This was my chance to tell him thanks, but no thanks. To find someone -- anyone -- else. But if I did that, he'd know it bothered me, and my pride wouldn't allow that.
"Twice a week is fine. Not like I'm doing anything else here," I said, my jaw tightening into a firm line.
We set up a schedule. He'd come Tuesdays and Thursdays after his shift ended. Brendan stayed professional throughout, even when he gave me his card so I could get a hold of him if I needed.
When he was leaving, he stopped at the door for just a second, lingering like he wanted to say something.
But all he said was, "I guess I'll see you next Tuesday. Have a good weekend, Keith," before he headed out the door.
5
Keith
It felt like some kind of serendipity that one of my first nights "out on the town" happened to be with Elliot and Reuben. I'd sent Elliot a text after Brendan left asking him what the fuck he was thinking. He'd seemed confused but invited me out with the two of them if I was feeling up to it.
Honestly, my leg was sore and my pride was feeling even worse, but I was going stir-crazy in my apartment. What Tina didn't know wouldn't hurt her, so I agreed to meet them at La Tienda for a casual dinner. No drinking. I wasn't supposed to do it with the pain pills I was taking, even though I only used one occasionally now and mostly stuck to Advil.
I just knew things wouldn't go well if I got shit-faced. The hurt and anger I felt at seeing Brendan again -- along with the fact that I'd wanted to let him pound me into the couch the second he touched me -- made for a volatile mix that didn't need any help from tequila.
The fact that I said "no thanks" when the server asked around for drink orders caught more attention from the two men than anything else.
"What? Can't a man turn over a new leaf after suffering a tragic zip-line accident?"
They both looked ashamed and I smirked.
"Give me another month and I'll be back to drinking you two lightweights under the table. They've just got me on so much shit, I don't want to add booze to the mix."
"Shit, I didn't even think about that," Elliot said. "Sorry, Keith. We can cancel our order if it'll make you more comfortable."
"Ugh, don't be so self-righteous. Eat. Drink. Be merry. I'll just live vicariously through you."
"You look like you're doing well," Reuben said, gesturing to me. "You seem to be getting around okay with the crutches. Leg causing you any pain?"
"Every now and again," I said, looking down at it. I'd put the brace on, the black material covering most of my lower leg. "A lot more now that your colleague decided to fuck with it."
Reuben gave me a sympathetic look. He opened his mouth to say something, but the server returned with their drinks and my water. I unwrapped a straw and plucked the lemon slice from the glass, squeezing a bit of the juice in. Iced city water was fucking awful, but at least the lemon made it a little more bearable.
"Yeah, you might be a little sore after sessions, but Brendan is a good guy and he's great at his job. He'll treat you right."
I snorted, rubbing my thumb over the collecting condensation on my water glass. I hadn't wanted to just launch right into it. This was my first night out in what felt like forever, but Reuben was opening the door as wide as possible. Elliot knew it, too. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him trying to give the universal signal for "don't go there" to his boyfriend.
"Yeah, I'm sure he's made himself into the perfect person at work, but he's an asshole and I'm pissed at you," I cut a glare toward Elliot, "for letting him come to my place."
"Wait, what? I thought you two were friends," Reuben said, his brow furrowing. "He told me--"
"He knew about this? He knew it was me he was seeing?" I asked, incredulous but not completely disbelieving.
Of course he'd known. Brendan always had to have the upper hand. He always had to leave me looking like the idiot; the guy who only had half the information in any given situation.
"You talked to him at Horizon, didn't you?" Elliot asked, clearly trying to smooth things over. "How am I supposed to know this guy is your lifelong nemesis? You never talk about him, Keith. You never talk about... anything."
A heavy silence hung over the table, interrupted only when the server came back out to ask after our orders. I didn't even remember what I ordered. Words just came out of my mouth and then the server went away, leaving us alone again
He was right. I didn't talk to him or anyone else. Tina was the closest, but even she didn't know everything. The last person I'd been completely open with was Brendan, and that'd turned out just great.
"So what's your beef with the guy, Keith?"
"Yeah. I mean, if he's living some secret double life as an asshole, I want to know about it," Reuben said, lifting his glass to his lips.
"All the time you've been working with him, I'm sure it's come out," I said, exasperation in my tone. "He's a homophobic piece of shit."
"Uh..." Reuben exchanged a look with his partner. Elliot just shrugged. "Are you sure we're talking about the same guy? Brendan Newell? Dude, he's super gay."
"Internalized homophobia is a thing," I countered, a bit of a growl to my voice that was going to change to a whine if I wasn't careful.
All I could think about was that night in the bed of his truck. His hands on me, mouth on me, hard cock grinding against me through our jeans...
"Just because he likes to suck the occasional dick doesn't make him a saint," I said, louder than I'd intended.
Someone from another table looked over at us, her eyes narrowed disparagingly. I was very nearly in the mood to flip her off and tell her to mind her own business, but I let myself be shamed and sank a little deeper into my chair.
"Why don't you just tell us what happened with you two?" Elliot asked. "Clearly there's some bad blood there."
