Bromosexual

“I can’t do that.”

He lets go of my crotch and brings his hands to my face, pulling me into his for a kiss. It’s an aggressive kiss. Our mouths lock so powerfully that my teeth hurt.

When he pulls away, there’s tears in his eyes. “The worst part is …” he starts to say, then chokes. “The worst part is that I think I’m in love with you, Stefan.”

His words show me just how much of a man I am. I cower. I feel my knees weaken. I feel sick. I feel terrified.

“What do I do with that?” he asks, his voice quivering. “What am I supposed to do with what I feel for you?”

I bare my teeth. Frustration crawls up my stomach and settles in my words, turning them to acid. “Why do you have to go and do that, Caulfield?”

His eyes narrow. “What?”

“Why …” My own words are choked and angry. “Why do you have to go and fucking ruin everything?”

Ryan only stares at me, his lips parted, no words coming out.

I let go of him and leave. I don’t even grab anything from my room, or the boxes I stored in his garage, or my toiletries. I just swipe my keys off of the kitchen counter, push through the front door, then get into my truck and make the engine roar.

For a moment, I expect to see Ryan’s shape at the front door, whether to watch me go or to stop me. But when I pull out of the driveway and give one last look at his house, I see no one there.

A sad, weak little part of me wishes he’d fought harder and let out all the ugliest words that he could. That would make this so much easier.

Instead, he goes and says he’s in love with me.

And here I am, running the fuck away.

26

STEFAN

The weekend is a blur. And here I am on a dead Sunday night seated at a hotel bar.

Again.

Except this time, after ordering the drink, I just stare at it. I don’t take a single sip. No matter how nice it’d feel to be totally numb right now, I can’t help but dwell in all of my twisted, fucked-up emotions first. I need to feel everything. I need to understand what the hell I’m going through.

My strongest emotion is regret, I think. It sings the loudest in my choir of whiny bitches. I’ve spent way too much time over the years wondering what my life would have been like if my best buddy Ryan Caulfield and I hadn’t parted ways senior year, and it leaves me feeling bitter, bitter regret.

If he had used me as a study buddy during college …

If I saw him in the stands during my ball games …

If our phones would’ve blown up every night with a hundred texts about how our days went …

Fuck if that doesn’t sound like heaven.

The day everything went to shit was a Monday when I heard from a fellow teammate in the hall that Ryan had quit the team.

I thought he was fucking with me at first. “Yeah, alright. And I’m quitting the team, too, and I have an A in Advanced Calculus, and also I won the lottery.”

“Seriously,” my teammate insisted. “Caulfield quit. For real.”

You could have driven an eighteen-wheeler down the hallway and I wouldn’t have noticed, my jaw dropped and my stare going right through my friend’s head. I couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be true. A million and one reasons went through my head. None of them made enough sense to cling to.

Normally it took me eight whole minutes to get from my class at one end of the school to the cafeteria at the other. That day, it took me three and a half.

“Is it your dad?” I asked right away, coming at Ryan while he sat at our table, all our friends and teammates still there. He stood up right away. “Did he pull you off the team? Or is it your mom? Wait. This is because of the elbow you took to the nose back in May, isn’t it? That’s what it is.”

Ryan had the strangest face, like he wasn’t even there. “Nah,” he grunted, his eyes averted. “That’s not it.”

I stared at him. I still wouldn’t accept that he quit the team voluntarily. There was no possible way he’d do that. Someone made him quit. Something forced him off the team. “So what is it? You fail a class or some shit?”

“I … I just don’t want to play anymore.”

It was some of the worst words he could’ve said, second only to the ones he would say next. “The fuck do you mean? You were born for baseball. It’s our thing!”

“It’s your thing,” he spat back, the world erupting into flames before his eyes. “Believe it or not, some of us can do more than one damned thing. You’re the one who throws perfectly, catches perfectly, bats perfectly. I’m not like you, Stefan. I’m not meant to be just another dumb jock playing games my whole life.”