Rue

All my estimates of how long it would take us to get back to the beach were completely thrown out the window. It took us an hour. It shouldn't have, but it did. Maybe Ethan’s busted up leg was a bit to blame for that, but I was pretty sure he was mostly just slow. And maybe that felt like a problem at first, something I needed to fix or be mad about, but in the end I was feeling kinda zen about it. I was a guy who intentionally trapped himself on the rocks for hours so he could watch the tide slowly come in and go out, after all. I could appreciate things that took patience once I put myself in the right mindset.

Heck, maybe I wouldn’t have minded another hour or two of mostly silent walking with him, but his leg was pretty banged up.

The surf life saving club building was mostly a restaurant, or at least that was what all the signs outside told me. I’d never actually eaten a meal there. Around the back, facing the beach, there was an open roller door and inside I saw the flash of a yellow shirt. They didn’t do full patrols out of season, but there were usually a few volunteer lifeguards hanging around no matter the time of year.

A familiar face appeared in the doorway, but Brit disappeared with a flick of a blond ponytail the moment she saw me. Fair. I’d cast her as my unwitting beard for our last two years of high school, and she still didn’t know I hadn’t just been leading her on for fun. Not that she’d necessarily like the real reason any better.

I expected her to stay hidden and send someone else out to deal with us, but as we approached the building, she reappeared. She’d taken her yellow lifeguard shirt off, leaving her in a bikini top and her board shorts. I braced myself for a song and dance I thought I’d left behind in high school, but she only had eyes for Ethan.

“Ooh, ouch,” she said, leaning forward slightly in a way that made her breasts strain against her bikini top as she looked down at the scrape on his leg. “What happened here?”

“Rocks,” Ethan said to her breasts. Had nobody ever taught this boy not to stare? Though she couldn’t exactly complain. Not when she’d taken her shirt off the moment she’d seen us.

And she sure didn’t seem to mind the attention—not if it made me jealous. If it did, it wasn’t in the way she was hoping. I’d already assumed Ethan was straight, but I didn’t need it to be rubbed in my face like this. 

Brit headed back inside and reappeared a few minutes later with a folding chair and a first aid kit and had Ethan sit down while she fussed over his boo boo. I would have rolled my eyes if I’d thought I wouldn’t get caught, but she kept glancing at me to check my reaction. 

Mostly, I was just embarrassed for her. Sitting there, letting a stranger ogle her tits, just to prove—what? That other guys found her attractive? I knew they did. Just not me. And to be fair, she didn’t know that was because I was completely gay, but still. She shouldn’t need all this for validation.

At least all her thorough attention meant she did a good job patching Ethan up. By the time she was done, all the blood was cleaned off him and the ugly scrape on his leg was disinfected and bandaged. There was a smile on Brit’s face as she sent us on our way, but she wasn’t happy. Not really. Which sucked, because I was kind of sick of making her miserable.

“Listen, about Brit,” I said as we headed up the ramp off the beach.

Ethan had his phone out, a frown firmly fixed on his face as he stared down at the screen, but he spared me a confused glance.

“The girl who just patched you up.”

“Oh,” he said. He sounded no less confused.

“Her and me, we had a will they, won’t they thing going on for about the last two years of high school. Then time for senior formal came, and I didn’t ask her. I didn’t go. It was this whole build up, and she expected…” I shook my head. “So she’s kinda pissed off at me.”

“Okay,” Ethan said, though he was still clearly more preoccupied with his phone. I saw him press the call button and then scowl at it even harder when it instantly went to voicemail.

“So that, back there—I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. That was more for me than it was for you. She should know better than to lead you on when that’s what she’s so mad at me for doing to her.”

I was worried he’d be upset, but there was no shift in his facial expression. “My dad went to a movie and turned his phone off. I think he forgot to turn it back on.”

“Okay, we can talk about that in a second. Are you listening to what I’m saying?”

His eyes tracked to the side, like he was mentally replaying the conversation in his head. “Sorry she’s mad at you?”

I shook my head. “Just don’t get your heart broken, okay? She was just trying to make me jealous.”

“Why would you be jealous?”

My heart stuttered. “Uh… I dunno.”

“I mean, if the whole thing was that you weren’t into her in the first place, I don’t know why she’d think you’d care.”

Oh, right. He was asking why she’d think she could make me jealous. “I guess she just figures that if another guy likes her, I’ll realise what I passed up. And man, you sure did play the part. I don’t think you broke eye contact with her tits once.”

A complicated series of expressions passed over his face as he considered that. “Ah.”

“Yeah. Not exactly subtle, man.”

He frowned for another moment, then waved it off. “Well, at least I’m never going to see her again. Can we talk about my problem now?”

