Page 8 of Honey Pot

“Besides, she’s not blonde enough for you.”

“I don’t specifically date blondes,” he argued.

“You have to in order to keep the genes alive. A baseball team of little blond Dean look-alikes.” I laughed, but Dean just scowled at me. Kids and legacy were a sore topic around the Hulk action figure. “What?… You can adopt. Or get your sister to be a surrogate. She loves having kids.”

That made him laugh. God I loved his smile.

“It’s terrifying how good she is at it.”

“I’m just saying you have options when it comes time to build the army of vanilla Hulk action figures.” I smiled and nudged the tension out of his flexed muscles.

We ordered and, just as expected, the addition of warm, salty french fries unknotted all the tense feelings that hung between us. There was something fucking magic about french fries. A cure-all.

I moaned when the salt hit my tongue and devoured them way too fast.

“Don’t.” He slapped my hand away as I reached over to steal a few of his.

“Ow!” I shook out my stinging fingers. “You’re in a foul mood today. What crawled up your ass?”

“No one, just give me five minutes of silence, Man. I know it’s hard for you, but—”

“You invited me for lunch, Ponyboy,” I argued, but he just stared at me for a long moment.

“You’re reading into it, and it’s nothing.” He ignored me and shoved another fry between his lips.

I scrunched my brows up.

“No, seriously,” leaning forward on the table, I said, actually concerned when his frown didn’t loosen. “What’s going on?”

Dean was typically sunshine. Sure, he had his moments of weakness, as we all did, but he was built differently. Raised from the ground in a nuclear family, hewas the golden child, and he worked hard to protect that image of himself in the shadow of his older brother and sister, who were both genuinely and weirdly incredible in their own right.

I was always a little jealous of his life and all for surface reasons.

Professor Tucker was a headstrong jerk, but he was a decent dad. His mom was a retired doctor who had stayed home and raised the kids from the moment his older sister was born. She moved on to be a grandma to a handful of kids that his older brother kept popping out like rabbits. He had a family—a big, loving family that wanted him to succeed.

The problem lay in how his family viewed him. His mother refused to acknowledge his sexuality, and it was a sore spot between them. Homophobia ran deep, and it made the love they extended to Dean feel like sandpaper on his skin.

I supposed that was the problem.

Love only got him so far when he spent half his time hiding who he really was. They played happy family in public, with smiles and jokes, but behind closed doors, it was barrages of text messages laced with passive-aggressive comments about his love life and his career. It was tiring to watch from the sidelines; I couldn’t imagine how exhausting it was to live through it.

“Anna is in town with her stuffy political husband.” He rolled his eyes at me. “I can’t do this again, Cael,” he groaned and pulled away from me as I went to rest my hand on his. “I won’t.”

“Hiding isn’t healthy either.” I shrugged.

“I’m not ashamed to be gay, Cael,” he snapped at me. “I just know it doesn’t matter what I want or need.”

The golden boy.

Stuck forever in the position he was carved into.

“We tried,” he continued, “really hard, a few times, and I love you.” He finally looked at me, and it hurt more than I expected it to. My fingers itched to rub the corners of his chiseled jaw and calm the storm that brewed behind his gray-blue eyes, but I didn’t because it was not what he wanted or needed. I might have been an idiot, but I listened well.

“But you can’t love me back. You tried, and I love you for the effort. But…” He sighed, his finger reaching out from under his plate to brush against thefrayed friendship bracelet around my wrist. “You hid behind the drugs and booze to forget that you already gave your heart to someone else, and I’m not going to play second string to a ghost.”

She wasn’t a ghost.

She was a daydream.

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