Fredric chuckled softly, and Ilan’s eyes went hot. “I had a feeling. She called me earlier this morning, and she was a bit…incensed.”
“She helped me see reason,” Ilan told him. “She also said you were seeing someone. I take it the date with Hudson went well.”
Fredric was quiet for a long time. “My personal life finally feels like…” He hesitated. “I feel like I finally know what I want, and I have the courage to reach for it.”
It was agony and ecstasy all at the same time. “Good.”
Fredric was quiet for a long time. “Can I see you soon?”
“Any time you want,” Ilan told him, and he felt like the worst martyr in the world, because sitting on the sidelines and watching this man fall in love would be the worst torture. And yet, he could never tell him no.
“Come over for dinner tomorrow night. I’m cooking. I’ve been honing my skills.”
Ilan grinned in spite of himself. “Boxed mac and cheese?”
“If that’s what you want…”
“No,” Ilan gasped through a laugh. “I’m joking. It’s fine, impress me with your skills. I’ll bring the wine.”
“I can’t wait,” Fredric said. “Thank you for calling.”
“Thank you for answering. And again…”
“Don’t,” Fredric said, very softly. “No more sorries. Just be here.”
And really, that was the easiest promise Ilan had ever made.
Chapter 16
Fredric felt Agatha at his shoulder as he spread open the pages of the cookbook. “What is that?” she asked, her voice a little too loud in his ear.
“This was a gift from my occupational therapist the day I graduated,” he said. It was an old, archaic cookbook with a lot of gelatin loaf recipes from the seventies and eighties. She’d put it together herself, meticulously brailling every page from her mother’s collection. “I think she had a lot more faith in my future as a chef than I did.”
Agatha laughed as she stepped away. “But you use it?”
“I actually haven’t touched it for years,” he confessed. “I tried to make something for my ex back on our fifteenth wedding anniversary. Lamb chops with mint sauce,” he said. The memory was old and stale, and he remembered chasing away the staff, burning his fingertips to blisters, and feeling absurdly proud when his fingers brushed over the badly plated dinner.
Except Jacqueline never showed. She called hours later to say that she was staying over at the hotel after some benefit, and she’d see him on the weekend. She wasn’t sorry—she hadn’t even remembered what night it was. He threw everything into the bin without tasting it, and then had their driver take him, Julian, and Corinne out for hot dogs and ice cream. He held them a little tighter that day—the single, miraculous blessing from his marriage to that woman.
He’d tucked the book away after that, letting it gather dust on a shelf until the movers—who had been instructed to find anything brailled—put it in a box and brought it to his new home.
His fingers right now hovered over a roast chicken. Hardly the romantic dinner he might have chosen under any other circumstances, but he didn’t think Ilan would mind. Ilan was a man of luxury taste but a fondness for simplicity. That much was obvious in the shakshuka he’d carefully guided Fredric through, his impossibly warm hands staying close to his, even though Fredric knew Ilan was only barely holding back his panic.
Two things happened that night with that almost kiss. The moment he realized he was in love and the moment he realized he was going to have to work harder than he ever had before, because Ilan would never, ever believe he was worthy of it. And Fredric was wallowing in guilt because Ilan still believed that tiny lie he hadn’t corrected about Hudson. But he’d fix that soon enough—Wednesday night when Ilan finally crossed the threshold of his house again.
Two weeks had been exactly enough for Fredric to find himself—to realize that yes, this was the man he wanted and anything else be damned. Ilan had gone on and on about Fredric deserving to be accommodated and romanced in ways that mattered to him, and it was the echo of those words, and the memory of being so close, that told Fredric he already had been.
Ilan had been wooing him for years. Fredric just hadn’t let himself see it.
And he wasn’t even sure Ilan did either.
After the first week of silence, Fredric had finally taken Agatha up on another invite to dinner. He was tired of feeling lonely, but it was out on the terrace having a beer with Teddy that gave him the courage to let himself keep waiting—and hoping—and believing.
“When Agatha and I first met,” Teddy said quietly, “I wanted to ask her out more than anything. She’s beautiful, and she’s funny. She never gives a single fuck what other people think, and god—I was so envious of that. I spent so much of my time caring about whether or not I was passing, about what they thought of me as an artist, or whether or not I deserved to be here at all. It took me so long to find the courage to stop thanking strangers for their back-handed compliments that meant nothing to me.”
Fredric winced. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Teddy said in a rush. “I mean, it’s obviously not fine. It sucked. But with her, it was easy. She took me at face value and never made me feel like I had to prove who I was. I think I fell in love with her the first time she set foot in my studio.” Fredric smiled softly and waited for him to go on. “My friends all kept telling me to ask her out, but she’d told me she was straight, and I was fucking panicking.”
Fredric’s brows dipped. “Why?”
“Because I don’t have a dick the way cis men do—and I’m the first person who will march under the sign that says genitals don’t equal gender, but it matters to so many people. I’m a big guy, I have nice beard, I work out a lot. I got top surgery when I was eighteen and I spent three years in voice training. But there are parts of me that will never align with what the world labels a man, and I was so in love with her that if she rejected me for that—it would have crushed me.”
Fredric saw where he was going. “I understand.”
“It took me six months to find the courage to ask her out. And it went so fucking badly. The date was a goddamn disaster, and she didn’t talk to me for a month.”
Fredric’s smile widened. “It’s hard to imagine. You two are…something important, something special to each other.”
“It was a long road full of insecurities and bullshit. She was busy trying to suppress her stimming and trying to remember all her shit-ass therapy that taught her how to be socially acceptable. And I was staring at myself in the mirror, at all these imperfections that made me not enough of a man for a straight woman.”
Fredric ran his tongue over his bottom lip. “So,” he said, then stopped because his voice was rough. “How did you get here?”
“Neither of us were willing to give up,” he said, like it was a simple as that. “We had a second date that was slightly better than the first. Then we decided to be friends, but we couldn’t stay away from each other. Eventually we just said fuck it. I took her to a play, then we got wasted and spilled everything we were afraid of, then we fucked for the first time in the backseat of her car. After that, we just decided we were better together than we were apart.”