“Uh.”
“Oh, come on.” Ben shoved his hands back into his hoodie. “You have to know you’re hot.”
“Wait,” Alexei blurted out. “Are you gay?”
After a stunned second, Ben laughed. Which made him feel, at least a tiny bit, like himself again.
“Um,yes, Lex,” he managed.
Alexei reached out and shoved him in the knee. Ben tried to ignore how much he liked it.
“What the hell, Ben? How come you never said anything?”
Ben’s laughter died away when he heard the hurt in Alexei’s voice. The glow from the headlamp caught the anger visible on his face. Shit.
“I’m sorry, Lex,” he whispered. He added honestly, “I don’t know.”
Because when he thought about it, while outing himself that night when Alexei shared his trauma with his parents hadn’t felt right, Ben probably should have done it later. As time went on, Ben probably should have found a right time to do it.
But maybe…
Maybe it had been easier to protect himself—to keep himself from making a bad decision—if Alexei didn’t know.
Ben exhaled slowly, rubbing his forehead.
In his defense, he had probably also thought, after a while, that Alexei would have figured it out on his own.
Because, like,Ben was really fucking gay.
Plus—
“I did think,” he said slowly, still processing that Alexei had just asked him thisnow, “that you would at least know I was queer. After the whole, you know, sleeping together thing.”
“I thought”—Alexei licked his lips—“that maybe you were just screwing around. Experimenting. Or that…you felt sorry for me. I don’t know.”
Ben hung his head in his hands.
“Alexei, no, God, that was not—” Ben blew out a hard breath. “That was why you were so upset that morning. Okay. That makes a lot more sense now.”
Ben reallyhadfucked it up. In so many ways.
He forgot sometimes. That Alexei was likely new at a lot of this, that he likely hadn’t had enough queer people in his life, that his head had probably been filled with ridiculous things. Ben had to at least make this clear. He leaned closer to Alexei’s tent. Ben had missed that anxious forehead, ached at the sight of it.
“First of all, anyone whoexperimentslike that is not straight. Second of all, what happened between us was definitely not an experiment. God, Lex, everything that happened that night was what I’ve wanted to do with you since the moment I first saw you. At least, thebeginningof what I wanted to do with you.” Ben leaned back, taking a deep breath, trying to reel himself in. “I don’t know where we go from here, Lex. If you need time to be alone, if we part ways, I’ll understand. But I need you to know that I wasn’t screwing around that night. You have to know that I meant every minute of it.”
Alexei stared at him. Ben pulled his knees up to his chest. Damn, it was cold.
“Ben,” Alexei said after a silence. His voice was shaky, quiet. “Ben, get in here. It’s freezing out there.”
Ben stilled. He stared back at Alexei for a long minute.
He glanced over his shoulder at his discarded pack, his unraveled tent and fallen poles. He unlaced his shoes. And for a second time, Ben clambered inside Alexei’s one-person tent.
Alexei unzipped his sleeping bag, leaning away to make room. Ben tried to slide onto Alexei’s tiny mattress pad as elegantly as he could.
But no matter what either of them did, it was an absurd affair.
Ben attempted to tuck his feet into the cozy foot box of Alexei’s sleeping bag, but Alexei’s own two feet barely fit in there. Alexei attempted to cover them both with the unzipped sleeping bag; it hardly covered their shoulders. Still, Ben was almost settled when he realized he needed to take off his sweatshirt for a pillow. Alexei was already cozied up with the flannel he sometimes wore at camp, folded neatly under his head. The mechanics of sitting up again to take off the sweatshirt without punching either Alexei or himself in the face seemed nearly impossible.
