Page 32 of Another Chance
“I sort of thought you were all too sick to go out tonight,” Eric said, somewhat weakly. Even with the flu bug being passed around, Eric knew that they had gone to the bar pretty much every night, as usual. He hadn’t because he’d been too eager to get back home to Theo, but his friends had.
“For this, I’ll make time,” Mary breathed rapturously. Eric smirked and shook his head.
“All right, all right, keep it in your pants,” he said, specifically to the two women, who looked, rebelliously, like they wanted to do no such thing. Theo was in so much trouble with those two. “I’ll go home and ask Theo if he wants to go. If he does, we’ll see you there.”
“You’ll ask Theo …” Anne asked, and her voice trailed off before regaining all of the volume it had lost, and then some. “Do you mean to tell me, Eric Parker, that you are actuallylivingwith the guy?”
At this point, Eric decided, the only thing he could do was get out of there before these nosy assholes had the whole damn story out of him. He had always kept his personal life to himself, despite their curiosity, but he could tell that those days could very quickly come to an end if he stuck around to be grilled about this.
“Later,” he said abruptly and then turned on his heel and walked away. The last thing he saw was Carlos, still looking at him with that deeply thoughtful frown on his face. Carlos, who might have said less than the women did, but who had surely seen just as much, if not more.
What would Carlos do, what would he say, if he found out that Eric was falling in love with his former best friend all over again? What would any of them say? As far as he knew, in this little town, there were no other queer people, and even though he knew it was accurate about himself, he was reluctant to identify that way. It wasn’t that it was a secret, not exactly, it was just that it had never come up before.
That had always been a good thing, though. It meant people didn’t treat him differently. It meant that he could pass below the radar, and there was a reason that the times he’d slept with men, it had all been outside of town, not with anyone he knew.
As far as these people knew, he was straight as an arrow. They’d certainly seen him date women, and he only talked about women. But from that look in the dark, intense eyes of his friend, he had to wonder if the secret wasn’t as much of a secret as he could have hoped.
Or maybe it was all just his imagination. The questionwas, if it wasn’t, how was he going to react to that? Should he deny it, or be open? It was, after all, not the dark ages anymore.
Groaning softly, Eric headed for his car. No doubt about it, his life had been far less complicated when Theo had been back in New York, and Eric hadn’t even known if he would ever see Theo again, much less that Theo was famous.
Yes, it had been less complicated, but had it been better? Could he really say that? No. It was better, better in a thousand ways, to have Theo by his side, and no matter what else happened, Eric would remain thankful that Theo, his Teddy, had come back into his life like he had.
