“So you’re waiting.”
“I’m being patient.”
“For how long?”
The question seems to strike Kyle somewhere vulnerable. He turns back to the squat rack, adjusting the weight clips that don’t need adjusting, avoiding my eyes.
“As long as it takes,” he says quietly.
I should probably let it go. Kyle’s private about his feelings in a way that makes extracting information not dissimilar to pulling teeth. But something about this conversation—about him calling me out for not defining things with Ryan while he’s been pining silently for Alex—strikes me as deeply hypocritical.
“You know,” I say, moving to spot him for his next set, “you’re giving me a lot of flak for not making things official with Ryan. But at least I’ve actually done something about my feelings. When’s the last time you even tried to move things forward with Alex?”
Kyle positions himself under the bar, his grip tightening. He takes a breath, lifts the weight, and descends into his squat. His voice comes out strained as he pushes through the rep. “You and Ryan are already physical. You’ve crossed that bridge. Alex and I haven’t even—we’re not?—”
“Not what?”
Kyle racks the bar with more force than necessary, the clang echoing through the gym. “I haven’t had sex since freshman year,” he says flatly. “Not since I met Alex.”
I blink. Process. Blink again.
“Wait, what?”
“You heard me.” Kyle crosses his arms, defensive. “You think your nine months of abstinence before the championship were impressive? Try three years, Jacoby. Three years of nothing but my hand, sometimes a dildo—which you will never tell a soul I own—because the only person I want is someone I’m too chickenshit to actually pursue.”
Well, slap my ass and call me Gerard.Sarcastic, prickly, takes-no-prisoners Kyle Graham has been celibate for three years because he’s in love with Alex Donovan.
“Kyle,” I say carefully. “That’s?—”
“Pathetic? Sad? I’m aware.”
“I was going to say intense.” I shake my head, still processing. “Three years. You’ve been into Alex for three years, and you’ve never said a thing?”
“What am I supposed to say?” Kyle’s voice cracks slightly. “‘Hey Alex, I know you have crippling anxiety, and I’m your only real friend on this campus, but also I’ve been in love with you since the moment we met, and I think about you constantly, and sometimes I jerk off imagining what it would be like to hold you?’ Yeah, that would go over great.”
“Maybe not in those exact words?—”
“There are no words.” Kyle slumps against the squat rack, his usual rigid posture crumbling. “Every time I think about telling him, I imagine his face. The fear. The confusion. He’d probably think I was only being nice to him because I wanted something. He’d pull away, and I’d lose him entirely, and I can’t—” His voice breaks. “I can’t lose him, Oliver. He’s the best thing in my life.”
The clatter of weights and hum of treadmills seems to fade away, leaving only the sound of Kyle’s uneven breathing and the distant thud of a basketball bouncing somewhere on the other side of the building. I move to stand beside Kyle, leaning against the rack shoulder to shoulder. We’re both sweaty and probably smell terrible, but this feels like a moment that requires physical proximity.
“For what it’s worth,” I say, “I don’t think you’d lose him.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No, but I’ve seen the way he looks at you.” I nudge Kyle’s shoulder with mine. “At the fair, when you were recovering from the Gravitron? He was rubbing your back and whispering to you like you were the only person in the world. That’s not how you treat someone you just want to be friends with.”
“Sometimes I let myself hope. But then I remember all the ways it could go wrong, and the hope feels dangerous. Like if I let myself believe too much, the disappointment will kill me.”
“Kyle.” I grip his shoulder, forcing him to meet my eyes. “You’re scared. I’m scared. Everyone’s scared. That’s not a reason to stay stuck. That’s just the price of admission for giving a damn about someone.”
Kyle stares at me, his brown eyes searching my face forsomething. Whatever he finds there causes some of the tension to drain from his shoulders.
“Come on,” I say, gesturing toward the weight rack. “We’ve got two more sets. Then after we hit the showers, we’ll go to the beach and earn back the calories with some ice cream while you tell me more about this three-year dry spell and share some porn links.”
“I hate you.”
“Love you too, Graham.”
