When Gabe Devries loses his partner, he isn’t sure what he's going to do with himself. Once again, he's taken what should have been a good thing in his life and destroyed it. So, when an old friend shows up from the city, Gabe accepts his offer to help get Gabe back together with his ex.
Jeff Rideau is a psychologist, he's known Gabe since they were both kids, and he won't put up with any of Gabe's posturing. So, if anyone can help, it will be Jeff. Recently out of a relationship himself, Jeff assures Gabe that love is real, and it will prevail.
Yet the longer Jeff tries to get Gabe and Rory back together, the more Gabe realizes that might not be what either of them want or need.
I yanked Jeff up by the shoulders. "Come on. Get back on the couch."
"Couch sucks," he mumbled back. My spine has dislocated in three different spots and broken altogether in another."
"Maybe you shouldn't sleep on the floor then." The logic made sense to me.
"That's why I'm sleeping on the floor, moron!"
Now, anyone else might have got a cuff for that name. I've been called a lot of things in my day, but when someone starts poking me about how smart I am or I'm not, that gets to me. Stupid and useless, I've heard it too many times in my life, and they shouldn't come from friends or lovers. It was bad enough when they came from family. But did I smack Jeff upside the head and tell him to watch his mouth? No, because I was trying to be a nice guy. It was a life change I'd been working on. Besides, I'd slept on the couch. He was right.
Instead, I dragged him out of the living room and dumped him on my bed. I could sleep in the armchair. I'd done that more than a few times since it had found its way home and it was more comfortable than it looked. Jeff groaned and dug himself into the mattress like a puppy trying to find the perfect spot in its blanket, and all I could do was shake my head at him. I started to pull away from him, but he caught my arm and he said, "Wait."
If I'd been a dog, my ears would have pricked up. It wasn't the way his eyes looked all half-lidded and sleepy, or the way his hair was poking up all over the place when he propped himself up. It wasn't even the way he licked his dry lips. It was the way he said wait. It had tone. A tone I've never heard from Jeff before, but one that I recognized immediately.
He seemed to struggle with his words from there. And as I was doing my best to pretend that I didn't know what he was about to say, I wasn't offering any suggestions. I was confident that among our circle of friends, many already thought I was a massive jerk. I didn't need to give any of them any more reasons to dislike me. After what felt like a pause long enough to fit a century or two in, he asked, "How come we've never ... you know."
A lot of clever answers popped into my head, an unending list of ridiculous finishes for that sentence, but I kept my wit to myself. To be the better person, of course, not because I was feeling a wee bit unsettled. I patted the mattress and finished sitting up. "Yeah, so, I'm just going to go back in the living room now. You can lie here and sleep away the rye that's apparently eating away your brain matter."
He tightened his grip, and I resisted the urge to smile at the attempt.
"How long has it been for you Gabe? Four weeks? Six weeks? Not even?" He propped himself up, moving closer. "It's been five months for me! Five months!"
All I could think was that there was no way this conversation could end well. I felt the need to point out the obvious. "Uh, Jeff? Buddy? I thought you were here to help me get back together with Rory?"
"I am!" Jeff said, his expression wide-eyed and innocent. "But it's not like you're together right now. We're both single. We're both adults."
"We're both friends," I reminded him.
He shrugged. "So what? We can still be friends, right? I'm sick to fucking death of jerking off but I'm not ready to get out there yet."
I cleared my throat. "Well, as much as I appreciate the offer, I'm not about to take advantage of a ..."
"What advantage? Trust me, if this is a mind-fuck it's all on you, buddy. Don't forget, I'm the brain-doctor." He moved fast, surprisingly fast for someone I just pulled off the living room floor. He grabbed the back of my head, got to his knees, and planted his mouth right on top of mine. It was the oddest thing I'd ever felt, like kissing a brother -- if that brother was semi-hot and gay, anyway. Yet, oddness aside, there was a whisper in the back of my mind that if I gave it a second or two, it might not feel so weird. It might even be kind of nice.
As I said, though, I was trying something new. I was trying to be the nice guy.
I plucked his hand off my arm and dropped it. I lightly pushed him back to the mattress, although the way he flumped against it would have made sound like a liar to anyone watching us. "Go to sleep, Jeff. I'll show you how to get on Grindr in the morning."
That's where I left him. If I'd thought too long about what happened, it might have kept me awake, but in all fairness, I'd been sleeping like shit, and I was way too tired to think. That was probably a good thing. I'd hate to think I might have changed my mind and gone back in there.
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