“No, it’s really okay. You should go to the game. It’s going to be wild, it sounds like.”
“Ryan asked me if I wanted to go to the game, and we haven’t really seen each other this week, so I thought…”
He trailed off, but his train of thought wasn’t over. Patrick might’ve been avoiding him, but it was a form of self-protection.
And maybe a misguided one.
Maybe he was pushing Spencer away too fast. He couldn’t take his eyes off him. Spencer licked his lips, and they glistened in the glow of the city. They were begging to be kissed.
I like you, Spencer.
Fuck, why was that so hard to say?
“I feel like you…” Spencer struggled with his words. “I feel like you don’t want to be friends.”
Friends.
The word was a kick in the nuts, a punch in the gut, and a slap in the face all at once. He didn’t know friends cuddled on the couch together to watch movies, or kissed each other good night, or jerked each other off in fucking corn fields. This whole time, all these months spent together, and it only amounted to friends?
Patrick didn’twantto be friends. He wantedmorewith Spencer.
It was worse than a rejection.
“You’re right. I don’t.” Patrick walked past him, getting one final close-up look at that sweet face, one final smell of that Spencer scent.
He left him alone on the roof, went back to his apartment, and found Tylenol PM in the back of his medicine cabinet. He wasn’t going to spend all night thinking about Spencer; his heart could break while he slept.
Patrick had an answer. His decision to stay away from his neighbor had been the right one. It was his fault for letting himself fall for Spencer, for opening his heart up to the dangerous idea that they were anything of substance. The hurt shattered his insides like a baseball bat in an antique store. He had learned this lesson once before with GFA, and the rejection felt even worse this time around.
It was a fall fling. Didn’t mean a thing.
October
a.k.a. Prime Time Fall
9
Patrick
Patrick began going to work super early in the morning to avoid Spencer. He got a reputation as a go-getter at the office for always being the first one in, which was the only positive to this situation. The El early in the morning was a ghost town. He didn’t have to fight through commuters at the station. He got a seat on the train every time. He rode through the city as the glowing embers of morning sun gave the world outside a burnt orange glow; in the afternoons, he left work a half-hour early, and on his train ride home, he stared out at bursts of fall foliage, the reds and oranges and yellows popping against the urban landscape. It was the ideal fall commute in the ideal fall month. October’s heat wave had come and gone quickly, leaving crisp breezes and temperatures that required fall jackets.
It was all perfect, and Patrick found himself not enjoying a thing. The leaves might as well have been black-and-white, and his candles might as well have smelled like office supplies. Fall was here in all its glory, and maybe it was because he enjoyed the anticipation more than the actual event, but he greeted it with a shrug.
Halfway into the month, he convinced his friend Libby to accompany him to AppleFest, a fall festival being held in the Uptown neighborhood. The fall festivals blended into one another. AppleFest, PumpkinFest, Autumn in Edgewater. They had the same layout, the same vendors hawking the same overpriced crafts, the same 80s cover bands singing the same songs.
But still, it was fall, and it was another chance for Patrick to try and forget about the boy across the hall.
Libby and Patrick ambled through AppleFest, which like the other festivals, was held on a closed-off street, with rows of vendors set up on both sides like a flea market, concert stages at each ends, and designated kid zones at the intersection. Leaves blew across the asphalt as they walked while sipping their Pumpkin Spice Lattes and wearing light, slightly-faded sweaters.
Again, a shrug from Patrick.
“This is so freaking cute,” Libby said, looking up temporarily from her iPhone. “Do you want to get some pumpkin beer? We can double-fist our fall drinks.”
“I’ll think about it.” He didn’t know how she’d be capable of double-fisting anything while holding onto her phone, but he appreciated the enthusiasm. He wished he could muster the same amount.
“Yes!” she said at something on her phone. “This company I’d been chasing for months just got back to me. They have budget. They want to talk. I think this is going to make my quarter if I can get this deal closed by end of month.”
“That’s awesome.”
