Page 64 of Brad & Finn
“I knew you looked familiar,” Naomi said after Finn gave a thirty-minute explanation and Chloe offered an addendum on her and Christian. “Orfeltfamiliar, I should say. Something about your calming energy was ringing bells in my head.”
“You know,” Mariana said, punctuated by a yawn. “While I am so grateful to get to know you both better, and we’d love to come out and meet Christian someday, you could have just told us you were polyamorous, and that was why Finn was doing this all for Brad, and we would have believed you.”
Chloe slapped a hand over her forehead, and Ms. Willson chimed in from behind them that she also would have believed that. Finn buried his face in his hands, but Mrs. Abernathy’s laugh eased some of his embarrassment.
Finn was shocked to learn that the carpenter was actually Miles from the bar. He quickly ran Miles through the much sparser details: that Finn wanted to do something for the man he loved. Miles agreed immediately. When they told him the guest list, including Atlas, his voice changed, and he informed them that Atlas was flying home in the morning to accept a new job. Finn and Chloe exchanged loaded looks, as it seemed maybe Finn and Brad weren’t the only two being put through the relationship wringer that weekend. Finn decided to reach out to Atlas anyway, and when he confirmed he would be gone by then, he also volunteered to have Miles video call him during the party.
When the preparations were in place, and all that was left was the execution—and, of course, a very long, possibly painful conversation with Brad—Finn finally got his childhood best friend’s phone number from his mom.
It rang through to voicemail once, then twice, and Finn hung up before it could ring through a third time. He could have senta text, asking if he and Brad could speak in the morning, but he decided he’d do it in person tomorrow.
He said goodnight to the other members of their makeshift command central team, and Chloe drove him back to the hotel.
His conviction—and his composure—lasted until he made it to their corner of the hallway, by which point he couldn’t help himself. He knocked gently on Brad’s door and then knocked a bit harder. There was no noise on the other side of the door, and Finn wondered if he was at the bar or out for a walk. Back in high school, Finn remembered one particular evening Brad ran all the way to Finn’s house on the north side of the city because he’d had a really bad practice and needed to clear his head. They hadn’t talked for long; Brad was mostly just pushing to see how far he could make it.
Finn’s heart clenched, and he leaned his forehead on the door, then turned and pressed his back into it.
Brad had been pushing for so long, and Finn knew that there was a very real chance he wouldn’t want—or even be able—to stop now. All Finn could do was lay his cards on the table, offer up his own version of the future, and hope.
Finn slid down the door until he was sitting on the dingy hotel carpet, just like two nights before. He put his head in his hands and tried not to wonder if he was making a mistake.
11
BRAD
Bradonce again woke up to the sound of knocking on his door. It was soft at first but grew more insistent as it continued. Prying open his aching eyes, he pushed himself up into what could loosely be considered an upright position. The memory of waking up the previous morning with Finn in his arms threatened to send him right back to bed.
Finn, who’d texted Brad last night…and Brad had never responded.
He stared down at the ugly floral print comforter and still didn’t know how to respond. How could he explain to Finn that in all the years of their friendship—and in the twenty years since—Brad was pretty sure Finn had never done a single thing wrong. On his run, while the front part of his brain had been fighting to remember how to breathe through pain and exhaustion, some other part of him had been working through fragments of ideas and shards of feelings, all culminating in the idea that Brad had doneeverythingwrong.
The knock sounded again, and he rolled his shoulders before pushing himself out of bed. He opened the door to find hismom holding two cups of steaming coffee and a bag reeking of cinnamon.
“Hi, honey,” she said, her voice containing a multitude of emotions that Brad couldn’t even begin to fathom. “I was hoping maybe we could talk?”
Brad eyed the coffee like it might bite if he turned his back too quickly.
“It’s from the place on the other side of town,” she assured him. “Chloe mentioned they had much better coffee, and I decided you were worth taking a risk and trying it out.”
To be clear, Brad loved his mother. He loved her with every part of his soul, and that meant that he would never do something as rude as snatch the cup out of her hand and slam the door so he could be alone with his one true love—this coffee. Instead, he very gently took the cup out of her hand and pressed his face to the lid of the cup like he was looking through The Roll’s window, trying to gauge how crowded it was.
“Oh, dear…” his mom said, and she handed him her coffee as well. He tried to hand it back, but she shook her head adamantly. “Honey, there is no way I need this as much as you do, and in fact, this is a great segue into what I came to talk to you about.”
Well, that was somehow both ominous and confusing. “Do you…want to talk here?” Brad asked after obediently accepting and then draining half of the second cup of coffee. He looked over his shoulder into his room, at the bed where he’d made love to Finn, and then at the other, where he’d held him through the night.
“Maybe somewhere else would be better,” she said, eyeing the newly destroyed state of his suitcase. “Do you need a few minutes? You can meet me downstairs. I’ve never minded hotel coffee, and I think I saw a station in the lobby.”
Brad agreed and did his best to hurry through his morning routine. He brushed his teeth only to bathe them in coffee amoment later, and tried to fix his hair, just to run a tired hand through it on the way out the door.
The chug of the elevator on the way down to the lobby jarred his brain against the sides of his skull in a way that sort of made him think of all those concussion videos he’d been forced to watch in school. Luckily, he’d managed to make it his whole career with only one concussion. It had been at the end of a long game, where he probably should have subbed out an entire quarter before he got hurt, but he’d refused.
That had sort of been a running theme in his life, huh?
He met his mom at the coffee station and received one of her signature warm-as-melted-honey-butter hugs. Unlike twenty minutes earlier, at least he was now showered and dressed to receive it. His mom led them outside and, to Brad’s surprise, around the corner to her car. She drove them to a familiar parking lot, next to an all too familiar football field.
“I thought we could talk here?” she said as they walked to their favorite spot, right in the middle of the second row from the top on the home side bleachers. “I know it’s been a while, but this conversation is way past overdue.”
Brad looked out over the field, and his eyes landed on the sidelines, where Finn used to cheer from. That was where Brad had intended to do the promposal. That’s where heshouldhave done the promposal.
