“Yeah, I freaked out. Of course I freaked out. We’re just friends for years and suddenly you call me your boyfriend out of the blue while you’re hopping in the shower with me? What the hell?” I was angrier than I thought. All the times I’d wished for him to claim me, all the times I’d wanted nothing more than to be his boyfriend, and that’s how it was going to happen? No conversation? No asking me out on a date or leaning in for a sweet kiss first?
My jaw tightened so hard, I heard my teeth squeak. So many words fought to escape my mouth all at the same time, but something held me back.
This isn’t the time to scream and yell at him. He just lost his grandfather.
“Teo,” he said softly, reaching out for me with one hand. “I thought this was what you wanted?”
He was right. Kind of.
“Yeah, but not right now. Not like this.” I slid into bed next to him and leaned over to turn off the bedside table light on my side. “It’s too much right now, Chris. I think we just need to get through the service, get back into a routine at work, and then revisit this when things feel more steady.”
Chris turned off the light on his side after shooing Socrates off the foot of the bed where he’d been curled into a little ball. A mean voice in my head made a snarky comment about how he had more right to that spot than Chris did, but I ignored my pettiness. As much as I’d been looking forward to being alone tonight, I really didn’t mind having someone to hold me all night. After spending several nights with Jack in Canada, I’d discovered just how much I enjoyed not being alone in bed.
It wasn’t the same with Chris, but I chalked that up to the fact we weren’t having sex together. Surely, if we were fucking, things would be as good as they’d been with Jack, right?
“You do still want this, right?” Chris asked after a few minutes of silence. “Want me?”
“Of course I do,” I said automatically. Was he crazy? I’d wanted him forever.
“What about Jack?” Chris’s voice sounded genuinely unsure.
Jack wasn’t up for a relationship, but I didn’t want to admit that to Chris. It would make it sound like that was the only reason I’d pick Chris over Jack, and it wasn’t.
Was it?
“I don’t want to talk about Jack tonight. Can we just go to sleep please?”
After a few more beats of silence, he started talking again. “Remember when we found that twenty-dollar bill in the field by the lake?”
I thought back to middle school. “Yeah. You wanted to save up for a Wii, but I wanted to…” I tried to remember. It was geeky, that’s all I could recall.
Chris snorted. “Write a letter to some space organization to petition them to let Pluto remain a planet.”
I groaned and put my hands over my face. “It has moons, for god’s sake. And, for the record, it’s still a planet, it’s just a dwarf planet.”
Chris reached over and ruffled my hair. I batted his hand away. It didn’t feel good when he did that. It felt like he thought I was his kid brother, a feeling I’d had on and off the entire time we’d known each other.
“Oh my god, that reminds me,” Chris said, moving to his side to face me. “Guess who I ran into the other day? Rachel Bell.”
“Your girlfriend from college? That Rachel?”
“Yeah. The one who shot me down when I brought up the subject of marriage. Broke my fucking heart. Anyway, she’s living my dream right now. Staying in some high-end executive penthouse downtown, traveling internationally all the fucking time, and earning gangster money at…”
His words were drowned out by the sudden clicking together of puzzle pieces I’d been carrying around in my pocket for years. As I lay there, his words finally, finally sank in. His dream was nothing like mine. Mine involved a little house in the suburbs with a garden out back and maybe a sunroom for the cats. Mine involved meaningful work with patients during the day and returning home to a loving husband at night. Mine involved game nights with family and friends on the weekends and maybe, if I was lucky, little league games—or figure skating or library story time or anything else fun like that—with my kids one day.
And none of that, none of that, was what Chris had ever wanted.
A hysterical giggle escaped before I could clap my hand over my mouth. Chris froze.
“I’m sorry. I… I forgot I hadn’t told you that.” He looked guilty.
“Told me what?”
“About asking Rachel to marry me. Well, I didn’t actually propose, so it didn’t really count, did it? You can’t be mad at me.”
Yeah, that part had hurt like a bitch. But I’d already known it. Rachel herself had come to me to ask about the best way to let him down easy. I’d told her to tell him the truth, that she had huge corporate ambitions that didn’t gel with being married young. And then I’d returned to my apartment and cried like a baby for five straight days.
It was good to hear she was living her dream.
“First of all, I can, indeed, be mad at you,” I said, ticking the point off with a finger. “Because you’d promised me a committed future. You sat there in the bed of your uncle’s pickup truck that night by the lake and asked me to wait for you so that someday we could build a life together just the two of us. So, yes. I can be mad as fuck at you for stringing me along.” I felt the anger of so many years of disappointment and heartbreak building up. It needed to come out, but it was going to ruin everything.
“Secondly,” I continued, “I already knew about it. And third, good for her for not letting someone else change the path she wanted for herself. It reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
He looked worried now. “You knew? All this time you knew that I’d talked to Rachel about marriage?”
“I’m quitting Banks. I’m going to try and get my job at Wilton back.”
He opened his eyes wider. “What? No. You can’t. We need you there. I need you there. I love being with you like that every day. Don’t you?”
I reached for his hand and held it between us. “No. I hate it. I hate working behind a desk. I hate working on compliance protocols, rules, and best-practices handbooks. I want my patients back. I want someone to care for.”
“You can care for me,” he said softly.
I shook my head. “No. I’m done with that too. For so long, I tried fitting you into this cardboard cutout of the perfect boyfriend. But that’s not you. It never was you. You have aspirations that don’t fit with mine. And they’re great. I love how much you love your job and how dedicated you are to growing the family business. It suits you. And I can see you enjoying your jet-set life with more travel and more exciting sales deals. But that’s not me.”
“What are you saying? That you don’t want to be with me?” His confusion seemed to morph to anger right before my eyes. “After all this fucking time of expecting me to change, I finally do exactly what you want and now forget it? You’ve changed your fucking mind?”
His voice had raised enough to worry me a little. I’d never known him to get physical or violent, but it was also rare for him to get this upset.
“Is this about Jack? Are you seriously dumping me for a glorified bus driver? The week of my grandfather’s fucking funeral?”