Page 19 of The Cubby Hole

“You’ve always been handsome and sexy.”

“I blew it. I know I did. I ruined it, trying to control it.” My voice broke. “I’m so sorry.”

Ben grabbed my wrists. “Do not cry.” His voice was calm and reassuring. “It just wasn’t the right time.”

“At least you were honest about fucking around with no strings. I kept lying to myself, getting into all these messy relationships, trying to make them something they weren’t. Thirty came and went, and neither of us said anything about the pact… I just kept repeating the pattern. Same story, different guy.”

“It wasn’t the right time.” He repeated it slowly like he was trying to convince me of a simple fact.

“So what changed?”

“Nothing has changed.” Ben didn’t always say much, but sometimes he said it all. “You are my first everything. You’re my best friend.”

“Just so you know, that’s the one thing none of the others has ever been to me.” I hoped he could see the truth of it. My head hurt trying to beam it to him. I slipped my wrists from his fingers and caught his hands in mine. “I love you.” I made sure I said it fiercely. It was a vow I wished I’d made sooner.

“I love you too.” He said it like he was delivering happy news. “So please don’t start crying again.”

“I’m not.” My pitiful croak betrayed me.

“Your eyes are awfully red.”

“It’s the chlorine!” I wasn’t convincing.

Ben’s laugh said he forgave me.

8

12:34 A.M.

Ben gathered up the trash and shooed me off the bed so he could turn down the covers. Watching him arrange our pillows in our preferred configuration, I was overcome by a profound sense of… Surely there had to be a better term than déjà vu.

Without needing to discuss it, we claimed our sides of the bed, climbed beneath the sheets, and assumed our positions. Him with his arm out, me with my head on his chest and one leg thrown over his thighs. The feeling of his big, beefy body next to mine was exquisite.

We both sighed.

I tried to describe it all to him, the alternate timelines, the loops, the circles of fate. How the multiverse had collapsed into this unlikely singularity, a bedroom in a cabin at a gay campground in the North Georgia mountains with a view of a bar called the Cubby Hole.

Ben responded with a few sleepy murmurs at appropriate points in the rise and fall of my blather.

My late-night rambling had irritated the fuck out of my other boyfriends, but even in our platonic phases, Ben had always claimed he liked to crash while listening to me. He said it was like falling asleep to a talk radio station.

“I was listening to this podcast,” I droned on, lulled by the sound of my own voice. “This self-help, spirituality thing. And the dude was talking about how you think you’re going around in circles. You think you keep ending up right back where you were before, but it’s an illusion. Evolution is actually a spiral. You’re never the same person when you come back around. You’re always climbing higher and changing with every turn of the wheel.”

Ben hummed like he was still following, but I knew he was seconds away from being out.

I glanced at the clock on the bedside table. It was well after midnight. “Happy birthday, babe,” I whispered. “I love you.”

I couldn’t sleep. My mind was spinning, replaying past insecurities and old doubts within the context of tonight’s revelations.

We’d only been twenty-two years old when we’d decided we weren’t enough for each other. We’d responded with completely different expressions of will and self-worth—I’d tried to make other men love me; Ben hadn’t let anybody love him.

Neither of us had defied the heartbreak.

Or the universe’s original intention that we walk our path on this earth together.

Part of me was relieved to have some time alone to process it all, to adjust to a renewed sense of hope.

Ben sleeping soundly beside me wasn’t complicated; he was comfortable and constant. There had only ever been one story, one guy, and he’d been there the whole time.