Page 26 of Up In Flames
Therapy looks good on you
Grinning, I tucked my phone away and strode toward my bus stop.
CHAPTER 12
Will
The first day back at work after my confession, I kept waiting for everyone to comment something to me. About how I was different now, but the changes in me were only on the inside. On the outside, I was the same Will Dorsey. Nothing had changed, not that they could tell. Inside, I felt different. Something me had shifted. It was subtle at first.
It started out as a warm, relieved feeling, like stepping into a cozy house and only then realizing how cold you’d been. For the first time, someone knew me. Knew the thing I held closest to myself. And he hadn’t rejected me. I’d always feared that coming out meant rejection, meant not being accepted.
Oren accepting me didn’t mean that everyone would, but someone had. If I’d thought I was comfortable in my skin before, it was nothing compared to now. I felt invincible. Oren knew I was gay, and he was fine with it. I’d told him more than a week ago, and nothing between us had changed. We talked every day. Less when I was on duty, but even when he was at work he found a spare minute now and then to shoot me a meme or a text about something he thought was interesting or funny.
His newest obsession was sending me pictures of food and asking me to cook it for him. It was supposed to be all in fun, butI’d secretly been looking up Beef Wellington recipes after he sent me a few pictures in a row with drooling emojis. It didn’t matter to me that Oren was straight. I wanted to make him happy. He was my friend, and after what he’d been through, he deserved a bit of happiness.
We didn’t talk about the accident anymore. He found out what he’d wanted to know and then we’d moved on from that subject. There was a lot of unpacking he had to do about it, I guessed, anyway. I’d never been through something like that, but I’d been there when lives were irrevocably changed. It wasn’t something most people could process in a single conversation.
Wellington, as it turned out, wasn’t as hard as I feared. My first attempt came out looking like the dog’s dinner, but the second one had turned out much better. Instead of inviting Oren over for dinner and making him navigate public transit, I loaded everything into containers and tucked them into an insulated bag.
Twenty minutes and every red light in town later, Oren met me in the hallway outside his apartment. He was dressed in sweats and a slightly too-tight tee, but clearly he’d been working as evidenced by one pen clipped to the collar of his shirt, another tucked behind his ear, and the ink marks on his hand.
“Well, this is a nice surprise.” Oren’s smile grew when he saw the insulated bag. “Dinner?”
“I’ve been working on a new recipe, and I need a guinea pig.”
“Then you’re in luck because I’ve been working all day and could use a break.”
“It’s Saturday.”
I followed Oren into his apartment. The kitchen was right off the entrance, so after I toed my shoes off, I went to the counter and started unloading the food.
Oren grabbed plates and cutlery for us. “Is this a ketchup kind of meal?” he asked.
“God, I hope not. But I guess we’ll find out. What are you doing working on a Saturday, though?”
“It might shock you to know that my firm is a very busy place. But also that I have zero social life. Making friends never was my strong suit, and in law school, not only was I too busy for friends, I already had Byron and Rita. I didn’t need anyone else.”
“Well, if it makes you feel better, you’re the only friend I have that I don’t also work with.”
Oren’s smile disarmed me, and I nearly fumbled the container holding the Wellington.
“It actually does.”
My stomach did a happy little flip. Making Oren happy made me happy. My crush was officially out of control. I knew it before I came over. I’d had crushes before, but none of them had inspired me to learn to make Beef fucking Wellington because of a couple drool emojis. None of them had ever stolen my breath with a look or made my pulse race by simply brushing against me accidentally. None of their approval had seemed necessary to my continued existence. And as time wore on, my crushes faded away like a sun-bleached photograph.
Not Oren. The longer I knew him, the more I wanted to know him. The more I was around him, the deeper I cared. I was falling for him. Hard. It didn’t matter that he was straight. My heart kept ignoring that fact. Much to my eventual detriment.
I hadn’t yet figured out how I was going to handle being halfway in love with Oren and continuing to be his friend. I couldn’t even pursue getting laid because the only man I could think of was Oren. My dating apps had sat untouched for weeks, and I didn’t see myself going back to them anytime soon. Not for as long as I was hung up on Oren.
“Is that…” His voice wavered. “Did you make me Beef Wellington?”
“Well, you sent enough drool emojis to drown my phone. So I took a crack at it. This is Wellington 2.0. The first one was more like Frankenstein than a Wellington.”
“Frankenstein’s monster, you mean. Frankenstein was the doctor.”
“Fucking lawyers.” I grinned and bumped my shoulder against Oren’s. When we were together, it was like my body found different ways to seek out his touch. I tried not to be obvious about it, but sometimes it happened automatically, like my body sought him out without the permission of my brain.
“I still can’t believe you made me a Wellington.” Oren met my gaze then glanced away, suddenly looking sheepish. “Is it alright if I confess that I’ve never had it, so I don’t even know if I’ll like it.?”
