“Did you stumble into love?”Kyle’s tone was teasing.
“Not that sort of trip.”
“How about Flynn?”
I frowned, automatically.Surprised by the segue.“Uh, what do you mean?”
Catherine raised an eyebrow.“I mean, he lives there.He was just here.I thought you guys might’ve...looked each other up?”
Keeping my face impassive, while my brain was screaming that it needed to find out just what she might be implying, was an unexpected struggle.
“It’s not like we’re friends,” I hedged, finally.
“When have you ever needed to be friends with a guy to have sex with him?”
I glared at Kyle.“He has a boyfriend.”
“Oh, but if he didn’t, you’d be interested?”Catherine’s expression was that of a bird of prey, one that just spotted something small, vulnerable, and probably delicious.
“I barely know him.”
“When did you ever need to know a guy, to have...”Kyle started
“Okay, okay, wiseass.”I ignored his clear amusement.“We had dinner.That’s why I came home late.”
“Flynn, you, and his boyfriend?”Catherine still had that curious-predator look.
“Just me and Flynn.”
They shared a glance.
“Oh, stop it, the pair of you,” I snapped.“Can’t two gay guys be friends?”
Kyle raised an eyebrow.“You just said you weren’t friends.”
The twisting, knotting conversation was starting to give me a headache.I decided it was easier to focus on specifics; or, more accurately, specific denials.“Flynn and I didn’t sleep together.”
Kyle actually looked disappointed, though I had no intention of digging into that reaction.Especially because Catherine hadn’t shed her suspicious expression.
“Dinner, or a date?”
“He has a boyfriend,” I repeated.
“Okay, so did the boyfriend know about your date?”
“It was just dinner!”I bit my lip, annoyed at myself for getting worked up.The protest had come out louder than I intended it to.
Catherine nodded, slowly.As if that reaction - more than anything I’d said - had clarified things perfectly.“When are you seeing him again?”
I shrugged, trying not to frown or look like the question had at all occurred to me before she asked it.“Who knows.We’re in two very different places.”
#
Catherine may haveasked the question out loud, but it wasn’t like my brain hadn’t churned over it a few dozen times already.Was still churning through it, in fact, even as I sipped my beer and listened to my two closest friends in the world bicker about inconsequential bullshit.
In theory, I could tell them.Perhaps not all the details, not everything that’d happened while I was away.Leave out the fact that I’d hooked up with Flynn’s boyfriend while he watched, perhaps; skip the whole surprise-cuck-play aspect that I still struggled to get my head around.Pare out, instead, the most basic details: enough of a framework sufficient to drape with my current confusion.
I’d hated him, and then I was attracted to him.Two intense feelings, but ordinarily ones you’d not expect to make for a natural transition.That I’d gone from wanting to wring Flynn’s neck - preferably with his mom watching - to thinking about having sex with him seemed like an atypical development.
