Dare
“So, the foam,”Brian said, kneeling to pour some rapidly-expanding green sludge into the hole he’d dug for the wooden pole I was holding, “protects the post from rotting, but also prevents the pressure-treating chemicals in the wood from leaching out into the soil. Plus, it’s fun to work with, even though it’s sticky as fuck.” He grinned up at me, gorgeous brown eyes shining, and he winked. “All the best things are,amiright?”
His joke made me grimace, and not just because it was lame.
Brian laughed delightedly at my frown as he stood and stripped off his gloves. “Bet you didn’t expect this morning to be entertainingandeducational, did you?” He stretched his back, groaning as his lean muscles tightened, and the sound made me want to whimper. “Did you feel your brain expanding as I explained fence posts to you?”
“Mm-hmm. Smarter every minute,” I lied.
In truth, I’d started to feel my brain leak out of my ears the second Brian had bent over to lift the first bag of pea gravel and his jeans had molded to his ass just so. Andthenhe’d started sweating, and his shirt had stuck to the defined muscles of his back and chest. Andthenhe’d knelt down to pour in… whatever-the-fuck goop he was using to hold the posts upright… and I’d gone back to noticing his ass again, in an endless loop of sexual fuckingtorture.
Or, you know, sexualtotally-not-fuckingtorture.
By the time we’d gotten to the final post, I was concentrating solely on making sure I was bracing the lumber in such a way Brian couldn’t see thatmywood was hard enough to drive the fucking thing into the ground, and cursing myself for agreeing when he’d offered to help.
I’d fuckingknownthis would happen, but I’d said yes anyway… as usual. I considered myself a fairly solid, intelligent person, but I could count on two hands the number of times I’d saidnoto Brian Carr and his big, honey-brown eyes.Ever. Keeping the man safe and happy had been the primary goal of my life for the past twenty-odd years. It was the thing I enjoyed most, and the thing I was best at.
Once upon a time, on a summer morning when I was ten, I’d been out in the big backyard at my parents’ old place in Camden, throwing a football through an old tire swing my dad hung at progressively trickier angles each night. Because Jay Turner was Camden-O’Leary High School’s principalanda former football coach, summers in the Turner household were less about unlimited freedom and more about academic and football-related skill drills, especially for the much-younger, accidental third sibling of an overachieving valedictorian sister and a quarterback brother.
I’d been having a hard time accurately gauging the distance to the tire and was getting really frustrated, when the quiet boy from next door had wandered outside with his goofy dog and a bunch of LEGOs and sat down on the little grassy knoll between our two houses to watch me.
Brian had been an average kid—not particularly big or fast or smart-mouthed or funny; not super artistic or nerdy or graceful or handsome the way he was now; not really worth noticing at all, really—except for his eyes. Even then, they’d been full of stars and perpetually excited, like they saw magic in the world that I couldn’t.
My ten-year-old-self had been fascinated… which, of course, I’d shown by steadfastly ignoring him and focusing on my throws.
“Why do you keep throwing it even after you get it?” he’d asked timidly, after the hundredth time I’d threaded the needle and gone to retrieve the ball.
“Because my dad says it makes my arm better. Muscle memory. You get to be so good at it, you don’t even have to think about it. Your muscles just do it the same way every time.”
“Cool.” Brian’s magic eyes had lit with the kind of honest hero worship I didn’t get a lot at that age… or, let’s face it,anyage. “Show me again?”
“Or I could teachyouhow to do it,” I’d offered.
“And I could let you play with my LEGOs!”
And that had been that. A lifetime friendship formed.
For that entire year, we’d been completely inseparable. We’d built a hundred LEGO castles that summer according to package directions—“The instructions are the instructions for areason, Dare!”—and he’d rubbed my head and read me comic books after my season-ending ankle injury in the third football game of the year. I’d taught him how to coast down Town-Line Hill that winter, and we’d promised we’d still be friends even when I moved from Camden to O’Leary that spring.
We’d kept that promise for two decades and counting.
Brian had gone into construction—a bit like playing with grownup LEGOs, he liked to say—so he’d helped me fix up my house over the years. He’d taught me to dance and listened to me vent about the bullshit minutiae of my job. I’d brought him soup and candy when he got a cold and helped cheer him up when guy, after guy, afterfucking idiotguy misunderstood and rejected him.
He was the single most important person in my life.
And at first, that wasallhe was. My person. My friend. A guy I’d found attractive here and there over the years—a little zip up my spine when his ass looked nice in his jeans, a little stomach clench when he swung a hammer, a minor fixation on the three freckles at the base of his neck that had consumed a good part of my summer three years back—but I’d kept him away from my dating life. The men I fucked around with were disposable, and Brian was not, therefore we would never fuck. This was the gospel according to Dare Turner.Amen.
But the very fact that this was such an inviolable rule was maybe why it took me so fucking long to realize that what I felt for Brian wasn’tjustfriendship or occasional, passing attraction. For example, I never brought Silas Sloane ice cream because he’d had a sad day.Godno. And I’d never sat through a five-course Moroccan dinner for my Grindr hookups just because I knew I’d get a chance to bask in the light of their smiles and their starry eyes—and those fuckersput out.
By the time I’d realized I was hopelessly in love with my best friend, the feeling had become such a part of me, I couldn’t stop it even if I’d wanted to.
Turned out, muscle memory was a thing for hearts, too.
“So. Hiking? Or has your brain exploded from too much knowledge?” Brian grabbed his bright red water bottle, tilted his head back, and guzzled it down, his throat undulating and his Adam’s apple bobbing like this was my very own live-action porn show.
Fuck.
He glanced at me curiously and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What?”
