“Fine, I’ll go change. I’m keeping the sunscreen on my nose, though. It makes me look cute.” He starts up the stairs towards his room, then pauses and turns back to look at me. “Oh, hey, Maggie texted me that she’s gonna get here a day early. Friday instead of Saturday Is that cool? She decided she’s gonna skip a few classes because some of them are just nonsense and she has a few off because of her midterms.”
I nod, and he smiles at me again, then does this weird little shimmy and rushes up the stairs. A part of me wishes I could go with him to change. And then another part of me hates that part of me for even wanting that. I sigh and plop on the couch, right into the warm spot where Cal just left. I curl into the warmth. The room is cold. Fuck you, Cal, it’s definitely cold outside. Too cold to swim, anyways.
I lay there for a few moments before my phone starts vibrating in my pocket. Assuming it’s my mom, asking why I’m in Michigan and didn’t warn her beforehand, so I just hit answer and put it up to my ear.
“Lee?” the voice on the other end asks. It’s not my mother, unless my mother and Noah had their voice boxes and vocal folds switched. My chest burns with anxiety. “I’m so glad you answered. I have a lot to say, and I’m not sure if you read my messages yet, but I feel really horrible, and I need to talk to you about it.”
“Noah, I don’t… Um, I need to go in a second. I don’t have a lot of time to talk. Cal and I are going to go see a movie in a few.”
“Right.” He takes an audibly shaky breath on the other end. “That’s cool. I’ll make it fast: last night, I got really drunk and I slept with Sofia.”
I already know, but hearing him say it out loud kind of feels like a punch in the gut. And that’s not even fair of me, because I’m not his boyfriend. I’m not his anything. I’m just his roommate. He can sleep with whoever he wants.
“Okay,” I reply after a few seconds of him not saying anything.
“Okay. I’m sorry, that’s all. It was a mistake, and she agrees. She feels horrible and asked me to apologize to you, because she said we’re both better than that and that you and I as a, um, as a couple, are better than that. I explained to her that we aren’t really a couple yet, and she said I still owe you an apology. And she’s right. It was stupid to get so fucking drunk, and I wanted to be mature and tell you that I’m sorry. I was jealous of you spending the week with Cal, and I wanted to make you feel bad.”
“But you shouldn’t be, Noah. He’s my best friend. We get flirty. We’re friends. We have been since I was like, eight. I love him a lot. I care about him a lot. I had a crush on him growing up, yeah. But if you were secure enough in our relationship, you’d understand that,” I snap. My voice is quivering because the more I think about it, the more upset I’m getting.
“How exactly am I supposed to know where you draw the line?”
“What?”
“You tell me you like me back, but you don’t want to be with me. Which is fine! It’s fine. You don’t have to be with me. But that’s sort of a hard thing to deal with. Liking someone as much as I like you--I think about you all the time--and not being able to be with them, even though they like you back. Especially when I have to be around you all the time. Then your best friend Cal comes around, and you make googly eyes at him and conveniently forget to invite me to Michigan. Not that you owe me that at all, for the record! You don’t. But making me feel like an afterthought sort of sucks, Liam. You just discarding me when something better comes around really made me wonder what kind of boyfriend you’d make. But then I felt bad for thinking like that. Look, I didn’t call you to get into an argument. Honestly, I thought a week apart would be really beneficial for me to get some of my thoughts in order and really figure out how I feel. And then I went and got drunk and slept with my ex. So I just wanted to apologize.”
“So me wanting to hang with my best friend makes me not boyfriend material?”
“You know that’s not what I meant, Lee. I’m sorry for calling you. I’ll let you get back to Cal, now. Just wanted to apologize. And tell you I miss you.”
“Noey--” But he’s already hung up.
When I turn around, Cal’s standing there, watching me.
“Sorry. Hope you didn’t hear much of that,” I tell him.
“I heard most of it. I’m sorry I’m causing problems.”
I shake my head and pace over towards him.
“It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault that my feelings are confusing.”
“I, um…” He opens his arms, and I rush into them.
He wraps me tight and warm in a hug. I feel safe. I feel at home. It’s just Cal. He and I can flirt every day of our lives, but we’re still just us. He’s still just the same kid who picked me up off of the ground when I was bullied and punched the bully so hard he got sent to the nurse’s before the principal’s. And I’m still the same guy who cried on his bed the night I told him I was gay. He hugged me then, sort of like he’s doing now. Tight, like he never wants to let go. Tight, like he loves me more than he realized fifteen minutes ago.
I wrap my arms around the middle of his torso, just under his arms, and tug back. It feels so comfortable and warm here. I could stay here forever, to be honest.
Then he leans back to look at me. We’re almost the same height--he isn’t much taller. Our faces are pretty close, and I flick my eyes around, taking in the details.
They’re details I’ve seen a hundred times, but today, with the light sliding in from between the blinds covering the door and painting his face orange, he looks sort of Apollonian. The edges of his hair look like they’re on fire. His lips are wrapped into the most kissable smirk I’ve ever seen in my life. The contours of his face look sharp and brilliant. He looks brilliant. That little smirk gets wider and turns into a full-blown smile.
