Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

But I didn’t leave. I closed the door behind me carefully and, holding the tiramisu in front of me like a ward, crept toward the bedroom, all the time I’d spent here bent to the purpose of getting there without making a sound so I could see for myself something that Will had insisted upon a hundred times: that he fucked other people.

I pushed the bedroom door open thinking that I knew how I was going to feel because I already felt that way. Gutted. Shredded. Devoured.

But though he had told me a dozen times over the months I’d been here, Will’s words were no inoculation. It was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.

Because I’d only thought about how it would feel to see Will with someone else. I hadn’t thought about how it would be to see another man with Will. Touching him. Kissing him. Doing all the things to him that I did. Making me totally redundant in Will’s life.

The door swung open on a scene so vivid it took me a moment to process the details. Will, on the bed, groaning as a man kissed him, bit his neck, pulled his hair back, hips grinding together, Will in just his underwear, the other man still half dressed. It was both intimate and impersonal, intense physical closeness with purely functional touch.

I must’ve made some horrible, broken sound because Will craned his head around the guy’s shoulder and looked at me. For a moment, I saw something in his eyes that I could read: panic, maybe, or regret. Then his face went blank and shuttered. He struggled underneath the man for a moment before the guy realized he was trying to sit up.

Distantly I heard a wet crunch, and I searched the bed for a detail I’d missed, slowly becoming aware that it was the sound of the tiramisu I’d been holding hitting the ground, its plastic clamshell cracking as it splattered on the floor.

Will shouldered the man to the side and scrambled off the bed, pulling on the same sweatpants that I’d pulled down the other morning when I’d dropped between his knees on the couch and sucked him until he was clutching my hair and cursing at me to let him come, his hands soft afterward, brushing over my cheeks and jaw and settling on my neck as we gazed at each other.

Now when he came over to me, I couldn’t stand to look at him, couldn’t stand the idea that he’d touch me. I wheeled around and made for the front door. He caught up to me before I opened it and I heard the man swear from the bedroom. I hoped he’d cut his foot open on the tiramisu box.

“Leo, wait,” Will said as the man came out of the room, wiping his foot on the rug. He was handsome. Fortyish, with light brown hair and a beard threaded with gray, trim and muscular, and everything I wasn’t. He leaned in the doorway, still shirtless, as if they were going to pick up where they’d left off.

“The kid’s cute. He can join us if you want,” he said, eyes dragging over me. He smiled at me, and I felt a brief flicker of flattery before it was replaced with disgust.

“Can you fuck off now, please,” Will told him, never looking away from me.

The man grumbled and went to the bedroom, coming out a minute later fully dressed as Will and I stared at each other. I was cataloging the places I’d seen the man touch him like I was dusting him for fingerprints, each touch standing out, a black spot on his pale skin.

The man crossed between us, patting Will possessively on the ass as he opened the door.

“I left my number on the bed. In case you want to finish what we started.” Will didn’t even look at him.

“Leo,” Will started, his voice unbearably gentle.

I couldn’t help it. I burst into tears. It was the final mortification.

“I told you,” Will said softly, voice strained. “I told you that I wasn’t what you wanted. That you shouldn’t expect anything from me.”

I shook my head furiously. I knew what he’d said, of course I knew. But so many things he’d done said something so different.

“You like me!” I found myself shouting. “I know you do!”

“I do, Leo. I like you so much. Of course I do.”

I knew that I sounded foolish. Childish. That Will had been clear on this point. And yet I couldn’t help myself. All I could process were the starkest reactions. The most basic hurts.

“Then why? Why would you do this?”

“It has nothing to do with you. I—other people—it’s just sex, it doesn’t matter.”

“If it doesn’t matter then stop!” I demanded. I was a hundred yards out of line, I knew, and my voice sounded frenzied.