Page 13 of All That History
“Like, I get it,” Flynn continued.
I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, to take his self-confident arrogance and ram it up his big city ass.Treating me like I was some naive country boy, who couldn’t help but drool when he saw a naked torso and a pair of Calvin Kleins.
“It’s not like I’m exactly ready to tell them I’m into guys, either,” he finished.
I opened and closed my mouth a few times.It almost seemed appropriate: fish-like, among the oceanic quantities of rain still falling on us.
“Oh,” I said, very nearly lost for words.“That.”
Flynn shifted in the seat.I made very sure to fix my eyes on the middle-distance; not be distracted by the soft-looking hair on his muscled legs.
“I shouldn’t have joked about the porn stuff the other night.It seemed funny, at the time, but...”
His apology only made me feel worse.Guiltier, for where my attention had roamed, and the avenues my brain had hurtled down as a result.
“I should’ve checked my phone first,” I said.“Rookie mistake.”
“And I wasn’t judging,” Flynn added.“Like, you can be into whatever...whatever you’re into.I didn’t mean to make it sound like...well...”
It was possible, I decided, that I could clench my jaw so tightly that all of my teeth would shatter into dust.It’d probably mean a lifetime of soup and liquidized meals, but at least my blow jobs would become legendary.
“Can we not...uh...”
Flynn grunted.“Sorry.I wasn’t sure if you talked about this stuff.With gay friends, I mean.”
We weren’t friends, I wanted to tell him.Tell him again, in fact.Only now just didn’t seem the time.
“I don’t really have any,” I admitted instead.
Silence, for a moment.
“You’re stronger than I am,” Flynn said, quietly.
It was one of those unexpected comments, where you can’t help but need to see the person’s face.Because otherwise it’s too confusing, too nebulous: the risk of taking serious what’s meant to be a joke, or vice-versa.Even if you know they’re an attractive, very-nearly-naked guy, who you’re not exactly into that way, but that doesn’t stop your brain from window shopping.
Flynn looked sad.More sad than someone who’d broken down in the middle of nowhere, got soaked waiting for rescue, and then was forced to sit in their underwear while slowly drying off.
I frowned.“I don’t think I...”
“I couldn’t hack it.The fucking loneliness, I mean.Feeling like I was hiding something from everybody, all the time.Because I just couldn’t trust them.”
It wasn’t so much a shrug, as a shiver of my own.“I mean, I have friends...who know.A few, anyway.Just not gay ones.”
He nodded, slowly.“Guess you did better than I ever did, then.”
There was something otherworldly about that perspective.Something I wasn’t quite ready to consider.
“We should get going,” I suggested, nodding out of the windshield.“It’s eased up, some.”
The rain was merely lashing down, now, rather than biblically bad.With the wipers on full tilt, I could even see a few car lengths ahead.
Knowing I was avoiding more of this ill-advised heart to heart, and knowing, too, that Flynn was probably well aware of that, I put the truck in gear.
#
“So what are you into, then?”
We’d been driving for nearly twenty minutes, in silence bar the rain and the grumble of the engine, before Flynn’s question.