He didn't want me. I gave him every part of me, and he threw it back in my face.
Part of me wanted to tell them. I knew they were sincere. Hell, they'd probably even support me, at least as much as they could considering Reuben and Brendan were colleagues. I didn't want any of this getting back to him, though, and more importantly than that, I just... didn't want to expose myself that much. To anyone. One time was enough, and that wasn't even counting all the times I'd relived it in my head over the years. Brendan had been living there rent-free for the majority of my life. He still had a nice condo there, with his damn feet propped up on the coffee table.
"Don't worry about it," I said testily. "If he's good at what he does, then I can deal. I need to get back into coaching shape before the fall season."
"Oh. So you're keeping Brendan on?" Reuben asked, brow furrowed in confusion.
Our food came shortly after, and though I answered with a nod, the question rattled around the annoyingly complex hallways of my mind for the rest of the night. Even when I was waiting outside on my Lyft driver, I thought about it.
I could get someone else, pride be damned. I should, because if I saw Brendan twice a week -- if he kept touching me the way he had, making eye contact with me in quiet moments -- my body was going to betray me. And if my body betrayed me, my heart would, too.
It was almost destined to be a huge mess, yet I couldn't walk away.
As I hobbled back into my apartment, shooting Elliot a quick text to let him know the driver hadn't murdered me and dumped my body in the swamp, I found myself thinking of Brendan more and more.
Pulling open my closet doors, I braced myself against one and leaned down to retrieve a plastic container filled to the brim with old Walgreens photo envelopes. Decades worth of loose pictures, most of which I'd picked up from my Mom's place when she needed to downsize. There were a couple of albums, too, and I started there.
It didn't take long to find pictures of Brendan.
We'd been inseparable as kids. Every summer vacation, his family joined ours. Every weekend, he was over at my house or I was at his. We shared in almost every after school activity and partnered up for ever
y field trip.
I smiled softly at a picture of us at Jenny Springs. We couldn't have been more than twelve there, just posing like goofballs on our innertubes. We aged up with every page I turned. The two of us riding horseback at an old ranch. Playing mini golf at the big skull course in Orlando. Waiting for one of the coasters to leave the station at Busch Gardens.
We always looked so happy but, as the years continued, I noticed something I hadn't paid attention to before. More often than not, I wasn't looking at the camera. I was looking at Brendan.
In all the photos I flipped through, I never once saw that same wistfulness in him. A fissure worked its way through my heart as I drew closer and closer to the end of our high school career. The end of our friendship.
The photos stopped abruptly. There were just a couple from after my graduation, and Brendan was nowhere to be found. Whole pages of the album were blank after that, making for a finale that was as depressing as real life.
Some stupid part of me wanted to believe the future might still be able to fill some of those pages, even if it was just us tolerating each other at Elliot and Reuben's wedding, or helping at Horizon, or some other innocuous thing.
But I feared it was just going to be page after page of nothing, with all those good memories tainted by the passing of time.
6
Brendan
Tuesday came quickly. I was back at Keith's place before I'd even really had the chance to process things. Just enough time to second guess myself, since it'd been clear last time that he didn't actually want me there. As much as we'd grown apart, I never expected that my best friend wouldn't even be able to tolerate being in the same room with me, but that was apparently life for us now.
I had to focus on being professional. Keith needed my help, and he'd agreed to let me be his therapist. If he really didn't want me around, he could have sent me packing during that consultation. There was still a chance he could do it now, and I tried to prepare myself for that as if it were inevitable.
I knocked on his door and heard him call from inside, "Yeah, it's open."
When I entered, I spotted him on the couch again, his leg propped up on an ottoman. He was wearing shorts just like last time, giving me a good view of a leg which had undoubtedly spent a lot of time covered up by a cast. I'd done a visual assessment before, but as I approached him, I took another quick look to make sure there wasn't any localized swelling or redness.
"Have a good weekend?" I asked, setting my bag down on the floor beside the couch.
"As good as can be expected, I guess." He had his phone in one hand and was lazily scrolling through it. "Finally escaped this prison, so that's something."
"How'd that go? Any increase in your pain levels?" I crouched down, getting a closer look at his leg. "Mind if I touch?"
Keith just shrugged, though I could see the muscles in his thighs tense up. "That's what you're here for, isn't it?"
I glanced up at him, then nodded. Professional. I had to stay professional, and not ask him why he still seemed to hate me so much after all these years. It wasn't any of my business. We didn't have to be friends. I was working for him, working on a specific problem. I just needed to focus.
"No increase in pain. Not from that, anyway. Some days it still aches."
I started to touch his leg, my palms pressed firmly on either side, fingers palpating the tissue. He was a little tighter than I would have expected, but that was why I was here. A couple sessions a week would loosen things up and get him to the point where he could use it effectively without the crutches.
"Hopefully, we can get you to the point where it doesn't hurt at all," I said, my hands moving up to his knee, then back down. "You'll probably be a little sore after each session, though. At least at first. If you ever feel pain during it, let me know and we'll stop."
