“Then why does most of the world seem to think you’re straight?” he asked me, his blue eyes holding mine. “If it’s not daddy issues, what is it? Mommy issues? Shame? Or you just don’t care enough about us?”
“I don’t even know where you’re getting this from,” I said tightly. “I care about you both.”
“I’m getting this from the fact that I never see you with guys in public, and every single person in and around the band who finds out you like guys, it seems to be news to them.”
“So, I’m private,” I protested. “I’m pretty sure you know by now what it’s like to be famous. So excuse me if I don’t exactly broadcast my love life to the media.”
“No? How about to your friends?”
“My friends know.”
“So then you’re okay with them knowing about us.”
Us? There was no us.
Wasn’t that his whole bullshit point here?
“You wanna talk about shame?” I said, finding my balls and biting back. “Since when is it okay to try to shame someone out of the closet? And for the record, I’m not in any fucking closet.”
I wasn’t. Being in the closet was totally fucking different than being secretive about your personal shit because you were famous.
Wasn’t it?
“Okay. For the record,” Ash said, “I don’t get involved with guys who are. You don’t want to own who and what you are, I’m not into that.”
“I never asked you to be.”
“Good thing.”
Christ, this was getting juvenile. What were we even arguing about?
He told me we had to cool it. And yet here he was challenging me on who and what I was, and how I lived my life?
What the fuck did it matter if he wasn’t getting involved with me?
He was still holding my gaze, leveling me with his intense blue eyes, and I didn’t flinch.
“You’ll hold Danica’s hand for a few minutes in public when no one’s really looking,” he pressed, “but that’s about it, huh?”
“She’s your wife.”
“And you wouldn’t want anyone to talk.”
“What do you want, Ashley? You want me to take a risk on you, and your wife, publicly? And then what happens? At some point we break up, and I get pushed out of your marriage? Publicly.”
“And that’s too much for you.”
“Why wouldn’t it be? It’s easy enough for you two to carry on. You’re married. Even a divorce, if it went that way, makes sense to most people. You think our relationship would make sense to most people?”
“I don’t care about most people.”
Neither do I.
I wanted to say it, but here I was using other people’s opinions of my life as my excuse to put a wedge between us—because he’d challenged me about things I didn’t like being challenged about.
“When I’m serious about someone,” I told him evenly, “I’ll let that be known. I was engaged once. I’ve had serious relationships.”
“Right. Just not with men.”
