“Your name isReginald, man. You don’t get to throw stones.”
“Ooh, defensive over lover boy’s name,” Reggie teased. “Little more serious than you meant it to be? I know you and hookups.”
“You didn’t know I was gay.”
“Yeah, but I know what showing up to work in the same clothes two days in a row looks like,” Reggie said. “I know you think no one noticed, but they just respect you too much to mention that your sex life was hanging out.”
I sighed. I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, apparently.
“This isn’t that, though, is it?”
“He’s my best friend,” I said.
“Ouch,” Reggie commented.
Yeah. That about summed it up. The way I currently felt wasouch.
“He broke it off, or…?”
“No, we… we were never really… it was supposed to be just for fun, while I was in town. We never got to be together when we were teenagers. I figured out too late that I wanted to be, we got into a fight about it. That was the last I saw him before last week.”
“This is some star-crossed lovers bullshit,” Reggie said.
He really would’ve gotten along with Dante.
“I’m into it, though. Might as well tell me the whole story.”
Yeah. Yeah, might as well tell him the whole story. What did I have to lose now?
I took a sip of my beer, looking out at the city lights twinkling like a cheap imitation of stars.
“I love him,” I said.
Saying it aloud again was like coming up for air after being pulled under by a wave. It wastrue. The only time in the last few days I’d been really, genuinely honest with myself.
I’dalwaysloved Iggy.
And now I wasin lovewith him, in the big, stupid, romantic way. I wanted to bring him flowers before every date we went on for the next fifty years just to see him smile the way he’d smiled the first time.
I wanted to walk Theo with him.
I wanted to wake up next to him.
And no amount of telling myself it’d all been make-believe changed any of that. It might’ve been a fake engagement, but these were real feelings.
Reggie billowed smoke into the already greasy night air.
“Told him that?” Reggie asked.
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” Reggie looked at me, the end of his cigarette glowing orange as he took another drag.
“It’s…”
“Complicated, I know,” Reggie said. “And messy. And it cuts like a blunt rusty knife being wielded by a toddler,” he added.
“That’s… descriptive,” I said. “How do you know all this?”