"Soreness just means something went right the night before," he said almost reflexively, his tone one I couldn't quite place.
It sounded... teasing? Maybe even flirtatious. Keith seemed to realize that, because he stilled abruptly, then went back to staring at his phone.
"I'm going to test out your range of motion, okay?"
"Sure," he said, not looking at me.
I worked slowly, manipulating his leg into different positions. Stretching him out with my hands and the weight of my body to support him. His range was still very limited, and I noted down the degrees to which he could move before pushing a bit further and comparing with the baseline I took the previous week.
Keith didn't complain of pain. He said nothing at all to me, only occasionally looking my way.
I should have just kept my mouth shut, but I couldn't stand the silence. "So you're a teacher, right? That's a good fit. When did you decide that's what you wanted to do?"
He glanced at me over his phone, not answering at first. Finally, as I had his leg partially bent against my chest, he said, "A couple semesters into college. I had a good professor who set me on the path."
"Have you been at your current school since graduating?"
"More or less. I was subbing for about seven months before I was given a spot. I got lucky," he mused. "So many teachers coming out of UF. Not enough spots to place them. Guess it helps that they pay us shit here."
I let out a soft, humorless laugh. "Yeah. One of the worst paid counties in the state, right? It's criminal."
"They know they can get away with it. If one teacher walks, just snatch up another from the coll--ah!"
He hissed in pain and I immediately stopped the planar flex I'd been doing.
"Too far?" I asked. "Okay, just relax your leg. I'll put it back down."
I rested his leg on the ottoman again, pulling my tablet back up to make a note of that.
"What about you?" Keith asked, shifting a little on the couch. "I thought you were supposed to become some big shot plastic surgeon or something."
I barely suppressed a groan. Over the years, I'd almost forgotten about that, about how hard my parents had pushed for it. It wasn't enough that I was the first person in our family to graduate from college. They wanted that MD after my name.
"Med school wasn't for me," I said, then gestured for him to stand. "Let's see you walk on the crutches a little. I want you to step with as much weight on that leg as you can stand."
He pulled himself up, tucking the crutches into his armpits. I stepped back for him and watched as he maneuvered through the tiny living room, into the kitchen, and back. He was still reluctant to put weight on it.
"Does it hurt when you lean more toward the injured leg?" I asked.
"No, I just..." His brow furrowed. "It doesn't feel steady. I feel like I'm going to fall."
I moved to stand behind him, my arms held on either side of him to demonstrate the fact that I was there and ready to support him if something happened.
"Try to do it now. I've got you."
He didn't move for the longest time. Tension filled me, twisting my gut and ratcheting up my anxiety to eleven. I was standing so close I was sure he could feel my breath on the back of his neck. My eyes strayed to the skin there; to the fuzz of buzzed-down hair regrowing at the nape. I wanted to press my lips there, to inhale the scent of his skin.
Keith stumbled and I was there, stepping into him, letting my body support him as my hands moved to his arms to steady him. He was warm against me, and that tension only grew tenfold, winding tighter and tighter as heat pooled low within me.
Something passed between us. I could feel it. His measured breathing, the way he stayed there for several moments before returning upright. Or, maybe I was just projecting. Maybe the sudden flash of want I'd experienced was frying my brain.
There were no more incidents as Keith made his way back to the couch and, once I was sure he had it under control, I stepped away from him and tried to wrestle my emotions -- and my body -- back under control.
"How'd your dad take that? Can't imagine he's too happy about you being paid to touch men all day." There was a
n almost bitter note to Keith's voice that snapped me out of whatever I'd been feeling.
"I wouldn't know," I said curtly. "We haven't really talked since I graduated and found a job. I guess he was still holding out hope until that point."
Keith's eyes met mine, something I couldn't read behind them. He suddenly reached for his phone again, as if he was desperate for some distraction.
Reaching into my bag, I started preparing some of the light resistance implements I had for him to exercise with. I took it slow, just getting him to do sets of five for most exercises. We could bump it up next session if he tolerated this well.
I was in the middle of having him push against my chest with the ball of his foot when I finally spoke again, unable to stay silent about the fact that he'd kept his eyes on his phone throughout most of this.
"Hot date tonight?" I asked, hoping a joke would break the tension.
He glanced up at me, meeting my eyes with what looked like a challenge. His lips curled just slightly before he said, "I wouldn't call it that. Unless getting railed by a guy counts as a date."
His bluntness shocked me, though I didn't know why. Keith had always been that way. He has always said whatever was on his mind with very little filter. This, though... it felt like it was weaponized. As if he was hurling it out there to see if I'd flinch.
I didn't. Even if my mind took a detour to places it shouldn't be.
"I guess it depends on the guy. If he buys you dinner first, it might still count as a date."
My attempt at humor was falling flat. For Keith, it just seemed an invitation to be even more audacious.
"Oh, he'll probably feed me first. Just not food."
Images assaulted my mind of Keith's pretty, full lips wrapped around my cock. I had to bite back a groan, the feeling of it so visceral that my dick twitched in eager response.
Time Out (Dear Lonely Guy Book 2) Page 4