Nally had his phone out and was switching back and forth between the apps that Jude had been managing and that he still didn’t think he had a good handle on. “I’ve got about a thousand DMs from people who I don’t even know,” he said. “There are even a few questions about whether I’m alright because I haven’t posted anything in two days. Why would people think something was wrong if I haven’t posted on social media in just two days?”
Jude laughed. “Welcome to the socialsphere, my friend. If you fail to post one day, everyone thinks you’re dead or dying.”
“Don’t people have anything better to do?” Nally asked.
“Not in this economy,” Jude answered.
Nally laughed with him, then tried his hand at managing his own social world by leaning to the side and taking a selfie of him and Jude, then posting it with the caption, “Road trip with my man.”
Two seconds after the post went live, Nally sucked in a breath and stared at it. He shouldn’t have phrased it that way. “My man” made it sound like he and Jude were officially a couple.
But weren’t they? Wasn’t that what the entire trip had been about? They were now sleeping together, after all, if just one night qualified as having a sexual relationship. It was what he wanted, after all, but he and Jude hadn’t had “The Talk”. Being blunt about what was happening between the two of them felt like breaking the final thread that was holding them to who they had always been.
More alarming, likes and comments on his post started to pour in right away.
“You two are so cute together!”
“OMG, are you guys officially dating?”
“You two should join OnlyFans together.”
Nally blinked at his phone, then looked up at Jude. “Um, I might have just accidentally made a certain announcement to the world,” he said.
Jude glanced over at his phone. “What did you post?” he asked, not sounding too fussed.
“That I was on a road trip with my man?” Nally said, then winced.
Jude burst into laughter so loud that the passenger in the car driving next to them glanced over with a confused face. “It’s fine,” Jude said. “It was bound to happen eventually anyhow, since we’ve been posting together so much lately.”
Nally tried to feel more at ease, but he still had questions. What was bound to happen? People mistakenly thinking they were together? The two of them actually being together? Making an announcement about their relationship?
He shook his head and put his phone away. More and more comments were coming in, and he couldn’t cope with it. How so many people of their generation lived their lives in public online was a mystery to him.
The rest of the trip was boring and easy. They stopped for lunch at one point and Jude checked a world of things on his phone, but Nally didn’t want to look anymore.
“Quentin replied,” Jude said at one point, glancing anxiously at Nally across the table. “Do you want to know?”
“Should I be calling the police?” Nally asked.
Jude pinched his face, then said, “No, not yet. He’s not happy, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Nally repeated.
That was it, though. He really didn’t want to know. Things were so good between him and Jude that he would have fought a lion to keep anything from bursting the bubble they’d fallen into. For the rest of the trip back to Hawthorne House, at least, they were comfortable with each other. Love was definitely in the air, but so was their friendship.
By the time they drove up Hawthorne House’s drive in the dark, stomachs rumbling since they’d foregone stopping for another fast-food dinner in favor of pushing through with the hope of real food, Nally almost didn’t feel like anything had changed at all.
“Your adventure up to the wilds of Scotland was a failure, I see,” Nally’s mum greeted them as they headed up the stairs to Nally’s flat to dump their things.
“We were unprepared for the wildness of the wilds,” Jude answered with a grin.
“Well, we’ve just finished up supper at ours and there are leftovers, if you’d like,” Janice said.
“Yes, please!” Nally sighed with relief.
It was all so ordinary. He and Jude spent about five minutes dumping their damp and dirty clothes out of their suitcases and throwing a load in the washer. Nally’s laptop still wasn’t working, and he still wasn’t as fussed about it as he should have been. They changed out of their travel clothes and ditched theirnew boots in favor of clean, fresh clothes from Nally’s wardrobe and headed down the hall to Nally’s parents’ flat in sock feet.
“Did any of it really happen?” Nally murmured right before they reached the open door to the flat and the classical music that wafted out of it.
