped. I put both hands flat on the table. "I'm being respectful."

"You're being different." He said it without any heat at all, which was how Connor took your legs out. "Respectful is asking him. Different is guessing, and doing it quietly, and hoping he doesn't notice. But he's Chen, he noticed on day one."

"Day one?"

"He noticed on day one."

I sat there with my eggs going cold.

"Connor. If I've been, if for four years I've been putting my hands on him and it was—"

"Ask him."

"I can't ask him THAT!"

"Then stop deciding it for him." He drank some more water. He was not angry. Connor had never once been angry at me and it was somehow worse. "You're the loudest person I know and you've spent days having an entire conversation with him inside your own head. He's not in there with you. He's out here, watching you not touch him and drawing his own conclusions, and I promise you his conclusions are worse than yours."

He picked up the check, which I let him do, because he lived in a house with a pool.

At the door of the place he stopped and said one more thing, and he said it looking out at the street and not at me, which was what he did when he was about to hand you something he had been holding for a while.

"He's had a hard couple of months. Longer than that." He let that sit out there in the cold. "Don't be one more thing."

"What does that mean?"

"It means don't be one more thing."

Then he left.

I drove home the long way.

He was on the couch when I got in, with a game on mute and a beer he had not opened. He looked up and said, "You're back," and went back to the screen. Everything about him was completely normal and I could see the four inches from the doorway.

I went past the back of the couch on the way to the kitchen and my hand came up.

That was what it did. He was sitting right there and my hand came up off my side the way it had come up ten thousand times, to smack the back of his head or grab his shoulder or thump him across the back of his neck, one of those, my body did not specify. It never specified.

But I stopped it.

Halfway. My hand was out in the air about four inches behind him and I stopped it dead and brought it back down and kept walking to the fridge.

He did not turn around.

He did not have to. There was a window over the TV and after dark the whole living room was in it, the couch and the back of his head and me standing behind him with my arm coming down. I knew he had been looking at it because when I got to the fridge and turned around, he was not.

I stood in my own kitchen with the fridge door open and cold air on my legs for way too long.

Then I shut it and got the speaker off the counter and put it on, loud, the way I had every night since August, and I went and sat down on the couch about two inches from him, which was where I sat, and said, "Who's winning?"

"Nobody. It's the first."

"That's not an answer, Chen, somebody's always winning."

"Nobody is winning," he repeated.

"Somebody's winning morally."

He made a sound through his nose that was almost the good one, and after about four minutes his shoulder came over into mine, which he did, which he decided to do. I just sat there and did not move a muscle for the rest of the period in case he took it back.