Page 20 of Forever Not Yours

“I wouldn’t dream of giving you anything. I get tested and take PreP. Haven’t had sex with anyone else since my last full medical. I wouldn’t risk that. Not with anyone.”

“So I’m not special?” he teased. Brat.

“Shut up.” I smiled, but he wiped that smile off my face with that look of fear he still had. So much bloody fear.

“Look, I know you get tested too. I know you don’t have…you know. Anything.”

“You don’t know shit.” Defensive, as always. But I was the one in the wrong here. The one who… Shit. “Bastien, Juliet tells me things. I know stuff.”

“Juliet has no boundaries, not with you. She shouldn’t be telling you anything.”

“She said you had a full medical a while ago. She was worried and needed a listening ear. I’m a medical professional—”

“You’re a physio, man. Hardly an expert on anything. And Juliet can go to hell.”

He didn’t mean that; he was just embarrassed. Not that I blamed him, and he was right about Juliet. I’dtold her off about oversharing, but at the same time, she’d had legitimate concerns. So had I.

“We need to sit down and talk. Not just…” I held up my hands, waved them around in frustration as Bastien turned off the water with a huff. The intimacy we’d shared was gone, and he grabbed the towel off the rail and walked out, leaving me stood here, stark naked and wet. With no towel.

“Bastien…”

“I need to sleep,” he threw back at me as I followed him, dripping.

I wasn’t embarrassed about my body. I was big and bulky with a bit of flab around my waist that didn’t bother me at all. I liked the way I looked, and Bastien had seen me naked more times than I cared to remember, as I had seen him. Sharing a small student flat did that to friends.

We’d always been friends. Now I suddenly wasn’t so sure what we were.

“Bas…”

“No more. Shut the fuck up.”

That was him. I could have taken his outbursts as rudeness and anger, but I knew better. He couldn’talways deal, and this would be the result. He dug around in his collection of belongings on the floor, finding pants and a T-shirt and pulled a hoodie over his wet hair while I stood there, still naked, and watched. Then he threw himself on the sofa, covered his entire body with the blanket and clearly shut me off.

That had told me then.

I spent my evening sitting in the armchair next to him while he slept and I didn’t. I wanted so badly to talk to him, to reassure him that this, all of this, was absolutely fine. Tell him that if he needed anything, I could give it to him, within reason, but that I needed things too…

No. I didn’t need things. I needed him, and that was bloody irresponsible and made me do stupid shit.

The sound of the fridge door woke me up at stupid o’clock in the morning, and I caught him making himself something to eat. I grunted.

“Go to bed, Jakey,” was his predictable response. I did. And then we just rolled on. I went to work. He went to work. I came home in the evenings to him sleeping on the sofa. He left before I got up.

In a way, it was the perfect arrangement. Roommates, coordinated living, all the familiarity whooshed me back to ten years or so ago. He filled the fridge with essentials. I added my own when we ran out of milk. I threw his blanket in the wash, and cooked an entire tray of chicken. He ate it all the next day. Then I got home to my collection of scrubs neatly hanging up on a drying rack I didn’t recognise.

Like we both lived here. Together.

The weekend came and went. I was a nervous wreck the whole time. He’d disappeared on Friday night, only to rock up on Sunday afternoon and again, in complete silence, pull a hoodie over his head and attempt to go to sleep on my sofa.

“You can sleep in my bed, you know. I want my sofa back.”

I didn’t, but something had to be said.

“You want me to go?” His voice came from under that goddamn blanket. I was starting to hate it.

“Bastien. I want you here. But I worry about your back and your sanity, sleeping on a manky leather sofa for weeks. I have a super-king-sized orthopaedic bed in there, with more than enough space for the two of us.No underlying intentions apart from that we would both sleep better.”

“You’d sleep better with me snoring next to you?”

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