Page 7 of We Are Just Us

Kieran went still. He hadn’t expected that answer. He’d figured Rory was the kind of guy who talked about clean sets, parking, and where to find the cheapest fish tacos. Not whatever the hell that was.

“You good?” Rory asked, noticing the silence.

“Yeah,” Kieran said, clearing his throat. “Just surprised you said something so poetic.”

Rory snorted, the heavy contours of his shoulders shaking as he smiled. “Sorry. Next time I’ll grunt and scratch myself instead.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

The words were out of Kieran’s mouth before his brain could intercept them.

A heavy, electric beat of silence dropped over the porch. Rory slowly raised one dark eyebrow, his gaze locking onto Kieran’s face with a sudden, sharp intensity. “Oh?”

Kieran’s entire face erupted into a scorching, white-hot heat. He instinctively took a massive gulp of his beer to cover it, swallowed entirely wrong, and immediately hacked into a violent cough mid-sip, making the entire sequence infinitely worse.

“Sorry,” he sputtered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, mortified down to his mismatched socks. “That was—God, shit. I am so unbelievably bad at small talk. Like, clinically bad. I can write flawless press releases. I can draft corporate talking points. I can record perfect, articulate voice memos. But the second I’m one-on-one with a human being in the real world, I just start blurting out things like ‘don’t tempt me’ to near-strangers and then I flatline from the shame.”

To his surprise, Rory didn’t look weirded out. He laughed. It wasn’t a polite, neighborly chuckle either—it was a full, deep laugh, his head tilting back, his chest rising as the tension broke.

“You’re not flatlining,” Rory said, his voice laced with an incredibly dangerous amount of warmth.

“I am. I’ve officially deceased. I’m a ghost haunting your outdoor furniture right now.”

“Relax, Kieran.”

That completely shut him up.

It was the first time Rory had used his name. Kieran. Said quietly, with a soft, grounded weight that made Kieran’s mouth go dry. He stared at his beer label, suddenly painfully aware of how unaccustomed he was to this kind of man.

He was used to the transactional safety of late-night apps—to guys who texted back within thirty seconds at 11 p.m. but took three days to respond at 11 a.m. He knew how to handle a first date where he talked too much to mask his anxiety, and he certainly knew how to handle a second date that never materialized. But this effortless, unhurried stillness? He had no script for it.

They ended up talking for over an hour as the coastal air cooled around them. They talked about nothing of consequence, mostly—the local music scene, how profoundly overpriced organic smoothies were, the ridiculousness of the latest season of The White Lotus.

Kieran shared a deeply embarrassing story about getting locked out of his Sacramento apartment in nothing but a damp towel, and Rory admitted he’d once had a catastrophic stomach issue inside a thick wetsuit during an amateur surf competition.

By the time the moon was high and the dogs had collapsed into furry heaps on the deck, Rory stood up, stretching his arms over his head.

“Well, I’ve got a brutal five a.m. start on a job tomorrow.”

“Right. Yeah.” Kieran stood up quickly, his knees cracking in the quiet night air, suddenly hyper-aware of how close their bodies were in the small space of the patio. “I should get these two back inside before they permanently become part of your landscaping. Thanks for the drink, Rory.”

“Thanks for not dying of shame on my watch.”

Kieran gave him a crooked, weary smile. “I’ll see you around?”

Rory nodded, his dark eyes catching the amber light from the kitchen window. “You will.”

THREE

Kieran spent most of the afternoon pretending to organize the garage of his rental. It wasn’t really a garage, more like a concrete box with bad lighting and a surfboard rack left behind by the last tenant.

He didn’t surf, but the rack sat there like a dare, as if the town itself were side-eyeing him, waiting for him to either assimilate or leave. Maybe he should take a lesson.

He hadn’t unpacked everything. The storage pod had arrived yesterday and it was barely half full. A few boxes of cookware, some art he didn’t have the heart to hang, and his mom’s worn leather armchair that still smelled like her perfume and peppermint. That was most of it.

He set the chair in the corner of the living room like a shrine. Every time he looked at it, he’d get a sharp stab of guilt for leaving her memory behind in their old city, and a strange relief that she wasn’t alive to watch him stumble through the awkward first steps of being out.

He didn’t want his coming out to become her project.