“What are you looking at?”
I roll my eyes and blush, then put my palms on his biceps and push myself out of his grasp. Or, I try to. He pulls me back in for another squeeze, then lets me go.
“You’re so weird,” I mutter.
I can’t pay much attention to the movie we watch. I’m sort of staring at him the whole time. A few times, our hands brush in the popcorn bowl. One of those times, he grabs it, pretends to nibble on it, then drops it back in the bowl after looking down and scowling, as if he only just noticed he was nibbling on my hand and not a real piece of popcorn.
Maybe I’m not so conflicted after all. Being around Cal feels so… easy. And comfortable. I feel relaxed around him. It’s just us. It always has been. Noah’s drama. Noah’s a confused straight boy. Noah isn’t my problem.
I find myself cuddling Cal almost every day now. He sits in my lap, I curl up on the couch with him, we intertwine our pinkies when we sit on the edge of the pier and stare out into the lake. It’s sort of an unspoken thing between us that we should enjoy the private time we have together before Maggie gets here and ruins… er, joins… the fun.
And we literally do not say a thing about it. We don’t discuss it once. When he walks in my room and mutters something about a nightmare while staring at the floor instead of making eye contact, I get it. I just pull my covers off so he can get under them and tell him to shut the door.
Even sleeping next to each other, we don’t get touchy or anything. No dicks out here. Though Jax has asked me four separate times over Snap how big Cal’s dick is and whether or not he’s single. Sometimes I kinda wanna punch Jax.
On Friday, Maggie arrives much earlier than she was supposed to. We left the door unlocked so she’d be able to come in, but she wasn’t supposed to get here for at least another three hours. So she catches us in robes, cuddling on the couch.
“Woah, what kinda gay shit did I just walk into?” she demands, tossing a rolling suitcase to the side and pulling her coat off. She leans back and takes a huge sniff of the air and sighs out, her posture visibly relaxing. “God, I love this place. Oh, don’t get up on my account, babes. I know where to put my stuff and everything. I know where I am. I’ll take my usual room. But, um… Where’s everyone else going to sleep?”
She turns and casts a raised eyebrow at me from the closet where she’s in the process of hanging up her coat. The sunlight illuminates her too, very nicely. Honestly, it’s hard to tell the difference between the honeyed log wood of the walls and the honeyed glow of her hair from here. I frown at her, only just understanding what she said.
“What other people?”
I’d say it was like that line was their cue, but I’m fairly sure that it actually was, knowing how much dramatic flair Maggie likes. She probably told them to wait to come in until she said something and I asked a question.
People start filing in left and right, all grinning. Most of them pause in the doorway to take in the view. Honestly, I don’t blame them. I do the same every single time, despite the fact that I’ve been coming here since I was an infant. The log cabin feel is so comfortable, and the stairs are probably the prettiest part. The stonework on the fireplace is also banging, and the kitchen even has these cute little wooden chairs that add to the whole vibe. Plus, the lake view from the massive windows is also pretty breathtaking. I guess sometimes I forget about it.
Syd flops down on the couch next to me and leans over to give me a big hug. She pats Cal’s shoulder, and he laughs. Jax sits on one of the armchairs and spreads his legs and winks at Cal, who blushes and turns to look at me. Jax has one of those straight boy sex-hungry looks on his face, so it’s obviously a joke, but… I’m not positive that Cal knows that. Ali and Jayde both politely step in and say hi to everyone, because neither of them are the chaos gremlins that Jax and Syd are, and then ask me where they should put their bags.
I pull my robe tight over me with embarrassment because I’m literally only wearing underwear underneath (Cal said it was better for cuddling. Not that he acknowledged why we were cuddling or anything, he just said that no clothes under fluffy robes would make it easier because he’d get less sweaty. When I told him I didn’t wanna walk around like a perv, he just grinned at me), then I point them upstairs and help them get settled, doing the math of who can share rooms with whom along the way. Unfortunately, I think that means either myself or Cal will have to end up sharing a room (and possibly a bed) with Jax, since, you know… Boys with boys and girls with girls and enbies with enbies… but Jax doesn’t exactly like women, and Jayde volunteers to share a room with him. Ali takes the room Maggie normally sleeps in, and Maggie agrees, saying that they can just split the bed no problem.
And then… the Cavalry arrives.
I really thought that was going to be it. I was impressed with Maggie for organizing my college friends here to celebrate my birthday. I guess I should have also expected Dominic and Nikitha to show up. I’m torn between being disappointed and being grateful that she didn’t invite Zach, Anya, and anyone else, because we barely have enough space for this many people, let alone any more.
“Maggie,” I ask, going into my room and grabbing a change of clothes because I need to wear clothes now that there are several guests here that weren’t here when I was comfortably cuddling my childhood best friend five minutes ago. “How the hell am I supposed to feed all of these people?”
She shrugs, following me into my room.
“I’ve got it covered.”
I roll my eyes and go to the bathroom to change in peace.
The whole time I’m changing, I start to think about how, of all the people that she managed to get here, Noah wasn’t one of them.
And then I wonder--did she invite him and he just chose not to come because he hates me, or did she just not invite him?
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