“You… kiss people all the time.” Harvard cleared his throat, slightly awkward. “Like, you’ve probably kissed someone within the last five minutes.”
Aiden tipped his hand back and forth. “Maybe an hour ago. Laurence.”
He wasn’t used to talking about kissing with Harvard. He refused to let it show this affected him.
“Wow, no, that was Byron,” Harvard informed him. “You were calling him Laurence? That’s worse than usual.”
“Really? Byron? You’d think I would remember a guy called Byron,” Aiden mused. “Anyway, enough of Byron. I won’t be seeing him again. We couldn’t even agree about the weather.”
Harvard looked out the window. “What’s to agree about? It’s a nice night.”
Aiden beamed approval at him. Harvard was so wise. “It is a nice night. And still early. Sorry your date was a lousy kisser, but what do you say we watch a movie and you can revisit dating another time?”
Such as college. Or grad school! You can’t hurry love. Sometimes, Aiden had heard, you just had to wait.
Harvard stated in a distant voice, “She wasn’t a lousy kisser.”
“Oh,” said Aiden. “She was a really great kisser?”
He regretted Cindy had already blocked Harvard. Aiden had more things to say to her.
“I don’t know. I didn’t kiss her,” Harvard told their floorboards. “She sort of swayed in toward me, and I panicked and I, uh, kissed her on the forehead and ruffled her hair and ran off.”
“Good call!” Aiden said. “There’s no need to rush this stuff. When you’re ready! Or never! Never is fine, too.”
He wondered idly how Harvard had got the Best Night Ever hashtag with a forehead kiss. No, he could picture how it had been. She must have thought Harvard was the last of the true gentlemen. She wasn’t wrong. Harvard had probably reached out and enfolded her in his arms, and she’d felt taken care of and cherished.
“I didn’t want to kiss her,” Harvard confessed very quietly.
“Why would you?” asked Aiden. “She has terrible taste in music and uses too many exclamation points!”
“I never…,” said Harvard. “I never thought about it before. I always thought I’d… want to one day? That it would feel right. But I don’t think I want to kiss girls at all.”
“Oh,” said Aiden. “Oh.”
They’d had this conversation before, from the opposite side. Harvard had assured Aiden of Harvard’s eternal friendship and how all kinds of love were beautiful, which hadn’t exactly been what Aiden was looking for.
Aiden couldn’t believe this was happening. He was too surprised to be supportive.
“So… you might want to kiss guys?”
“I—maybe?” said Harvard. “I think… yes?”
As statements of ringing certainty went, this one left something to be desired. Still, it was more than Aiden had at the start of the night. Aiden remained in a place of dazed disbelief.
“Welcome to the club?” Aiden hazarded. “It’s a sexy club.”
Aiden shot Harvard Paw an incredulous look, to see if someone else was getting this. His stuffed bear had fallen over on his side. Aiden was fully in sympathy with the bear.
When his gaze returned to Harvard, he was smiling weakly. Harvard’s wider smiles embraced everyone, but these small grins were exclusively for Aiden. “Thanks, buddy.”
If Harvard felt better, Aiden felt better.
Maybe…, Aiden thought through the shock, testing the thoughts out in his mind as if he were rehearsing lines for a play to see if a role felt right. Maybe this is great.
Harvard wasn’t going to marry Stacey with the bad taste in music and settle down in a house featuring a white picket fence and two point five golden retrievers. Aiden was saved.
“I think you know who you should talk to about this,” Aiden purred encouragingly. “Lucky for you, there’s an expert on hand.”
“Yeah,” mumbled Harvard, and scooped up his phone from the floor.
Aiden watched in disbelief as Harvard rang the second contact on his phone.
“Hey, Mom. Just called to say I love you. And, uh… Do any of your friends have a son my age? Who might be interested in going on a date? With me?”
Aiden sat down hard on their bedroom floor. He tried to have a heart attack in a cool and collected fashion.
9: NICHOLAS
Seiji was mad at him. That wasn’t exactly unusual, but this time it was Jesse Coste’s fault.
Seiji had been silent coming back from the woods, then quiet all night without even uttering the normal bedtime stuff like Turn off the light immediately, Nicholas, and Don’t speak to me. He hadn’t come to breakfast this morning, even though he’d said he would, and Nicholas had saved him a seat.
He kept remembering the moment in the dark woods when Jesse had said Seiji should go with him, and the way Seiji—who never hesitated—had hesitated. Some part of Seiji wanted to go.
Seiji hadn’t gone. Probably because Jesse Coste was an enormous jerk. But Seiji seemed tempted by the idea of Exton and the fencing team there.
Nicholas couldn’t really imagine a school better or fancier than Kings Row. Even when he’d got a brochure for Kings Row sent to Coach Joe’s gym, the place had looked fake to him, a school out of a book or a childhood dream. Nicholas had worried he’d get grubby fingerprints on the brochures, but now that he was there, he felt—and plenty of students acted—as though Nicholas might get grubby fingerprints over the whole school. If there was a better school, Seiji deserved to go there.
He deserved a better fencing partner. Nicholas had figured out that when they were together, sometimes Seiji was fencing someone else, someone also fast and left-handed, but with an advanced skill that Nicholas didn’t have. Yet. He’d have it soon, if Seiji would just wait.
Wait, and not return to Jesse.
How were they supposed to be rivals if Seiji went to a whole other school and forgot Nicholas existed? Nicholas didn’t want him to leave. But he knew uneasily that he would be furious if he were Seiji, cut off from having what he wanted. If Exton was to Seiji what Kings Row was to Nicholas… then Nicholas shouldn’t get in his way.
Nicholas was too dispirited to steal much of Eugene’s bacon.
“Having a domestic, bro?” asked Eugene. “You fighting with Seiji again? Can’t help but notice he’s not here.”
“Yeah, uh…”
Nicholas wasn’t going to get into the whole Robert Coste is my father and his other, legitimate son was trying to lure Seiji away from the team in a limo. He’d never told anybody about Robert Coste. And it seemed like a lot to spill to Eugene over scrambled eggs. Eugene would probably focus on the Robert Coste issue, and right now Nicholas was preoccupied with Seiji.
“I broke his watch?” Nicholas hazarded at last.
He’d been worrying about that off and on. It seemed like basic roommate etiquette—a word from the Kings Row brochures that Nicholas didn’t know how to pronounce—not to break your roommate’s stuff. Seiji must be mad about that, too. Jesse probably wouldn’t have broken Seiji’s watch.