by Matthew Lang
Better with Bacon
By Matthew Lang
When Patrick’s long-term girlfriend Li Ling dumps him just as he’s working up the nerve to propose, he ends up drunk on David’s couch—and later in David’s bed. Although initially reluctant to pursue anything beyond a one-time drunken tryst, David throws caution to the wind during an intimate dinner, where the two men also discuss Patrick’s dream of entering the food industry. Just as the friends-turned-lovers are settling into their new romance, Li Ling calls Patrick—she’s pregnant.
Convinced the announcement spells the end of their love affair and a return to their platonic friendship, David flees to Sydney to escape his heartbreak. But upon his return to Melbourne, David discovers the situation hasn’t gone the way he’d expected. There might still be a chance for David and Patrick’s dreams to come true if they can forgive each other’s mistakes and move forward.
Table of Contents
Blurb
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
More from Matthew Lang
About the Author
By Matthew Lang
Visit Dreamspinner Press
Copyright
Prologue
THE SHRILL, insistent, and repetitive opening to “Hall of the Mountain King” brought David out of his comfortable slumber, and for a moment he lay in his best friend-cum-lover’s embrace as Patrick snored into his hair. Patrick could sleep through just about anything. After worming his way out of the warm circle of Patrick’s arms, he hunted through the discarded clothing for Patrick’s dress pants. The soft and silky fabric slipped frustratingly through his fingers, and it took a while to find the right pocket, but he eventually pulled out the battered iPhone, its spiderweb of cracks silent testimony to the number of times Patrick had dropped the damn thing.
It was an unknown number that seemed vaguely familiar, and he swiped to accept the call. “Hello, this is Patrick Gorman’s phone—”
“Dave, it’s me.”
“Oh, hi, Li Ling.”
“What are you doing with Patrick’s phone?”
David looked back into the bedroom where Patrick lay, naked in a sprawl of bedsheets that hadn’t quite made it onto the floor despite their best efforts.
I just woke up after boning your almost-fiancé. “I’m at Pat’s place, and you know how he is in the mornings.”
“Right, of course. I need to speak with him.”
“Well, I’m terribly sorry, but he’s asleep, and I should point out he doesn’t want to speak to you right now.”
“Dave, I’m pregnant.”
A knife dropped through the centre of David’s body, a blade so sharp that the pain only came a few seconds after the cut. His warm, happy feelings from the previous night were sucked from his body in the wake of the blade, leaving only ice. “Who’s the father?” he asked hopelessly.
Chapter 1
Two weeks earlier.
“SO WHAT are your plans for the fourteenth?” Patrick asked, taking a swig of beer before reaching for the Xbox controller, his large hands seeming to dwarf the contraption.
“If this is another chance to brag about your plans to propose to Li Ling, I’m going to puke,” David warned as he turned up the volume on the TV. “I am and remain happy for you, but I still say proposing on Valentine’s Day is barf worthy. Tekken?”
“She dumped me.” Patrick’s voice was soft enough that David almost didn’t hear it.
David paused, his fingers hovering above the game cases on his shelf. “Okay,” he said, sitting back. “Less happy for you now.”
Patrick and Li Ling had been high school sweethearts, and David had known them for over half his life. Patrick had been his best mate since the incident with the tire swing on grade four camp, and the boys had discovered broken bones together, the first in a long string of discoveries that included cars, porn, a mutual dislike of One Direction, and a love of The Lord of the Rings. Admittedly Patrick only came around to David’s line of thinking when the movies came out, but it was still agreement. Li Ling had always been around. David remembered her as the only other Asian kid in primary school. He’d never had much in common with her, though, until Patrick had asked her for help one day with his history homework in year nine, and suddenly David and Li Ling had one thing in common—Patrick.
The three of them had gone to the formal together, along with David’s then boyfriend, and headed on to schoolies on the Gold Coast before taking the long drive home to Melbourne. They stopped at all the good and not so good beaches on the way back south, taking in the rays or with Patrick trying unsuccessfully to teach them to surf, until sunburn forced them out of the sun and into motel rooms with tubes of aloe vera gel. It was odd, but for so long David hadn’t really thought of his friends as individuals. For so long it had been “Patrick and Li Ling” or “Li Ling and Patrick.” For so long it had been “We’ll be over around eight.” We.
“So, single boys’ night in, huh?” David said, using his controller to load up Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. “Haven’t had one of those in a while.”
“I don’t think I’ve had one since we were fifteen.”
“That was a sleepover,” David objected. “You want to play Lara?”
Patrick laughed. “Sure. I know you just want to play the hot guy.”
“No, if I wanted that, I’d be playing Arkham.”
“Which one?”
“Does it matter?”
“Guess not,” Patrick said. “Question: Christian Bale or Joseph Gordon-Levitt?”
“What?”
“Who’s sexier?”
“Joseph Gordon-Levitt,” David said promptly. “Especially after Inception. He was never Batman, though.”
“No, he was Robin.”
