Yours? You don’t own him, remember?
I rolled my eyes at my bitchy inner demon. Micah eyed me. “Are you having a conversation with yourself?”
“Little bit.”
“Did something happen?”
“What do you mean?”
“While I was gone,” he said. “You seem, uh, out of sorts, and I don’t think it’s all about me.”
“It’s not. My dad had a heart attack. That’s where I’ve been.”
“What?” Micah dropped his plate in the sink and blurred across the kitchen, instantly at my side. “When did that happen? Is he okay? Are you? What about your mum?”
His flurry of questions made my head spin. I latched onto the most important. “He’s okay now. It was mild, and he had a stent fitted yesterday. My mum brought him home this morning. She’s hopping mad at herself for all the fry ups she’s cooked him over the years, but it is what it is. I threw the chip pan in the sea before I left.”
“Seriously?”
“No. I put it in the bin, but you get the picture.”
Micah sank onto the stool beside me. “I thought you’d moved out. How self-absorbed am I?”
“Not very. It’s not exactly something you could’ve guessed, is it? I’d have told you... if things had been different. When you hung up on me the other day, I thought it was because you were done with me interfering in your life.”
“Inter—what?” Micah frowned. “I’ve never thought that. And I’m glad you did this time. If you hadn’t? Fuck, I don’t know if I’d ever have figured it out for myself. I was losing my mind in that hotel. Dom said I was jabbering like a mad man when he picked me up.”
“Dom? You mean, Dom Ramos?”
“Yeah.”
“How did that happen?”
“I called him after what you said to me sank in. It took a while, and I’m sorry about that. I wasn’t myself, or maybe I was, and that’s the problem.”
“Micah—” I shook my head. What was I doing? Shamefully, I didn’t know anywhere near enough about his mental health to tell him he was wrong. We’d lived together for months and months and months. Spent most of Christmas together. Got tipsy and sucked each other’s dicks. But I had no idea why he’d been prescribed powerful psychiatric drugs beyond the fact that he’d been through a hell of a hard time.
I pushed my plate away and took his hand. “Start from the beginning.”
* * *
Micah
I thought he meant the beginning of my latest crisis, but it turned out he wanted more, much more. So I told him about my first bloke-fuelled wet dream and the pubescent years I’d spent counting tiles on changing room walls to stop myself getting a boner over my naked teammates.
He laughed and it felt so fucking good. “Oh god, I feel you there. PE lessons were a nightmare, and do you know what was worse? Half the boys I was getting a sweat on over were bloody munted.”
“Same. It was probably the first time in my life I thought I was going mad, cos I fancied girls too. I had no idea that I could be bi, and the thought of being gay terrified me.”
“It’s not so bad, you know. I do okay.”
“Of course you do. But you’ve lived a different life. Maybe if I hadn’t got into football, it would’ve bothered me less, but the game was the only thing I was good at, and I wanted it so much. Getting an academy place and making the first team was the dream, man.”
“Came at a cost, though.”
I couldn’t deny it. “Yeah, but I didn’t realise until I hit the big time and my life was no longer my own. When no one knew who I was, I had friends I could mess around with that had no reason to tell anyone. And later, when I’d paid them to keep quiet, there were enough girls around that I was distracted for a while.”
Sam slid off his stool. He held out his hand and jerked his head towards the living room.
