Page 20 of Up In Flames
“Long day?” I ignored the urge I had to sit next to him and sat in the recliner. There was something about him that made me want to be close to him. I chalked it up to the way we met. It wasn’t every day I was pulled from a car wreck that could havekilled me. Maybe my brain had a bit of hero worship going on where Will was concerned. It would explain the way I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
“Some days just suck.” Will opened the beer and took a long drink. He sucked in a deep breath when he was done. “God, I needed that.”
“If you need to talk about it, I’m all ears.”
“Let me preface this with the fact that I love my parents and any violence I might want to inflict on their persons is purely me blowing off steam, and I don’t actually mean any of it.”
“That bad, huh?”
He groaned. “I was at my parents' for dinner tonight, and Mom surprised me with a blind date. When I got there, some girl Mom knows from her church was there with fucking hearts in her eyes, man.”
Will took another drink, and I couldn’t help but watch his lips touch the can and the way his throat moved when he swallowed.
“Hence the weird phone call.”
“Yeah, sorry about that, but I was fucking dying. Mom and—I don’t even remember her name—were busy talking about me like I wasn’t even there.”
He closed his eyes again, and I realized how tired he looked. He should’ve gone home, crawled into bed, and gotten some sleep, but he’d come here instead seeking comfort. Friendship.
I’d never been the guy who had a million friends. I had Liam, and before the accident I’d had Byron and Rita. Law school had weeded a lot of people out of my life. I wasn’t like Byron, whom everything had come easy to. A lot of people who had been my friends had simply fallen off my radar because I was always studying. If I wasn’t studying, I was in class, and if I wasn’t there, I was working shitty jobs to try and get by.
Things weren’t much better now. I was still scraping by, but at least the law school part of my life was behind me. I had time for friends again. Even if my current friend pool was one singular firefighter, it was better than having no one at all.
My therapist would be proud that I’d made a friend. Even if it was kind of by accident.
“Do they often try to set you up with women?” The idea of Will going out with some woman who’d already been approved of by his parents made my stomach churn.
“Every once in a while, Mom forgets that I hate it when she meddles in my shit and she’ll arrange for me to meet a nice girl from her church. Even though I haven’t gone since I was a teenager, I think Mom hopes that a nice church girl will lure me back into the fold.” He took another long drink of his beer. Leaning forward, he set the empty on the coffee table.
“Another?”
“Nah, I’m good, thanks.” Will looked at me. There was a softness to his expression that made him look vulnerable. “Thanks for saving my ass today.”
“Anytime. I mean it.”
“I just wish Mom would stop dragging random women around hoping that I’ll just magically fall in love with them.”
“Are they not your type?”
His expression shuttered. “You could say that.”
“Well, if she doesn’t stop, you could always give her a set of guidelines. If she’s going to try to marry you off, the least she could do is try to match your taste a little better.”
Will scoffed in obvious defeat. “That’s not going to happen.”
His body language was suddenly different. He looked more rigid than he’d been, almost like he was bracing himself for something. But for what?
“I was mostly joking. It’s a terrible idea. No one really wants their mom to play matchmaker.”
“It wasn’t that bad of an idea, but mom will never find a girl that I’d want to settle down with.”
“Not into the religious ones?”
There was a long pause. I watched Will and the way he hunched forward. His chest expanded with each deep breath he took. “Not into women. Like, at all. Ever. I’m… I’m gay.” He exhaled a shaky breath, and a half smile tried to form on his mouth, but it was like he didn’t know whether to be happy or to be sick. “I’ve never told anyone before.”
Will was gay. Will was gay and not out. To anyone but me apparently. I didn’t know what I’d done to become the one person on the planet he felt he could tell. Maybe because I wasn’t important the way his parents were, or the guys he worked with were.
Maybe he’d told me because he didn’t know me very long, and if he lost me, it wouldn’t be a big loss at all. But I chose to believe that he told me because he somehow knew that I was a safe person to tell.
