“I would…believe ya,” I said, and even I could hear the doubt in my voice and quickly added, “I mean it. I would believe ya. I just…I dunno, it’s been buggin’ me is all. But if that’s what ya say, I won’t push.”
Walker’s expression was pinched. “Of course you won’t, but you’ll let it eat away at you because you don’t want to upset me.”
“I mean?—”
“I get it,” he said with a sigh, and took a drink of his coffee. “I wondered if I was going to have to say something at some point, but I didn’t want to. And before you say something likeyou look like you’re about to, no, this isn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Okay,” I said carefully, believing him but not sure what else it could have been.
“I just…need a bit of space,” he said, looking at me in time to probably see the wounded look on my face. “Aw, don’t make that face. I just said it’s not you, it’s because…well, I guess it is kind of you, but not in the way you’re thinking.”
I frowned. “Now I’m just confused.”
“I figured,” he said. “Mostly because I’m trying to explain without having to explain myself, because once I do that, there’s no going back.”
“If it’s that bad, ya don’t have to,” I told him quickly.
“I just… A wall I had up before,mostlyhad up anyway, apparently didn’t come back after seeing you again.”
“What’sthatmean?”
“Right, I’m making this worse by pussyfooting around. Look, the other day, in the shower?—”
“I know you were upset?—”
“Stop,” he said sharply, and I did. “It’s already hard enough without you jumping to conclusions.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“There’s literally no other way, so I’m just going to put it out there,” he said with a shake of his head. “I was…turned on.”
I frowned. “By Logan?”
“Jesus, byyou.”
“Me?” I asked, my eyes going wide as I tried to… No, wait, hold on. My mind flashed back to the locker room. I’d been standing there, torn between being pissed off that Logan had been an asshole and worried that I had pissed off Walker. When he’d made the comment about me being naked, he’d said it was…distracting. Which had sort of made sense; I had been naked after all. The only weird thing had been that he’d been…well, I had looked and I hadn’t tried to think about it too much afterward, but he had seemed to be…excited. “Oh.”
“Yeah,oh,” Walker said with a pained look. “Back in the day, I kept…a mental wall up between stuff like that and everything else. But clearly, that didn’t stick.”
Huh, okay, so he had been, uh, hard. “Wall?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose with a groan. “Right, of course, I’ll have to go all in, because it wouldn’t go any other way, would it?”
“I’m still kinda confused,” I admitted.
“Look, you know I’m gay.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Andyoumight not be aware of it, but our team wasn’t exactly a bunch of trolls. And all of you were pretty comfortable touching and walking around in…whatever. Which is normal, I know, and I don’t know if it’s true for every gay guy in the service, but I built a sort of wall. I just…didn’t notice when guys were good-looking. I didn’t notice they were hot, I didn’t notice they had nice bodies, and I didn’t notice when they had nice asses or were hung.”
I blinked. “I mean, still not followin’ but that makes sense…sorta.”
I mean, if I were constantly surrounded by good-looking women who were comfortable enough to walk around in barely any clothes or no clothes, I would struggle. I’d never really thought about Walker having to deal with that, especially with our team, because he had…seemed to get used to everything. I’d definitely never thought about him being turned on by me of all people. It didn’t bother me, but it was like that night he’d drunkenly slept on me; it wasn’t bad, but it was…weird.
“But I always had a harder time with you,” he said, and then wrinkled his nose. “Pun not intended. I’m not going into that, don’t ask me, but it was always harder to put that wall up withyou. I finally did, but I guess in the past few years, it broke down, probably because I didn’t need it and I had other things to deal with. But when I saw you the other day, I realized how gone it was. I was…well, like I said, it was distracting.”
“Er…you’re sayin’ you were turned on by me?” I asked and then shook my head. “Alright, no, that makes sense. I thought ya were, uh?—”
