Gus grimaced. “I’m sorry.”
Rasul packed his complicated feelings about his distant family and his father’s homeland away and rested his hands on the table. “So. I wanted to pick your brains about the best way to court Jacob, for real.” When they shared a heavy glance and raised their eyebrows, Rasul added, “I was still at his place when he came home the night he got drunk with you. He… got chatty. We both did, to be honest.”
Matt shook his head as he pulled the plastic wrap off the baba ganoush. “I knew we should have walked him all the way up.”
Rasul cracked open the container holding the maneesh and pushed it toward Matt and Gus. “But now I know how he really feels, and I think he’s open to us getting closer, if I’m mindful of how I go. I wanted to know if there was anything I should be careful of, or bear in mind, and if you guys had any information that would help me out.”
Gus and Matt didn’t say anything at first, only dragged their maneesh through the baba ganoush and regarded one another solemnly while they chewed.
“This was a tactical error,” Gus said at last, “to ask him to bring food when we knew we’d have to sit in judgment.”
“But can anyone who brings food like this be all bad, truly?” Matt licked some errant baba ganoush off his fingers and leaned back in his chair. “Here’s the thing. We like you, more than we expected. But Jacob is….” He rubbed his cheek. “Not fragile, exactly, but he’s self-protective for a reason. When he was younger, he was a lot more adventurous. If you’d have come here when he was in high school, he’d have pursued you, or even if you’d met while he was in college.”
It was difficult to picture. “Did his parents’ deaths affect him that much?”
“They tipped him over the edge,” Matt said. He consulted Gus with a glance again, Gus shrugged, and Matt dove in. “His job already wasn’t going well, and he’d had a few overly complicated romantic relationships. His parents were worried about him and kept trying to get him to come home because they worried he was dangerously depressed, which I think he was. They wanted him to talk to someone and look into medication. I know this because they were friends with my family. Jacob’s a little older than me, but we hung out even when we were younger. I idolized him in middle school and would hang on him when he would come back from college. But his parents were always talking about him, and they worried out loud constantly when they came over to the store while he was in Chicago. They were our accountants. Anyway, they were going to drive to Chicago and address things in person, but the snowstorm first delayed them, then took their lives.”
Gus sighed. “I didn’t meet him before, since I’ve only lived here from college on, but everything people told me confirms this. I didn’t know him while I was in undergrad, not until I started making a project of the coffee shop I’d eventually own. When I first met him, he was a shell of a human. I tried to lure him into the shop a lot and engage him, but it was hard. I think it’s mostly that he lost so much that he treasured all at once, at the same time he was questioning his occupation and plan for the future. Obviously he’s a lot better now, but….” Gus looked helplessly at Matt, who shrugged. Gus grimaced and continued. “It’s a little complicated that you’re here. You have no idea how weird it is for him that his favorite author exists in Copper Point at all, let alone that said author is trying to date him. On the one hand, we’re excited for him and for you. On the other, we’re afraid he’s going to break again.”
Matt cut Rasul off as he started to speak. “Look, I know what you’re going to say. You’re thinking, so he had an author crush on me, maybe even a celebrity crush. But now we’ve gotten to know one another, so it’s fine. Right?” When Rasul nodded, Matt snorted. “Wrong. That man carried your books around like they were Bibles and he was the head priest. Your stories were the reason he crawled out of the pit, but there was a long time he was pretty unsteady even with that. It was like he hinged his whole sanity around that point. Over the years he’s evened out, and he looks back at those first days with embarrassment, but they still happened.”
“I think he worries his feelings for you aren’t real, that it’s impossible for him to untangle the you in his head from the you in front of him,” Gus said. “He got upset, not excited, when he found out you were coming. I think he was fully cognizant both that he had kind of a weird place for you in his psyche but also that it was super important to him.”
“Granted,” Matt added, “he’s come around since getting to know you. He does genuinely like you.”
None of this was exactly news to Rasul, but he’d never had it all laid out like this before. He sat back in his chair and contemplated the tabletop. “So what you’re saying is that I need to… what? Convince him this is real? That I’m not a figment of his imagination?”
Gus shook his head. “No. He gets that. We’re not saying he’s still where he was right after his parents died or before he opened the bookstore.”
“But you do, basically, take him back to where he was at that time, just by existing,” Matt finished. “Not completely. But enough that he’s at a kind of war with himself. Personally, I think it’s good for him. He’s been walled off too much for too long. And in a way, only you could have broken him out of his shell for good.”
“Don’t toy with him, though,” Gus added. “We’re not saying you have to relocate to Copper Point, but don’t view this as a fling. If you do, it’d be better to stick to friendship, or your fake dating or whatever.”
“I don’t view this as a fling.” Rasul frowned at the tabletop. “This is important for me too. I’m learning a lot about myself by being here. And he’s the only reason I’m going to finish this book.”
“My advice,” Matt said, “is to go slow. I know you probably think about this as glacially paced already, but his getting drunk the other night is the first time he’s really allowed himself to consider this potentially possible. Or more to the point, he had to get drunk to let himself go there. We’ve been hoping he’d date someone for a while, but nobody ever would have guessed you would be who he’d end up with.”
Rasul felt more out to sea by the minute. “I honestly only came here to get some direction. This is… a lot.”
Gus tilted his head. “That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you. Being with Jacob, truly being with him, especially you being with him, is a lot. Normally we wouldn’t get this involved in a friend’s love life. We want this to work for both of you, but we also don’t want him to lose the ground he’s gained.”
“Like I said. Go slow.” Matt patted his shoulder. “I know that’s not usually how you operate, but give it a shot. You said Jacob’s been good for you. Maybe this will be too.”
Rasul rubbed his cheek. “I’m just afraid I’ll fuck it up. And fuck him up in the process.”
“Don’t worry.” Gus sipped his coffee, meeting Rasul’s gaze over the rim. “We’ll be watching to make sure you don’t.”