“Secondly,” continued Angel, “I definitely didn’t know whether you’d care if I left or not. We were getting ready to leave our little paradise, and you didn’t even tell me you wanted to date when we got home.”
“Erroneous!” I exclaimed. “As mentioned many times prior to this boat ride, I invited you to Vanya’s!”
“You told me I could come to a friend’s birthday party if I wanted. You said you’d like to see me there. That’s not telling someone you’d like to continue things, Luca. That was you offering just enough to make me chase you again. But after so much chasing, I had to ask myself if you really wanted to be chased at all. I had to ask if maybe you were just looking for a polite way to wind things down, and if this was all some convenient fuckfest for you and nothing more.”
“How dare! How very dare! I am not the convenient fuckfest type!” Which was sometimes to my great regret, but still.
I thought he was narrowing his eyes at me from behind his mirrored sunglasses right now. “How am I supposed to know that, Luca? How many serious relationships have I seen you in over the years? Scratch that, how many relationships period have I seen you in?”
Ooh! I wanted to jump out of this swan right now and swim dramatically to shore. “Objection! Irrelevant!”
“I don’t think it is. So tell me what you would think in my shoes? That this person who never has relationships, who never opens up—”
“I do too! I have no boundaries!”
“—about anything that matters—”
“That’s because of my tragic Oregonian backstory!”
“—would you think that this person might actually care for me and want to build something with me? Or that I just needed to be grateful for the time that I’d had with him, and accept that he didn’t want a future?”
I sat stonily, my jaw tight, my chin threatening to tremble. “You’re not being very fair right now,” I managed to say without my voice wavering.
Angel didn’t speak for a moment. When I looked over at him, he was staring at the skyscrapers in the distance, his throat working.
“It’s hard for me to open up too, Luca,” he finally said.
His voice was soft, and it did waver a little, and suddenly I felt like a feelings miser. Like I’d been so busy making sure he didn’t know how upset I was that I hadn’t made space for him to be upset too.
“It’s scary for me too,” he continued. “I don’t have a tragic Oregonian backstory, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not also scared of being rejected. Of someone not understanding me. I can get weird about art, sometimes I disappear into it, sometimes I try to disappear away from it. It makes me difficult to be around sometimes.”
I couldn’t stop the scoff that pushed out of my chest. “You’ve never been difficult to be around.”
“You only have a month’s worth of data to work with,” he replied dryly.
“I’ve known you a lot longer than a month. And you might be a little sensitive, and yes, a little obsessive like you said, but you’re never difficult, Angel. You are passionate and funny and you see so much about the world around you, and anyone who thinks you’re difficult doesn’t deserve to even look at the same sun as you do.”
I stopped as I realized I was ranting now. But I couldn’t help it; Angel was a hot genius who was also hilarious and who fucked like it was his profession (high praise, given the industry we were connected with). Who wouldn’t adore this man???
“Sorry. I just can’t even conceive of someone thinking you aren’t perfect,” I said.
A smile twitched around Angel’s mouth. “Thanks. I feel the same about you, you know.”
I was about to say that everyone thought I was perfect . . . but then I realized that might not be strictly true.
“Anyway,” Angel said, with the voice of someone getting back to business, “the point is that I couldn’t find a way through all of those feelings and fears in the minutes I had between getting my acceptance email and your flight getting called. And then I told myself that I’d straighten everything out once I landed, but by the time I had a second to breathe and connect to the internet, you’d blocked me everywhere. After two days. And then I thought . . . well, Angel, you were right. Luca didn’t actually want you after all. And if you didn’t want me, there didn’t seem like much use in forcing the issue. In trying to talk to you through one of our friends or something.”
Oh. Oh fuck.
That . . . really, really sucked to hear. That my burn notice had burned someone who’d still cared for me, still wanted to be with me.
We sat without speaking, the boat slowly spinning. The splash of the nearby fountain filled the silence, but it didn’t make it any easier to bear.
I took a breath, and then another, and then it just happened on its own.
“I’m sorry too,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t give you a chance to explain what was happening. And I’m sorry I didn’t give you more reason before you left to know that I . . . liked you. Wanted to be with you. I’m really sorry, Angel.”
I thought it would feel horrible to say, but it didn’t. The truth was that I’d spent a lot of time when I was younger thinking I needed to be sorry, because my parents were this varietal of passive-aggressive mediocrity that was impossible to entirely explain, but was still awful to live with. Because I was as pansexual as they came, and I loved fashion-fuckery, and I loved attention and the spotlight, and yes, okay, I loved being one of a kind. As the meme goes, I was the drama. I didn’t think my parents knew what to do with that, and I spent a long time thinking that was my fault.
So the moment I’d stepped foot in LA, I decided that I wasn’t going to waste a single second of my life being sorry ever again.
Except that Angel wasn’t my parents, Angel wasn’t the cis-heteronormative patriarchy. Angel was wonderful and lovely, and if anyone deserved the s-word from me, it would be him.
Angel squeezed my hand at the same time I turned to face him.
“We both fucked up,” I said.
“I know.”
“And this is still really messy,” I added.
“Yeah.”
“But,” I continued, “I think if we don’t spend the night together, I’m going to jump out of this swan just like your dad did.”
Angel smiled. The diamond studs in his ears sparkled just like the water around us. “That was almost romantic until you mentioned my dad.”
“Okay, how about this. If we don’t spend the night together, I will pout until you kiss me.”
“You’d do that anyway,” Angel pointed out.
“How do you know?”
His smile deepened until subtle dimples appeared in his cheeks. “You’re doing it now,” he murmured, leaning forward.
“Am I?” I asked with as much innocence as I could muster, also leaning forward. I could see my reflection in his sunglasses, just like I could see the reflection of him in mine also in his sunglasses, and it was like a hall of mirrors, Angel, Luca, Angel, Luca, both of us into infinity.
Angel’s breath was sweet and minty as his lips brushed over mine. “You are,” he confirmed, and then abruptly yanked me close to give me the kind of kiss that would have made Sunny call to keep the cameras rolling.