Van frowned. “Benji asked me to come over.”
“Why?”
He looked past Joshua, but couldn’t seem to meet Benji’s stare. “Why don’t you ask your boyfriend?”
“Let him in, please,” Benji said.
Joshua walked several feet away, to the opposite side of the living room, giving Van plenty of clearance to enter. Van hovered by the door, though, seeming confused and annoyed at Joshua’s attendance at this little meeting. Then again, Benji hadn’t blatantly said that Joshua wouldn’t be there when he’d called last night.
“Hello?” Van had said, surprising Benji by picking up on what was probably an unknown number, since he had no reason to have Benji’s contact info.
“Hi, Van? This is Benji Moore. Joshua’s boyfriend.” Benji’s voice had shaken a bit with those first few words, and his stomach had been a ball of nausea.
“Um, hello. Is everything okay?”
“Yes and no. I’m going to be down at the shore tomorrow, for a week’s vacation, and I want to talk to you. Face-to-face. Man-to-man.”
Van had sucked in a sharp breath. “This is about Joshua, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry?—”
“Not over the phone. Come to the beach house tomorrow afternoon, one o’clock.”
“Benji—”
“You kissed my boyfriend, Van. You owe me one conversation.”
Van had been quiet a long moment, before letting out a harsh breath. “Okay, you’re right. One o’clock. Will Joshua be there?”
“This is between you and me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And he’d hung up.
“You said you wanted to talk man-to-man,” Van now said to Benji, frustration beginning to overtake his surprise. “Not man-to-man-to-man.”
“All three of us are involved in this,” Benji replied, “so we’re going to talk about it. Please, you don’t have to hover by the door. I promise I’m not going to deck you. I’ve never punched anyone in my life, and I don’t plan to start now.”
Van studied him a moment, then closed the storm door against the late October chill. He took a few steps deeper into the living room, creating an equidistant triangle with Benji and Joshua.
“I don’t understand,” Joshua said. “Ben, I thought we were good about that kiss.”
“You and me are good,” Benji replied. “But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, especially why it happened, and I know it all goes back to the first time I flirted with Van in July.”
“It does?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you?” Van asked. “I know you and Joshua were in a bad place at the time, but what was that all about? Revenge against him?”
“It was a lot of different things.” Benji shoved his hands into his jeans pockets so no one saw them trembling. “It wasn’t long after Joshua and I fought about closing the relationship. He refused, and the fight probably wasn’t fair to him, because I didn’t tell him why I was asking. I didn’t tell him that I needed to prove to myself that I was enough for him.”
“I wish you had,” Joshua said softly. “Maybe then I’d have admitted to having not hooked up with anyone since before the accident, and maybe we wouldn’t have been on a break for so long.”
“We can’t change the things we did or didn’t do, that’s not what this is about. It’s about moving forward in a way that’s best for everyone.” He looked at Van again. “That night at Off Beat was me trying to prove to myself that I could be like Joshua. I wanted to go out, flirt with a cute guy, and maybe even go off and have sex with a stranger.”
“So you were going to use me for sex?” Van being annoyed by that was intensely adorable.
