Page 5 of Your Only Fan
And even though there have been rumors and talk about us for years, we’re nothing but best friends. Linc is as straight as they come and I’m gayer than a flag in the wind, so we spend our time watching football, talking about our academic lives, and unloading on each other about our personal lives.
“Yo, bud. You okay?” he asks as he crosses my threshold and sets the beer down.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I say.
Linc scans me up and down once and raises an eyebrow.
“You look... scruffy. Have you been beating off?”
I roll my eyes.
“Why do you always assume I’m beating off?”
“Because you usually are. From the first moment I met you, no less,” Linc winks and closes the door behind him.
He never lets me forget it. Him walking into our dorm room almost sixteen years ago while I was blowing off some steam with my right hand and coming two seconds after the door flew open.
What can I say? My dick wanted to greet him.
Despite the unfortunate first encounter, we’d been riding life together ever since.
“Maybe I had a guy in there,” I say.
“Well… did you?” he asks before huffing. “Thought so. Just you and your forbidden crush. What are you thinking? Pizza or Tacos?” He sits down and his gaze lands on my untouched Chinese from last night. “Or Chinese?”
I shake my head and throw the food in the trash.
Yes, Linc knows about my crush. He’s the only one who does. I mean, who else would I tell? My mom? Or my pop?
No, they are quite blissfully unaware of their son’s true obsession and enjoying their retirement in Barbados. They don’t need to get any more involved in my life. They’ve already sacrificed enough to give me the life I have. It’s their time to be free of me.
When I sit down next to my friend a few minutes later, the pizza is on the way and two beers are in our hands while the rest are chilling in the fridge.
The game starts and we fall into our usual routine of shouting at the TV, downing cans of the good stuff, and shoving food to our faces until we go into a food-and-beer-induced coma.
“Do you want me to call you a cab?” I ask without moving or looking at him. The only thing I can do is breathe, and I can barely manage that.
“Nah. I’ll crash here, dude,” he says.
“What about Makayla?” I ask.
“Makayla isn’t crashing here,” he says matter-of-factly.
I snort and manage to lift a finger to reposition my glasses on the bridge of my nose.
“I know that, smart-ass. I mean, won’t she mind?”
“She’ll be all right,” he replies, and I fight the urge to snort again.
Makayla definitely minds and she won’t be all right, but he won’t tell me that. He thinks I don’t know she dislikes me.
For some reason, she’s got it in her thick head that I’m trying to convert her fiancé and she doesn’t like it one bit. She doesn’t understand that I’ve had all the time in the world to convert him before she came into the picture and Linc is not interested.
And neither am I, for the record. Yes, I did have a crush on him during college—and, dare I say, had jerked off watching him sleep across the room on occasion—but I was long past my obsession for him.
I’ve always had crushes on my friends, boys or girls, and those only strengthened our bond, so I guess it was part of the wiring in my brain and the phase it had to go through to grow close to someone.
If only most of my friends lived in New Harlow, I’m sure I wouldn’t feel so lonely when Linc was busy with his girlfriend.
