An hour or so later, the door unlocked and swung open. Andre strutted through with a relaxed, easy look on his face, like he’d just gotten off someone else’s dick. Then he saw me.
“Hey,” he said uneasily.
“Hey,” I said darkly.
“You waited up for me?”
I nodded. We could go to bed without any more words between us. We could even make love, if that’s what he wanted. We could play pretend, the happy gay couple. God, how I wanted that fantasy, except I was the only one playing.
“Where were you, Andre?”
“I was out.” He took off his shoes, dropped his ball cap next to where I left my keys, his spot right next to mine just like all the other places in my apartment, in my life, that were reserved for him, because he was special, he was mine. My lover, boyfriend, best friend, soul mate.My Andre.God, how I adored him, still. How could he act so nonchalant about it? How could he lie to me so easily? He must not care about me at all.
“Where do you go when you go out?” I asked. I was having trouble maintaining my composure. My chest felt like it’d been carved out with an ice-cream scoop, my heart plopped on the coffee table in front of me. My body was hemorrhaging while my heart still beat for him.
“I don’t know, bars, restaurants, skate park?”
“Where did you go tonight?” I wanted him to lie to me, prove to me his betrayal.
He yawned and stretched his arms over his head, revealing the top of his boxers and a strip of honey-bronze skin that drove me insane because I wanted him still.
“I’m tired, Martin. It’s been a long day. Let’s go to bed.”
I could forget what I’d seen. I could accept our relationship for what it was. We could belong to each other while we were together and whatever happened outside this apartment didn’t matter.
Except that it mattered to me. I’d discovered Andre’s fatal flaw.
“Where did you go?” I said again.
“I went to Daniela’s.”
Daniela’s was the cantina. He had gone there first, before making his second call of the night.
“Where did you go after that?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Nowhere.” The word sounded like a threat.
I sighed, deflated. I didn’t want to play games with him. It didn’t matter if I caught him in a lie because there would be no winner here, except maybe Fang. “I followed you, Andre.”
Anger flashed in his eyes or maybe it was fear that he’d been caught. “Then why the fuck are you asking me where I went?”
I couldn’t believe him, that he had the nerve to be angry at me after what he’d done. I stood up because I had so much rage inside me I felt like I was going to explode.
“I wanted to see if you’d tell me the truth.”
He rubbed the back of his head and glanced down at his feet. “I didn’t think you’d like it if you knew.”
“I don’t like it,” I snapped. “I fucking hate it.”
“Nothing happened, Martin. He just needed some company.”
That word, “company….” Was it a slip of the tongue, or did it mean what I thought it meant?
“The kind of company only you can give, Andre?” It was small and mean, but I said it because I wanted to hurt him, even if only a fraction of how he’d hurt me.
“What the fuck?” His arms exploded at his side. Andre in flight.
“Have you been fucking him this whole time?”