I was mildly irritated by the way he’d brushed the whole thing off, but it wasn’t like I’d wanted him to care. Maybe I was just confused, more than anything. “Sure.”

“So, I need to get back to the house, but my dad’s phone is off. It’s probably quicker if you don’t go along the rocks, but it’s still a long way to walk back. Or I could just sit and wait until he gets home and realises I’m not there, but I might die of hypothermia before then.”

Unlike the whole Brit situation, he seemed genuinely agitated about this, his expression tight and his body one big fidget. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal to me, but fuck it, my self-esteem could use another opportunity to play hero after I’d kind of fucked up all the rest by letting him slip on the rocks, snapping at him on the way out of there, and then subjecting him to the echos of my high school drama while he got patched up.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Where are you staying? We’ll just take the bus.”

“Do you have money for a ticket?”

“I have my bus card for me, but I bet we can get your shivery, scraped up ass on for free with a little bit of puppy eyes. They’re still doing fifty cent fares, so it’s not like they care.”

Ethan frowned. “Maybe we could ask that girl if she has fifty cents?”

I was a little offended on Brit’s behalf that he hadn’t even bothered remembering her name. She deserved better than that.

“Let’s not,” I said. “Don’t worry. This’ll work, I promise.”

He didn’t look convinced, but he shrugged his shoulders and followed me like he was happy to consider it my problem if it didn’t. And to be fair, I was too. I had nowhere to be, nothing to do. Since I finished high school, I felt like I’d been slowly fading away, becoming more and more detached from the outside world. Sure, I’d never really had close friends, but at least I’d had the kind of social connections that came from forced proximity. Now the only people I really interacted with were my dad when he was home and the customers at the petrol station I worked at. Neither of those made for great company.

But it wasn’t like I’d really made any efforts to change that, beyond almost getting swept up by desperation and joining a dating site and one brief foray into flirting with one of the other attendants at the petrol station before realising he was slightly insane and definitely straight. It was just complicated in a small town when you were gay because nothing stayed private for long. Sure, it wasn’t so small that everyone knew one another, but you’d cross paths with people you knew too often to expect to operate with any kind of anonymity. 

It wasn’t that everyone was homophobic—there had been kids who were out at my high school, and some of them had been pretty popular. But I lived with my dad, and I didn’t see a path out of that right now, and he wouldn’t be too keen.

It was the kind of situation I knew there were all sorts of simple answers to, mostly to do with growing a spine and taking control of my life. That was part of why I kept it all to myself. Because the answers were simple, but the execution was not, and if I rocked the boat before I had a solid way out, I could end up homeless. 

Who would I talk to about it, anyway? It was rather circular in that way. I wasn’t close to anyone because I kept all of what made me me bottled up, but I didn’t open up in the first place because I wasn’t close enough to anyone. These didn’t really feel like the kinds of things a bunch of barely grown shitheads were supposed to help you out with anyway. Your family were supposed to be the ones helping you step out into the adult world, but I was shit out of luck there.

We reached the bus stop and spent a few minutes figuring out where Ethan was staying and checking bus times, then sat down to wait. 

Ethan didn’t strike me as the kind of person who would have any answers to my life struggles even if I did open up, but maybe that was part of what I liked about him. He existed outside of every worried thought that kept me awake at night. His problems were—at least within the confines of our interactions so far—things that I could solve.

I waved the bus down when I saw it coming and managed to summon up a smile for the driver as I pulled out my bus card and swiped it. I gestured with it back towards Ethan who had reluctantly trailed up the bus steps behind me, hugging my hoodie tight around his chest. “Found this one caught out along the cliffs when the tide came in. He got banged up on the rocks so I had to take him over to the lifeguards to get patched up. I told him you’d let him have a free ride so he doesn’t have to limp home in the cold.”

I didn’t think any of the drivers around here were big enough dicks to say no to the trembling boy standing one step behind me, but we were doubly safe with this one. She often drove my morning commute, always ready with a smile on a soft face just past middle age. I’d say she was the grandmotherly type, except I had a couple of grandmothers and frankly I had a closer relationship with this bus driver—and I didn’t even know her name.

She didn’t quite say ‘aw’ when she looked at Ethan, but her face did. “We’ve all made that mistake with the cliffs, sweetheart. Don’t worry about the fare.”

Ethan murmured a shaky thank you through his shivers and we found a spot near the front of the mostly empty bus. It really shouldn’t have taken as much willpower as it did not to fucking cuddle him as he trembled in the seat next to me, but the way he was leaning into the heat of my body really didn’t help. 

Fortunately, we weren’t going far, and I managed to hold out the five minutes it took for us to get to our stop. Walking helped warm him a little, but the sun was sinking lower and the air was starting to get a bite to it.