With his head turning over his shoulder, and through the space in his helmet, a smile reaches his eyes.
“You like me.”
It’s an unspoken, almost instinctual ritual, the way that we leave the shop together and climb onto our bikes.
While we ride, with no real destination in mind, I find myself stuck in my head, trying to sort through thoughts and feelings that I haven’t been able to make sense of.
I love my wife, and I trust her; except for the times that I can’t.
I miss my best friend, but I hate him; except for the times that I don’t.
Two out of six, a voice says in my head.
Connor’s voice.
I shake my head to force him out of it, snapping my gaze to my right to find him looking at me, too. Centering myself again on the road ahead of me, I roll back my accelerator and tuck in to the fuel tank to slide up ahead of him.
My heart hammers, and I slam a fist against my chest in an effort to make it stop.
Connor’s bike glides up next to mine moments afterward, and a gloved hand points off the side of the road, maybe a few hundred feet away from us.
“Pull off here,” he orders through our comms unit.
I follow him off of the shoulder and onto a patch of overgrown grass, a few palm trees of varying ages littered throughout. People don’t tend to stop here; they usually just drive right through. One of those strips of road that tends to be left neglected.
As we climb off of our bikes, Connor reaches for the strap beneath his chin to pull his helmet off of his head.
“Take off your helmet.”
“What?”
“Helmet,” he says, carefully dropping his to the ground with his gloves following shortly after.
I don’t move at first; instead, I study him through the dark tint of my visor as he pushes his fingers back through his messy auburn waves. When his hands move toward my chin to take hold of the strap there, I take hold of his wrists to push them away from me.
“I got it, alright? Jesus.”
My helmet meets the ground next to his as I pull it off of my head, and now there’s no barrier between us. It’s just my eyes on his and his on mine.
The air around us is quiet, with nothing but the sound of screaming cicadas in the trees and the slamming of my heart against my eardrums.
My fist balls at my side, my fingers flexing with every inch of my body on fire, wanting to knock him across the jaw to stop the tightness pushing in on my stomach from every direction.
“The first time that I liked another guy, I hated him,” he finally tells me, after too many moments too long. “Every time I saw him, I just wanted to tear out his throat. I think there was a part of me that might have been afraid of him; or of what his presence in my head meant, and I didn’t want him there, taking up as much real estate as he did.”
His hand finds its way to the zipper of his jacket, gently tugging it down as he encroaches on my personal space, filling it with the smell of gasoline and cedarwood.
“Then, that same guy pushed me up against a wall and kissed me, and all the noise stopped.” Reaching for the bottom of his t-shirt, he tugs it free from its tucked-in position behind his waistband. “All of that anger, the jealousy, theneedI felt to hurt him…gone. It was quiet for the first time in months.”
“Nice story,” I tell him, “but as you pointed out, I’ve already kissed you.”
“And you liked it,” he challenges, “and now you don’t know what to do with that.That’swhy you can’t decide if you love me or hate me.That’swhy you can’t decide if you want to knock me out or fuck me. You invited me into your bed, and I don’t think you expected to like having me there as much as you did.”
I didn’t.
I wanted him to be miserable. To be there, watching, hearing, and feeling while my wife came forme, and I wanted him to hate it. I wanted it to hurt him.
And then I fucking ordered him into our bed.