“True. Crap! Spear trap!”
“Pay attention, Zhang,” Patrick said. “And you didn’t answer my question.”
“What question?”
“What are you doing on the fourteenth?”
“Nothing. It’s a manufactured piece of commercial gimmickry designed to sell us crap we don’t need or want, and all the restaurants put on bad set menus because realistically they don’t want to deal with lovestruck demanding couples with more money than food sense.”
“Plus you’re single.”
“Technically, I guess.”
“Technically?”
“You could say I’m seeing a number of guys—just no one at boyfriend level.”
Patrick paused the game and turned to face him. “Okay, run that one by me again?”
“You want me to translate that to heterospeak? Okay. I’m not seeing anyone special.”
“Wow, I actually feel slightly offended,” Patrick said.
“Heterospeak?”
“Kinda. I thought I spoke fluent David Zhang if not fluent gay.”
David laughed and cracked another bottle of Amstel. “I think there’s a rather large obstacle in your way of speaking fluent gay.”
“You’ve kept me up to date despite my long relationship with a woman, haven’t you?”
“Mostly.”
Patrick frowned. “Okay, back up and take it from the top—”
“Oh, I generally do,” David said archly.
For a moment, Patrick sat on the couch, unmoving. “Right. Yes. Okay. Truth time. How many guys would you have had sex with in the last… I don’t know, three m
onths?”
“I don’t know, probably about ten?”
“Ten?”
“With options on a few more. I don’t know. Apparently now that I’ve hit late-twenties, everyone wants me.”
“Or Australia’s just caught up to your sexy man bod.”
“Um, thanks.”
“And none of them special?” Patrick asked, reaching for the bowl of wasabi peas.
“I don’t think so,” David said thoughtfully. “One of them was really nice, but he’s poly, and I don’t think I am—”
“Just a bit of a man-slut?”
“Look, I don’t mind sleeping around with or without emotions and sleeping, but I’ve only got room in my life for one boyfriend, thank you. There’s another guy, but he seems more interested in sleeping with every other boy he can find, and, well, he’s a bit… up himself, I guess. There’s a cute geek, but I don’t know if we’d be compatible away from a game console….”
“And the other—” Patrick paused and recounted. “—seven?”
“Once-offs, too young, too old, one of them smoked, one was jobless with no ambition… one was a hairdresser.”
“What’s wrong with hairdressers?”
“He didn’t understand what I do for a living.”
“Dave, I don’t understand what you do for a living. I get that it’s got to do with repackaging debt and selling it to investors, but that’s about it.”
“Yeah, but you understand that’s possible and roughly how it works,” David said. “Vic was amazingly cute, but… look, he doesn’t even understand credit cards. How am I supposed to explain derivative securities if he doesn’t get credit cards?”
“You know, you are seriously picky, anyone ever tell you that?” Patrick said. “Reload so you don’t die on spikes?”
“Yes, you and yes, reload,” David said. “And I’m not more picky. Gay men just have more variables to work with.”
“What, pitching and catching?”
“For instance, yes. Fucksticks!”
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” Patrick said. “Just watch out for his….”
“Club?” David asked with a sigh.
“Yeah, you gotta be ready when he starts swinging that one around.”
David shot his friend a look. “Mr Gorman, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were flirting with me. Aren’t you supposed to be heartbroken and in need of ice cream, alcohol, or both?”
Patrick laughed then, higher pitched than normal and with an edge of hysteria. “Probably. I should be getting ratshit, but I can’t… I can’t bring myself to drink alone.”
David paused and looked at his friend for a moment. Outwardly, Patrick looked much the same as always, jeans and a T-shirt—this time featuring Aquaman—and bare feet. Patrick never wore shoes and socks inside if he could help it, even in the dead of winter on freezing tiles. His arms were muscular, and his blond hair was shaved short at the moment in a near buzz cut. Later it would go longer and wispier until Patrick got pissed off with it and shaved it again. But there was something David had missed before, hiding in the tightness of Patrick’s jaw and the whiteness of his fingertips where they gripped the beer bottle. It was just visible in the tension of Patrick’s neck as he tipped his head back and drained the last of the amber liquid in a single gulp. Sighing, David cracked open another beer and passed it over. “Well, I can help with that—you know, for maybe one more drink before I pass out.”
“S’okay,” Patrick said, glancing down at the row of empties at the base of the coffee table. That was a tradition that had started years ago, before they’d been able to buy whatever they wanted. “I’m about six ahead of you. Probably doesn’t help that much anyway.” Still, he reached for the bottle and immediately took a long swig.
“It’s always helped me,” David said, taking a beer for himself and settling back into the couch.
