His FaceTime notification came up, and I hit the button. The screen went crazy as he set up the phone on his tripod.
“Are you wearing a widow’s robe?” I asked, looking more closely.
“Look, I’m not anal shaming you,” he said, ignoring my question as he removed a strip of fake eyelashes. “I will, however, shame you for not knowing what a hanging chad is. GoogleBush versus Gorefor fuck’s sake.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll get right on that,” I said, lying, then struck out to defend myself. “In the meantime, I am not the first gay man in the world who’s never had anal sex. Plenty of us enjoy the side menu. Besides, lots of exclusive tops have never taken it up the ass, and no one is going around calling thempure.”
“Are you an exclusive top, Rowd? Have you even topped anyone at all?”
I wrinkled my nose. “No.”
“Haven’t you said on multiple occasions that you were desperate to bottom for the right man?”
“Yes, but?—”
“More importantly, have any of your side lovers ever remotely satisfied you?” he asked, removing the strip of fake lashes from his other eye.
Ouch. Coming in hot with the uncomfortable truths. Of the guys I’d encountered, reciprocation-slash-mutual pleasure hadn’t been high on the list, which made the jokes about my hookup prowess kinda sting, if I were being honest.
The jokes did an excellent job of hiding the fact that my weekends away were not, in fact, filled with fucking end-to-end randos in club bathrooms. Mostly because that sounded like the most awful thing ever.
Whatever.
“How are shitty lovers my fault?”
“Shitty lovers are never your fault, sweet love,” Skylar said, pausing to smear makeup remover all over his face. “Daddy and mommy issues, on the other hand, while also not your fault,areyour responsibility to work through.”
Ugh, he knew me too well.
“You do realize that you’re a nurse practitioner, not a therapist, right?” I asked as he wiped the goop off his face with a washcloth.
“So you’re gonna pretend we didn’t meet in a group therapy session?” he asked as he poured some kind of toner on a cotton round. “We’re pretending that I never heard you admit that, while you want to experience it, the thought of backdoor scares the shit out of you?”
“Was that an anal sex pun?”
“Maybe.”
I rolled my eyes. “No one has ever explained to me why—WHY—I would want to do that with someone I don’t know. It’s giving stranger danger, not to mention green-faced emoji, puke emoji, and skull emoji.”
This was clearly amething because all of my friends had enjoyed their no-strings encounters. Still...blech.
“Wow. You are very dramatic tonight,” he said as he slathered on one of the many layers of his nightly creams and potions.
“Honest question: How do people just go out and trust strangers withthat partof their anatomy?” I asked, as though I hadn’t already asked him this a dozen times before. “Just cue the testicular retraction right now because...no.”
“Because strangers are a viable option, and because then you don’t have to worry about falling in love only to have your heart shattered over and over again.”
That wasn’t his usual response, and his eyes looked a little sad in the low light.
“Hey, Sky?”
“Yeah?”
“How are things with Daddy Big Bucks?” I asked, using the nickname we’d given his latest sugar daddy.
“The construction project he was in town for?”
“Yeah?”
