“It was real, Lo. Everything we shared.” I press my lips to her smooth cheek. “It was too late when I realized the truth. I had already cut you loose and ruined everything, and I believed you were better off without me, because there was a part of me that always felt wrong about it. That felt like I used you.”
“I didn’t do anything with you I didn’t want to,” she says, running her fingers through my hair. “I felt guilty,” she adds in a soft whisper. “Because I fell in love with you and you’d made it very clear from the beginning you could never love me.”
I circle my arms around her back. “Not you. Any girl,” I say, needing to clarify. “And that’s what I believed back then.”
“But not anymore?” Her brow creases. “I don’t understand.”
“That makes two of us.” I smooth a hand up and down her back, loving the feeling of her in my arms again. “I was confused over my sexuality when we first agreed to fake date to keep our parents off our backs, but that was nothing compared to how confused I was after I let you go.”
“Are you saying you’re into women now too?” she asks, repositioning herself on my lap so she’s straddling me.
The sultry, spicy perfume she wears wraps around me like a comfort blanket, and my cock swells in my pants. “I’m saying I’m intoyou.”
She blinks profusely. “How?”
I lift my hips, pressing my hard-on against her. “Feel that?” She nods. “That’s what you do to me. No other woman has ever turned me on like you, and it took me letting you go to realize it.”
“But you’re still into guys.”
There is no judgment in her statement. She has always accepted me as I am.
I was honest with her, pretty much from the start.
That first night we met, at my house, because Dad had just hired his lawyer’s wife to work on a new advertising campaign, we got drunk on a stolen bottle of Mom’s gin and ended up making out. I thought about her a lot over the next few weeks, and when we next met, and ended up kissing again, I blurted out that I was gay. She was cool about it, and the fake relationship was her suggestion. One I latched on to because it would get Mom off my case. She’d started arranging dates for me, and it was making me ill. Lo wanted to get her parents off her case too. They were worried about her after the traumatic experience she’d been through. Having me as a boyfriend helped alleviate some of their fears.
“Yes, but I’ve never acted on it.”
“But you’ve fucked other girls,” she says. “With the guys.”
“Two,” I admit. “And there were a few I let suck my dick, but that’s it. None of them got my juices flowing.”
She grabs both sides of my face, tilting my head up to her. “It was seeing the guys that did it.”
Heat creeps up my neck and on to my cheeks. She knows me so well.
“Or was it just him?”
I gulp over the messy ball of emotion clogging my throat. “I should’ve known you’d figure it out.”
“Does he know?”
I vigorously shake my head. “No, and that’s the way I want to keep it.”
“He won’t hear it from me.”
“I don’t know how to tell them,” I admit. “I don’t know how they’ll react. I can’t lose the only family I’ve got.”
“Do you think they suspect?” she asks.
I shrug. “I think I’ve hidden it well. It’s the only reason I’ve gone near any of those girls.”
She looks off into space. “I think they might surprise you.” She turns to me with a soft smile. “You should tell them. Youneedto tell them. The longer you keep it secret, the harder it will get, and the more they might feel like it’s a betrayal.”
“I’m scared,” I admit. “I don’t want them to look at me any differently.”
“You really think they would?”
“I don’t think so, but if they do, I stand to lose everything.”
