“Don’t you?” He pressed gently.
I sighed. “Have I thought about it? Hell yeah, but not because I think you’re ashamed. I think the unknown of people’s reactions is a heavy burden for you to bear. In some ways, it would be easier if we could walk into a room and not worry about how we looked at each other.”
“People are gonna see regardless,” he mused.
I smiled. “Yeah, probably. But I can back off, stay in the background of your career.”
“No.” His voice was hard and finite. “You’ve spent almost all the time I’ve known you in the background, T. You don’t belong there, and I’ll be damned if that’s where I put you.”
“What are you saying?” I asked, trying not to be totally won over by his burst of resolve.
“I want to live like I drive. Full throttle. I don’t want to back down. I don’t want to put my career above our relationship. I don’t want a line drawn between my life with you on one side and everything else on the other.”
“Tell me what you need, Drew. You’ll have it.” I kind of felt like I was walking a tight rope. Walking that line Drew mentioned he didn’t want to have. It was unsteady, and I was scared, but I had to keep my balance. I had to make it across.
“As determined as I am…” His voice faded away and his face turned down so I couldn’t look at him.
“You’re scared.” If he couldn’t say, I could. I knew what it was like to be scared. I knew what it was like when you weren’t supposed to be scared. My joke about Drew being a girl aside, we were both men, strong ones, ones who would never want to show weakness.
The truth was everyone in life was sometimes afraid. It was how one reacted to that fear that defined a person.
He nodded but didn’t look up.
The need to make the bubble Drew and I lived in a little bit bigger, a little more secure, grew tenfold. The distance between us was minimal. I grabbed him, not really caring if he was ready or not. Sometimes I liked to move slow with him, cautious so as not to scare him away.
But now wasn’t the time for that shit.
Now was the time for action. I knew what it was like to be scared and to fall into a black hole of not knowing how people would react to the way you felt inside. I didn’t want him to feel that. I knew it was likely inevitable—it was a natural almost automatic response to falling in love with your best friend—but he wasn’t alone.
He didn’t have to be alone.
His big body collided with mine, and I wound both arms around him to hold him close. My heart ached a little when his forehead hit my shoulder, like it was a relief I was offering to hold him up.
“You aren’t alone,” I whispered.
“Do you ever get scared?” he whispered back.
All the fucking time. “Not when you’re beside me.”
“Liar,” he muttered.
I tried to suppress my laughter, but my body quaked with it, so I know he felt it, too.
“I’m coming to the meeting. I’m gonna be there at your parents’ house,” I told him.
His body, which was pliable in my arms, went rigid.
“Don’t bother,” I said, lazy, tightening my grip. “It’s not up for discussion. I don’t have to talk, but I will be there. I just said you aren’t alone, and I meant it.”
“What if he throws me out?” Although the words weren’t whispered, they were low, and they ripped from the deepest part of him. A part so deep I had no idea it even existed.
He gave me something else with those painful words. Something I didn’t even know was missing.
He was mine entirely now.
He might have given me his heart before, but it wasn’t just his heart I wanted.
I wanted the place I thought only I had inside me. That place that hid behind the heart. As tender as the heart was, this place was more so. A place so fragile only the heart could protect it.
He showed it to me.
Now it wasn’t just his heart that would protect it.
I would, too.
For all the fierceness that rose up inside me, I couldn’t lie. “I don’t know,” I replied and hugged him a little tighter.
The sharp grip of his fingertips pushed into my lower back, and I let him cling. It reminded me of all the times I tied a knot in the straw paper he always blew across the table at me.
Sometimes in life you had to tie a knot and hold on. I would be his knot.
Of all the obstacles Drew and I faced as men who’d fallen in love, the biggest hurdle for Drew was his father. I didn’t know what it was like to want to please someone so badly, because my dad had never been around.
It seemed like a lot of pressure to not only be who you were, but who everyone else wanted you to be.
Oh.
Maybe I did understand that better than I realized.