“But you’ve always been you,” Patrick said. “You’re Dave. You’re smart, stylish, and a crazy mud-runner who plants trees and grows his own chillies. The drink doesn’t matter, because you wake up to you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m Patrick Gorman. The ex-boyfriend of Li Ling Teo. I trained as a chef and couldn’t hack the kitchen. I’m a chippie. I help other people renovate their houses and… what? I used to go to yum cha each Sunday, and Tuesday was gelato night because Il Dolce Fredo is closed on Mondays. I’m the handyman everyone wants because their medical-trained minds can’t put up a shelf. But hell, I’m not good enough for any of them because I didn’t go to uni, no, I got a fucking apprenticeship and didn’t even do anything with it! And that’s it. That’s me. It’s like… I’ve been Li Ling’s boyfriend for so long I don’t know how to be me without her. I’m not sure who Patrick Gorman is now.”
“He’s my best friend, and I thought he was awesome before he started dating girls,” David said around a mouthful of spicy peas. “Just saying.”
“Yeah, when I was a kid with potential.” Patrick growled the last word before taking another long drink. “Not the loser with nothing but dead-end jobs to look forward to. Maybe I should just go back and grow up all over again.”
David wasn’t really sure what to say to that. The one thing he’d never seen before was a depressed Patrick. Maybe not depressed depressed, but Patrick had never been this down about anything before. “Give me a holler when you hit puberty again,” David said finally, settling on humour. “That should be fun.”
“What, I can’t just raid your skin-cleaning drawer again?”
“Cleansing, Pat, it’s skin cleansing. And I only have about three products in that corner of the drawer now.”
“But I can borrow them, right?”
David rolled his eyes. “Yes, you can borrow my cleanser. Just don’t forget to moisturise too.”
“That, I already do, thanks to your Christmas present,” Pat said. “I think Li Ling was more upset about leaving the moisturiser than she was about leaving me.”
“I’ll get her a fake tan version for…. Do you think she’s even going to talk to me now?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Why did she—”
“She said I wasn’t going anywhere.”
“Clearly she hasn’t watched The Block, then.”
“Dave, I’m not going on The Block. That show is crazy, and I suck at interior design.”
“Well, okay, no, but have you seen the pay cheques you can make as a kick-ass builder?”
Pat laughed and drained his beer. “How do you always know what to say to make me feel better?”
“I know you,” David said, passing Patrick another bottle. “Beer?”
“You know, at this rate, I’m not going to make it home.”
David shrugged. “The couch pulls out into a double bed,” he said. “I think I might even have almost clean sheets somewhere.”
“Oh, be still my heart,” Patrick said. “Almost clean sheets. I don’t know how I’ll cope.”
DAVID WOKE up feeling strangely warm—and strangely constricted. His room was still the same—meticulously neat and with open curtains that allowed him a view out over Albert Park. In the autumn, it gave him balcony seating to the Australian Grand Prix as cars raced around the lakeside track. At other times of the year, it was a relaxing view of greenery, picnickers, and occasionally, sailboats out on the water. Of course, open curtains also allowed the sun to shine right into his eyes, as it was currently doing, and his head pounded. Too much beer. Once again he made a mental resolution to switch to light beers rather than buying into the whole low-carb craze. Sure, low carb tasted good, but it didn’t change the fact that most of the carbs in beer was actually in the alcohol.
Reaching down to toss off the covers, he instead encountered a moderately hairy arm, which was wrapped around his midriff, fingers brushing against David’s morning wood. Then he realised the stale beer breath he was smelling wasn’t just coming from him, and someone else’s cloth-covered erectio
n was pressing up against his ass. Either he’d had a really good night, or something was wrong. He didn’t remember picking up anyone on Grindr, or via any of the other usual channels. And yet, and yet… and yet Patrick was on the couch. Had he really picked up a guy and allowed him to stay over when his best friend was sacking out on his couch post-breakup? How much had he drunk last night to think that was a good idea and then not remember it? Too much, clearly, but….
David turned his head carefully, but his neck and shoulders rotated too, and a shift in breathing told him the other man was waking up. Blinking the sleep from his eyes, David twisted around, trying to work out the most tactful way of saying “Get out quickly before my straight buddy sees you,” only to look into a pair of sleepy blue eyes set wide in a familiar, bestubbled face.
“Well, this is different,” Patrick said, his voice rough with sleep.
“Yeah,” David said. “It really is.”
“I never knew you slept naked.”
“You never asked.”
“You’re hard.”
“So are you.”
“I know.”
“One of us should be freaking out right now.”
“I think one of us is,” Patrick said with a grin that was both amused and… something else that David couldn’t quite place.
“We didn’t…. I mean, you and I….”
“I don’t think so,” Patrick said thoughtfully, before flattening his hand against David’s belly and rubbing it suggestively. “But I’m starting to think it might be an idea.”
David pulled back slightly to stare at his friend. “Are you still drunk?”
“Probably,” Patrick admitted. “I’m serious, though. I’ve always wondered.”
“What it’s like?”
“Yeah. I mean, Li Ling and I had a few threesomes with a second girl, and I did suggest one with another guy, but she was always a bit meh about the whole thing. So I was a bit okay, backing off if it’s not your thing. I thought she’d love the idea.”
“Clearly not.”
“No, but, I always…. I want to know.”