“No, you wouldn’t,” I said grimly, my mouth stretching flat. “You were probably popular in high school.”
I watched from the corner of my eye as Brody’s mouth twisted slightly like he was trying to decide what to say. “I wasn’t, like, a jock or anything.”
“Yeah, well, neither was I,” I said sourly. The conversation was bringing up old bitterness, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I could contain it. “I got bullied for being Asian, and then when they figured out I was gay, I got bullied for that as well. No one wanted to be seen with me after that. It was like a double curse.”
Brody shifted completely, turning his whole body towards me. “But you were so confident, even in college,” he said. “I never would have guessed…”
“I got good at pretending,” I snapped, more harshly than I meant to. “I had to hide it all from my parents, on top of everything else. Both the bullying and the reason for it. I faked it for years. Obviously, I could fake it when I met new people at college.”
My heart felt squeezed, wrung out. Why had I said all of that? Why had I outed myself as a loser? Not only did I feel like shit with all those memories running fresh through my head, but I had almost definitely put Brody off for life.
At least I wasn’t going to have to deal with all those complicated feelings he brought up in me now.
I shifted my arms tighter over my chest, ready to come up with an excuse to get away from him.
What could I say to make it sound like I was the one rejecting him, not the other way around?
Brody
Everything made sense now.
His cold, aloof demeanor, that I had always interpreted as him thinking he was too good to hang around with me. The way it disappeared when he was around people he felt comfortable with, like Keaton. Even the way he gladly engaged in what seemed to be a friends-with-benefits situation with Xavi, despite the fact that he clearly found him irritating.
He was desperate for validation, and desperately afraid that he wouldn’t get it.
I rubbed a hand over my mouth, trying to think of what to say. How to go forward from here. I glanced at Ace and saw his body language shifting, moving away from me, getting stiffer.
He was turning back from water to ice, closing me off.
I didn’t want him to do that – not after opening up to me. If he was ever going to recover from his childhood, he needed to be able to talk about it without fearing that he would lose the person he was talking to.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said sincerely, needing to get in before he ran away. “You didn’t deserve it. You couldn’t change who you were.”
I could have sworn I saw Ace’s breathing stop. He sucked in oxygen and then just stopped, like I’d said something that hit him so hard he forgot how his body functioned. A moment passed and he breathed out, then swallowed hard.
“It wasn’t fair,” he said, and I heard two things in his voice: a shadow of the boy he used to be, and a plea for confirmation.
“It wasn’t,” I said. “There wasn’t anything wrong with who you were. Being gay, being Asian – you were just born with those things. There’s nothing bad about them, and even if there was, you couldn’t help it. Kids are dicks.”
Ace gave a short, half-broken laugh. “No,” he said. “I like dicks.”
I chuckled back. “Right. They’re a lot worse than dicks. And for what it’s worth, I still would have hung out with you back then. I was half as bad, remember? Still gay. I just got away with mostly anything because I was secretly sleeping with half the football team, so none of them wanted to say anything against me.”
Ace shook his head slowly from side to side. “Wow. I wish that would have been an option for me.”
“I have my own crosses to bear,” I shrugged. It didn’t take a trained psychologist to understand why I’d cheated on Cade quite so immensely. We were all looking for attention and validation, in our own ways. Stigma had a lot to answer for. I know I hadn’t helped things at all by becoming widely known as a promiscuous, cheating, dramatic, untrustworthy gay – something that played right into all the unwelcome stereotypes we faced. I was never going to forgive myself for that part of it, even if I ever got over the rest.
Ace cleared his throat. His body language had eased a little, and I got the impression he was thawing again. “Thank you.”
I nodded slowly. I’d given him comfort, but I had a lot to think about, too. The fact of the matter was, he had a lot more going on than I’d realized. It didn’t sound like he was over it – any of it – and that was a problem.
Not that I blamed him for it – any of it. I meant every word I said.
But I’d also been in relationships with men who had a lot of baggage before, and I knew it didn’t end well for either of us.
All that could happen here would be that Ace would get even more hurt, and so would I, and he’d go on still not working on himself.
Just for the weekend, he’d said. I’d fought against that mentally every single moment we were together, wanting to find a way to change his mind.
