Page 13 of Love Bleeds
"It's... I'm not going to say it's okay, but..." She took a deep breath, as if to stop herself from crying again. "I thought about asking him out for a year or so before we finally started dating. Now I feel pissed that we only got like three or four dates before..." She trailed off, exhaled and inhaled again. "But then I look at you and I think of Damian and... I just know that he wouldn't have left without a word to you. I know something must have happened to him, and I'm almost glad that Brian asked me out before something happened to him." Her voice cracked on the last half of that sentence.
I wanted to ask her why she was drawing parallels between herself and Brian and me and Damian, but her tears had started flowing again and the whole situation was making me feel extremely uncomfortable.
What to do?
I rifled through my backpack to see if I’d brought tissues, but Savannah pulled a pack from her own purse before I could find anything and blew her nose. "Sorry, I just--"
I held up a hand. "It's fine." I'd cried a lot too. Not that I was going to tell her that. It was bad enough my family had seen me bawl like a baby.
Savannah regarded me quietly for a moment. I got the feeling that she was working up to something, but what that was, I had no idea. Not until she spoke anyway. "Damian made me promise never to tell you this, but..."
"What?" I tensed, more than mildly curious. Damian and I had always told each other everything. What would he have shared with Savannah that he didn't want me to know?
Savannah licked her lips. "He liked you."
I frowned at her. What kind of secret was that? "Of course he did. He was my best friend!" My words came out harsher than I'd meant them. This wasn't the tone I should be taking with my friend who was hurting. God, Puck was right. I really was becoming easily irritated. I never used to snap at my friends--or anyone, really.
Savannah didn't seem disturbed by my outburst, though. There was no anger in her expression, only... sympathy? I'd seen that look in my siblings' eyes so often recently I was getting good at recognizing it. "You don't get it," she said. "That's not what I meant."
I took a breath before speaking again so my irritation wouldn't shine through in my words. "What do you mean?"
"He's..." She paused, obviously choosing her words carefully. "Did he ever tell you that he liked boys?"
"No, he didn't." That notion was ridiculous. I would have known if my best friend was gay. My own brother was gay, and I didn't have a problem with that, so why would Damian have hidden something like that from me?
"He told me he was bi," Savannah said. "I don't think he meant to. We'd both had a little much to drink."
That explained it. Damian had said something stupid when he was drunk, and Savannah had gotten it all wrong. No surprise there. Damian never drank much. A few beers could get him to do and say all sorts of silly things.
"It was Mackenzie's birthday party," Savannah went on. "Last year."
I nodded. At least she wasn't crying anymore. If this story helped her take her mind off Brian, I was happy to let her talk, even as my own heart hurt. Sometimes, thinking about Damian brought a smile to my lips, and sometimes it made me want to cry and more often than not, it ended up being a weird mix of both those things.
After all, how could I remember all the good times we'd had without remembering that it was my fault he wasn't here anymore?
"You and Julien were trying to fix her laptop," Savannah said. "I don't remember exactly. I think she wanted it to play music and there was no sound or something." She shrugged. "I sat on the couch with Damian. He got into the liquor pretty deep that night." A small smile lit up her face at the memory. "Pretty sure he would have been helping you guys if not for that. He kept glancing over at you anyway. At first I thought he wanted to play with the laptop too, but then..." She paused.
"Then what?" I prompted.
"I realized he wasn't looking at the laptop. The laptop sat on the low table next to the TV and you were bending over it. He was staring at your ass."
"What?" That couldn't be right. Why would Damian have stared at my ass? "Are you... um... you were drinking too, right?"
"I'm not making this shit up, Luke. I figured he was just being a little out of it, so I just kinda punched his shoulder and made a joke, you know? Like, what, are you into guys now? And he looked at me and laughed and said that he'd always been bi. And then he flushed and hurried to correct himself, making like he hadn't meant it, but--"
"Of course he didn't mean it," I cut her off. This whole idea was... it didn't make sense.
Why wouldn't he have told me?
I swallowed, trying to imagine how I'd have reacted to such a confession. The part where he was bisexual wouldn't have bothered me, obviously. The part where he'd been staring at my ass, though?
My mind blanked.
It didn't matter, I decided then, because it hadn't happened.
But even as I tried to convince myself of this, Savannah kept right on talking. "I thought maybe he was just drunk and talking shit, not knowing what he was saying." She gave a short shrug. "But I watched him after that, during our game nights, and like... when you know, it's just painfully obvious. The way he looked at you, Luke..."
If she was expecting a reaction from me, I didn't know what to tell her. There'd been nothing 'painfully obvious' to me about the way Damian looked at me.
