“I remember when you guys had just gotten her. She could fit in the palm of my hand.”
“Yup,” Mia said. “And you’d always come over to bottle-feed her. I think Mav started getting jealous at one point.”
“He did once say I hung out with Tammy more than him.”
Benji cleared his throat. “All right, I’m headed to bed.”
Mia shot a glance at the clock hanging on the wall. “It’s only eight. Are you feeling sick?”
“No,” Benji said, shrugging. He didn’t offer anything else. He placed the last of the dishes he had been drying into the cabinet and headed out of the kitchen, leaving a trail of questions in his wake.
I asked the first one I could pull from the murk. “Is he okay?”
Mia shook her head, placing both hands on the countertop, the reds of her freshly painted nails popping against the white quartz. She looked out the window above the sink, at the setting sun that dipped below the tree line.
“I… I don’t know.”
“How long has he been acting like this?”
Mia seemed to do some calculating before saying, “Since he came home over the summer. He lost his job and was having trouble finding another one, so we told him to come home and regroup. Since then, he’s just been looking so beat down.” Mia dropped her head, and I could see how much she’d been thinking about it. Her shoulders slumped. “I’ve asked him what’s wrong, and he won’t open up. But I see it, same as you did, Rex. I just don’t know what to do about it.”
I wanted to reassure her somehow, but I felt at a similar loss. Probably even more than she did. If she couldn’t get through to him, there’d be no way that he’d listen to me.
Fuck… What if I’m making it worse for him just by being here?
The thought hit me like a hammer over the head. It was a thought I hated. There’d been a time when we had both helped each other immensely, and now, all that felt like it had happened three lifetimes ago. This Benji was so vastly different from the one who I kissed under the Costa Rican canopy. He’d been the first kiss I ever had with another guy, and it unlocked a piece of me that I had hoped would suffocate inside before ever seeing the light of day.
Benji helped me in not only accepting my body, but also my sexuality.
And now, instead of helping him, I was possibly hurting him.
“He’ll be okay,” Mia said, rolling her head so that her chin reached her chest, her neck popping. “He’s my little Benj, he’ll be okay.”
“He will.”
Mia’s phone vibrated against the counter, her cheery ringtone dinging through the kitchen. She grabbed it, and her eyes went wide as she read whatever appeared on her screen. I wrapped things up with the dishes, squeezing the water from the sponge and washing the soap suds down the drain.
“I can’t believe it,” Mia said. “It’s from the adoption agency.” She looked like she was about to start jumping up and down. “Oh, I have to call Ashley. I can’t believe it! They’re moving us into the final step for the adoption.”
“That’s great!” She wrapped me in one of those hugs that could only follow a bout of incredible news. Mav had filled me in on the rocky process his moms had been having with the adoption of a boy named River. He was fostered by one of their volunteers, who unfortunately couldn’t care for him much longer, and instead of letting him bounce to another foster home, Mia and Ashley had started the process of adopting him. It had been stalled by a development that scared everyone involved: an obsessive stalker by the name of “the Dove,” who had been demanding that the Gold Sanctuary be shut down. From what Mav told me, the psycho had made multiple threats and had almost driven Mia and Ashley into picking up and moving, leaving their little paradise of an animal sanctuary in Georgia and going somewhere extremely far and way more safe.
Thankfully, they didn’t have to do any of that. The Dove had been caught. About a month ago, cameras picked up on the man who tried sneaking onto the sanctuary late at night. He had a dove tattooed on his shoulder and had been spitting all kinds of crazy conspiracies as the police were cuffing him, about how the animals were being used for government testing and that there was a nuclear base underneath the horse stables.
Mia was already calling Ashley on FaceTime, her smile reaching from ear to ear. I thought I’d leave the two alone, so I congratulated her one more time before I stepped out.
I walked down the hall and into the living room, where Kaitlyn lay asleep with a book on her chest and Chester the calico sleeping by her feet. Next to the couch was a baby pen, where three baby raccoons rolled around with each other. I tried not to wake Kaitlyn as I crossed the living room, silently opening the door leading to the outside.
A Georgia fall felt much nicer than those in New York, soooo, silver lining, I guess? I could wear shorts and a shirt like I did now and not worry about freezing my balls right off.
The guesthouse was sandwiched between the pool and the reptile house. Usually, I cut through the backyard since that was the quickest and most direct way to get there. Tonight, an unfamiliar tug made me take the longer route, taking a left and going back inside the house, through a guest bathroom. I walked out into another hall, this one lined with family photos. Some of them included me smiling alongside the Golds. One of the photos, framed inside a thin gold frame, made me pause, a smile overtaking my face.
A picture from our trip to Costa Rica. Benji and I stood next to each other, and although I was dead sure we weren’t, it sure as hell looked like the two of us were holding hands.
Something I wanted to do so fucking bad. I knew by then that I was bi, and that I wanted Benji more than anything in the damn world. More than anyone else, all I wanted was Benji. But it felt wrong, on so many different fronts. First off, being the closeted son of a high-profile conservative politician didn’t make it easy. Having a stepmom who’d founded one of the leading anti-queer organizations hellbent on keeping families ‘normal’ (whatever the fuck normal even meant) certainly didn’t make what I was feeling any easier to accept.
But then there was the fact that Benji was my best friend’s little brother. It was an unwritten rule, but it was a rule. I didn’t want to break it. I risked losing not only my best friend but also my found family, a group of people who took me in and loved and cared for me more than my own flesh and blood did.
And yet… it was Benjamin Gold, the one whose kiss stole my breath, who stole so much more than my breath…
The light in his room was on. It was the last door in the hall, before making the turn that led out to the guesthouse. There was no sound coming from behind the door, but I figured he was in there.
I could leave him alone. Maybe that would be the better option, for the both of us.
Truth was, as much as I’d been trying to avoid Benji, I had instead found myself searching for him every chance I could get. I wanted to talk to him. I needed us to get back to what we had been, back when the world felt like a limitless playground and time would for sure stretch on into infinity.
Back when I didn’t have to worry about a sex tape leaking.
The thought made my pulse instantly shoot up. Goose pimples broke out in a rampage down my neck and arms.
I could go and fester inside the guest bedroom, thinking about all the shit swirling around my head. I didn’t need to knock on Benji’s door. Hell, maybe it wasn’t smart of me to even knock in the first place.