Justin

I sat on the sofa and frowned down at a pile of print outs Cam had just slapped down on the coffee table in front of me. “Whoever you pick is fine. Really.”

“I don’t want to hear that, so don’t say it again,” Cam said, his words hard around the edges.

My frown deepened, but I wasn’t going to argue. This was what Angry Cam sounded like, believe it or not. He didn’t shout. He didn’t close himself off like I did. He just communicated firmly. Goes to show what a couple of loving parents and a nice house in the suburbs can do for you.

Each sheet of paper had a profile on it, printed from the site Cam had used to take applications for the spare room. I wondered if he’d bothered to print them all off or if he’d already combed through and made a few eliminations. There’d been one guy who’d started immediately trying to negotiate with our decorating choices, and another who had wanted his husky to move in along with him. Of the two of us, Cam cared more about keeping up with the housework, but I had my limits and the heavy shedding coat of a husky was well past them.

But there had been a few bright spots as well. On the top of the stack sat Shannon’s profile, the image in the corner showing the first few lines of age around kind eyes. She had been our only female applicant. Apparently she’d figured out we were gay—or gay enough, I guess, in Cam’s case—just from looking at the pictures of the house Cam had put up.

She reminded me of Cam’s mum, which wasn’t a bad thing, exactly. That woman had done more to raise me than my own parents. She was a lovely woman. But did I really want to live with my mother-in-law as a grown adult man? I didn’t need a mother, and if Cam ever did, I’d be the one filling that role.

I flipped to the next profile, a man with a quiff much more dramatic than Cam’s named Leo. On paper, Leo was easily the best pick. He was around our age, very obviously gay, and he worked in a museum. He and Cam had spent what had felt like hours talking about every piece of furniture and decor in the house. I was outside in the shed working for most of it, but I’d come back in for a glass of water, and they’d still be at it. 

So, naturally, I hated Leo, because antiques were me and Cam’s thing. I liked the physical act of restoring furniture and he liked the art, the history, the story behind old things. I was going to have a fucking crisis if we brought in someone who had a stronger connection to the parts of it he loved than I did.

So what we were learning here was that I was a petty, jealous bitch. I just hid it well by being unconventional about it. I’ll watch my man put his dick in you, no problem, but you stay the hell away from our shared interest. It probably helped that I didn’t want Cam to fuck me. We’d tried it before, but it’d mostly just felt strange. For both of us.

I turned to the next profile, but my eyes were immediately drawn to a yellow post-it note stuck to it. The post-it note said Flynn, but the profile it was stuck to wasn’t his.

“He didn’t fill out his profile, so I figured I’d save on printer ink,” Cam explained. “Plus I didn’t think there was much risk we’d forget who Flynn was.”

“If we never see Flynn again, I think I’ll be ninety years old, on my deathbed, and still remember him.”

“Ninety, huh? That’s optimistic.”

“I’m counting on medical advancements to carry me a good handful of those years. We know I don’t have genetics on my side.”

Cam winced. “I wasn’t thinking about—”

“I know.”

Tammy had only been my half sister, anyway. There were equal odds the cancer had come from her dad’s side.

I held the post-it note between my fingers and tapped it against the coffee table. Flynn was probably a bad idea. We wanted him for all the wrong reasons. Maybe a few right ones, too, but there was a lot of potential for things to get messy. Not that me or Cam would ever act on anything. We were adults with self control. There was zero risk of that. But if Flynn walked into the kitchen with his shirt off while I was making my morning coffee, I couldn’t be held responsible for where my eyes went. Which was totally fair, to be honest, because I’d caught him doing some looking of his own.

A glance through the rest of the profiles told me they were in some kind of order, with most of the middle lot being forgettable and the ones at the very bottom more of a waste of ink than Flynn’s empty profile would have been. Did that mean Shannon was Cam’s first choice? Well, better than Leo, maybe. Or was the order who Cam thought I’d liked best? In other contexts, I’d have liked them both, so it wasn’t totally insane.

I flicked a glance up at Cam. “You want my opinion?”

“I thought I made that clear.”

“Hm.” I sorted a few of the profiles from the bottom of the stack into their own pile and said, “no,” as I put them down. “No—” I placed Leo’s profile on top, “—and no.” I added Shannon’s profile to the stack.

Cam laughed. “What did poor Shannon do to you?”

I shrugged.

“Well, no, that’s good. I’m glad you’re taking this seriously. Thank you.” Cam flipped through what remained of the profiles and pulled one out. “So you wouldn’t mind this guy?”

I studied the profile picture for a few seconds, then shrugged again. “Did I meet him? I don’t remember.”

Cam sighed and added that profile to the discard pile. “Are there any you actually liked?”

“I’m fine with any of the others.”

“Can we please stop pretending?”

“I’m being honest.”

Cam considered me for a long moment. “Hey Justin, what’s in your hand?”

I looked down. My hand had been tapping against the coffee table without me really noticing it. No, not my hand—the thing in my hand. A yellow post-it note.

“Oh.” I reached over and stuck it to the top of the stack of profiles Cam was holding.

“Do you actually want any of these other guys?”

“No. So they’ve got that going for them.”

Cam snorted. “Yeah, okay. And what does Flynn have going for him?”

“Not that,” I said. I gave myself a moment to think, to get past the obvious wants and issues. “I think he could really use a home.”

“The thing about homes is that everyone needs one, more or less equally.”

“Mm,” I said, not quite agreement. “But I think he’s lying. I’m not sure about which parts, or what the truth is, but—I don’t know. If I’d been more honest with you when we were kids, I’d have been staying at your place full time long before my last year of high school. That’s what I see in Flynn. He’s just a lot more sunshiney about it all than I ever was.”

“Do you want to call him, or shall I?”

I blinked. “That’s the end of the conversation? Decision made? I thought we’d go back and forth on it a bit.”

“Can you name a single other person in the ‘maybe’ pile?”

“Uhh…” I said, trying to get a subtle peek at the name on the profile on the top of the stack. Cam covered it with his hand.

“If you want a debate, go ahead. You can argue both sides and see which one you come down on. Whatever decision you make is fine.”

I glared. “Put it on speaker.”