Peyton
Well past dinnertime,Noah and I sat in the otherwise quiet office that housed the firm, each at opposite sides of a long conference table. There were blueprints and sketches and stacks of research, filling the space between us, and an overhead light occasionally flickering across the wood-paneled walls.
My business partner and I met in college, in a drawing class required for all architecture majors. He was an incredibly talented freshman, and I was a senior, but we hit it off right away and built a friendship that drove us into our careers. Now, I was in my early thirties, and after ten years of working steadily together, I understood Noah’s silences and easily read the subtle shifts in his mood.
That morning, he’d had the meeting with his brother. Before he’d gone, I’d considered working up the courage and telling him what had happened. There was just no way there were two DJs named Alastair Brown in this city, no matter how much I prayed that was true.
Except I was still trying to process the experience myself. Did it mean I was bisexual? Probably, I supposed, and I didn’t have a problem with that. Two of my brothers and my high school best friends were all gay or bi. Hell, the only other time my curiosity had led me to hooking up with a guy was when Casey, my old best friend, had come out of the closet.
I’d gone then to the internet and found myself a very unsatisfying night with an older man, bad enough to convince me I was straight after all.
Sitting down with Noah and telling him I’d fooled around with a man felt difficult enough. Adding that the hookup was with his brother made me dizzy.
I pulled out my phone, then opened a new window. I searched for “gay cub or bear,” which I had already done a couple of times, and tried to figure out again if I really was like the images of men who popped up.
Definitely not, in the case of the porn stars with construction hats and that kind of nonsense. But with some of the others… maybe?
Were those words always pornographic, bear and cub? And why was it that every time I considered levelling with Noah, I just ended up fantasizing about Jet again, and his tongue stud, and the noises he dragged out of me?
I looked back up. Noah was frowning at his laptop, his shirt unbuttoned and his tie tossed to the table. “I’m not getting anything done,” he complained, then closed his laptop. “How about you?”
I looked at the hairy, burly man on my phone, then clicked it away. “I’m losing steam. Should we call it a night?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Noah said, but didn’t move. We’d both gotten apartments that were literally across the street, knowing that setting up the business would require long hours and that every minute shaved off the commute would be a blessing. Rest was just a short walk away, but since Noah wasn’t moving, I knew it meant a part of him wanted to talk.
“I saw my brother this morning.”
And there it was. Time for me to fess up something about myself I wasn’t ready to admit or else become a total liar to my friend. “Right. Alastair the DJ.”
He shook his head. “He’s not a DJ.”
I paused, thrown by this information. “He’s not?”
Noah sat across the long table, frowning. “He used to be. That’s in his past.”
I spoke cautiously. “But he goes by Alastair, right?”
Noah shot me a confused, slightly irritated look. “What?”
I shook my head quickly. “Sorry. Nothing. How did it go?”
While I waited for Noah to answer, explanations swirled through my brain. Jet wasn’t Alastair. I’d just hallucinated that name on the license because he’d driven me insane with oral sex, and I was panicking after blowing a man in an alley. Or maybe Alastair Brown was more common of a name than I would have assumed. Maybe there were lots of DJs and former DJs in this city. A city of DJs! That was possible, right?
Because the guy I met, Jet, was definitely still a DJ. He was working that night, even.
“It went okay,” Noah finally said, cutting me from my spiraling thoughts. “It kind of felt good to see him, actually, but then all the other feelings came up, too.”
“Your parents,” I said, knowing how much he struggled with them.
He nodded. “You know how hard they were on me. First, the house was a chaotic nightmare, with Alastair bringing trouble home and our parents flipping out and screaming all night. And after he left, they were twice as strict with me. It’s like I couldn’t breathe in that house.” He shook his head quickly, frustrated. “And they were right about him. He wasn’t reliable. He didn’t come back for me, even though I was so sure he would.”
I stood and crossed to him. I’d heard the story before, of course, but I still felt some of Noah’s ache, hearing it again now. He tried to maintain a good relationship with his parents, but they were difficult people, and the damage done in his childhood still reverberated through the family. He was like me, responsible and even-keeled, and it always seemed ridiculous that they could have any problem at all with a son like him.
“Did you try to talk about any of that with Alastair?” I asked as I sat beside him.
“Hell no,” he chuckled. “If I’m going to try to have a relationship with my brother, I don’t need to go and dump all that out the first time we see each other.”
“So you are going to see him again?”
