Fate by Rob Rosen

Author:Rob Rosen [Rosen, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay romance
Publisher: MLR Press LLC
Published: 2015-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Senior Year

Once again, everyone left for the summer, including Aaron. Only Brian remained. He’d grown his hair long. He looked like a blond hippie. He’d broken up with Veronica. Serena broke up with him. He’d briefly dated a girl named Stefanie. He was getting so-so grades and was playing Lacrosse. I didn’t even know what that was. I think we called that field hockey when we were in high school. He was somehow taller now, a late growth spurt. He was leaner, too, ripped from playing sports. I could barely see the seven year old in his face anymore. And, trust me, I looked.

“What will happen to us next year?” he asked, alone in my apartment, Curtis having departed weeks earlier.

“In context to what?”

“You’ll be with your mom. I’ll still be in college. Will we grow apart?”

I frowned. “We haven’t yet, have we?”

“We have. Then we didn’t. It could happen again,” he said. “Will it? Do people stay friends their entire lives?”

“We’ve made it this far. Our moms have made it this far,” I told him. “I’d like to think we will, too.” In truth, I couldn’t imagine it any other way. If Aaron and I were two trees that had grown together, Brian was my entire forest. With him I felt the most comfortable, the most like myself.

“I’d like to think that, too,” he said.

My frown dissipated. “Then that’s what will happen.”

He stood up. He walked over to me. He kissed me. Sometimes he did that, always catching me by surprise. He was straight. I’d come to truly believe that. He didn’t kiss any other men, as far as I knew; he only kissed me. So I wouldn’t even classify him as bi. And yet, when he kissed me, I always felt the burn behind it, the same spark I felt all those many years earlier.

I stared into those eyes of blue. Men got lost at sea. I knew the feeling. “Do you love me, Brian?”

He laughed. “You stopped asking me if I was gay and have moved on to love instead?”

“You’re not gay.”

He shook his head. “I’m not anything, Eddie. I’m just me. You’re just you. And, yes, I love you. How could I not love you? How could I not breathe?”

I grinned up at him. “Schmaltz 101?”

He kissed me again. “My only A.” He paused and continued staring, looking beyond my irises and pupils. “Your turn.”

“You want me to say it?”

He shook his head again, blond mane falling over his shoulders. “I want you to want to say it.”

I nodded, ruminating on the thought, rolling it around in my head before I allowed it to formulate on my tongue. Did I want to say it? Was it a wise thing to say? He said is so easily, though it was anything but that. “I wish you were gay, Brian.”

“Why? Why would it matter? It wouldn’t change anything.”

No, it wouldn’t. And, yet, it somehow would. “I love you, Brian. It would be easier not to breathe than not to love you,” I told him, smiling so widely that my mouth hurt.

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