Confide in Me

by Renae Kaye

“You’re going to block his number, right?” Tammy called after me.

  “Yes,” I called back, and closed the door.

  The person who wouldn’t return the custody of my troll to me deserved to be lied to.

  ~~~~~~~~

  Chapter Four

  What do people do when the man of their dreams asks them for advice on whom to date?

  Smart people ignore them. Even smarter people block their numbers.

  I fully embraced stupidity and replied to his early morning text about how his beach date was another failure.

  Anyone who has a dick pic or an abs pic as their profile is not looking for a serious relationship.

  I turned my phone to silent so that Tammy couldn’t hear I was getting messages, then sat at the desk in my room and marked schoolwork.

  He’d taken Tammy’s text as a joke and had sent me a meme of Meghan Trainor with the caption, “You know I’m all about that bass ass.” The accompanying message said, So if I ask for ass shots, does that make me a donkey?

  I thought our friendship was through after that, but no. He gave me a rundown of the date, then had the gall to debate with me over whether an abs pic was a suitable substitute for a dick pic.

  I have an abs pic in my photos on Tinder, he argued.

  I raised my eyebrows as I typed back. And what sort of guys are you getting?

  So you think I should take that photo off my profile?

  That would help me, because I was sure that would get him a lot less right swipes. It’s up to you.

  So you think I should. Your evasive answer told me yes.

  I channelled my inner Yoda. My evasive answer told you I think you need to decide for yourself.

  Callum’s reply wasn’t long in coming back to me. You think I should avoid any guy that sends me a dick pic?

  If a guy’s dick is the most important feature to you, then you should ask for them.

  Harsh. I giggled at his one-word text. I could clearly imagine him screeching the word at me.

  Truth, I replied.

  I waited for the answer with a smile on my face. He didn’t take that long, with his lightning-fast texting thumbs. Yeah, okay. Truthfully I don’t really care. It would be nice to date someone with a decent size, but it’s not a deal breaker if he has a little less.

  Exactly. Personality more than makes up for it. So go for the guys with personality over inches.

  That’s going to be my new motto. Personality over inches. Thanks, Ed.

  I looked at my phone and decided that if ever I had a reason to throw myself in front of a bus, this was it.

  ~~~~~~~~

  Over the next two months, Callum managed to score three dates for every one I got. I knew that because I got a rundown of each one.

  Well that was a total bust. How do you spell dickhead? His name starts with M and ends with N.

  It was okay. There were just no sparks, you know? He cares more about fishing.

  Nope. That one is totally hung up on his ex. It’s all he could talk about.

  Those were the easy messages. I sympathised with him and gave him advice and encouragement. I was a sucker for punishment.

  I think he’s a keeper! To the second date at least.

  HE IS HOT. Hmm.

  If you were here, you’d be so green with envy over me sharing dinner with the hottest man in town.

  To those ones, I gritted my teeth and cautiously said I was happy, only to celebrate when the second date was a bust, or the idiot didn’t message Callum back the next day.

  Sometimes he’d call me. It was harder to talk to him about the dates because I couldn’t consider my answer for twenty minutes before replying.

  One Saturday afternoon I was secluded in my bedroom, talking to Callum about his latest fail. I had the door shut because Tammy was home and I didn’t want her to know I was chatting with Callum. Todd had gone off to spend time with his parents. Callum called me, and talked about the weather, which meant he was avoiding telling me about the previous evening, which meant it had gone badly. I was happy about that, so I asked about the date.

  Callum sighed and answered immediately, so I knew he had wanted to talk about it and was only waiting for the right moment in the conversation. “What a loser. I was ready to leave even before the first course arrived.”

  I clucked my tongue in a good imitation of sympathy. “That bad, huh?”

  “I need to tell you when I’m going on a date, and tee you up to send me a text message twenty minutes later. Then if it’s going so badly, I can pretend your message is an emergency and leave.”

  I wasn’t impressed. “What? Are we fifteen-year-old girls? Why can’t you just say it’s not working and leave?”

  He coughed. “Would you do that?”

  I had to concede I wouldn’t. And that then morphed into a number of stories of the worst date ever. But Callum didn’t let the subject drop.

  “So, can I rely on you to message me during the date and give me an out?”

  I was lying on my bed, so I frowned at the ceiling. “Don’t you have a best friend who can do that for you?” I asked.

  That was greeted with silence. My frown turned into a scowl. I hesitated. I guessed the question was a little insensitive, but I thought it was okay between us.

  “Do you have a best friend?” I asked. We’d discussed many things, and I was sure Callum had mentioned several escapades with “mates.” I suddenly came over cold. What if Callum had a best friend who’d died some horrible death recently and I was dredging up bad memories? “Forget it. I’m sorry I asked,” I said hastily.

  “No. It’s okay,” Callum rushed to assure me. “I just don’t know how to explain the boys to you without it sounding like they’re insensitive pricks.”

  “The boys?” I asked cautiously.

  “Yeah,” Callum said. “There are four of us. Justin and I were friends in high school. Then we started hanging around with Brendan after he joined our basketball team. That was when we were about seventeen. And then Justin’s younger brother, Rhys, tagged along. The four of us are pretty tight. We go on holidays, and pubs, and gym, and still play basketball together.”

  “But?” I asked with trepidation. They sounded like okay friends.

  “But… they’re all straight,” he muttered.

  I looked around the room as if there was a clue hiding somewhere and it would give me the answer to this strange statement. I was perplexed by it. “My best friend is Tammy, and she’s straight. And we hang with Todd, her boyfriend. And he’s straight. And sometimes we go out with Lynette and Roy and Sammie. They’re all straight. Well, actually not all, but mostly. I don’t see the problem.”

  He huffed loudly. “They’re not okay with the gay bit.”

  I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it, baffled.

  “What?”

  I heard him speaking from a distance and realised I was still looking at his name on my phone as if it had the answers. I quickly put the phone back to my ear.

  He was explaining something that was foreign to me.

  “They don’t really get the gay thing. It’s not that they’re homophobic. They’re fine with me being gay and will thump any prick who thinks they should have an issue with it. It’s just that they don’t want it in their faces. They don’t want to see it or hear about it.”

  “They don’t want to hear about your life?” I asked in disbelief.

  He sighed loudly. “See. That’s what makes them sound like pricks.”

  I could see why, but kept my tongue. It wasn’t my place to tell the guy who to be friends with. But if I was ever in the same room as those guys, they’d better be sure they were accepting of me, or I would… give them homework. I giggled to myself as I attempted to find the worst thing I could set for them. Perhaps an essay on the gender conditioning in Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

  “Look,” Callum said. “They’re great friends. They just… don’t care about dating or anything like that. We do guy things together.”<
br />
  I couldn’t help myself. I blurted it out without thinking. “We did guy things together too. It was called gay sex and we had a great time. Just us guys.”

  “I….” He broke off as if he wasn’t sure what to say.

  I was happy that I’d made him speechless. I heard him take a deep breath and then he was rattling off to me so fast I had trouble following.

  “I mean that I can’t talk to them about the gay stuff because they don’t understand. They don’t understand the problems or the reasons behind why we do stuff.” He was talking quickly. “I really liked our date when we talked, because you got the gay stuff. I felt I could talk to you, and you wouldn’t shut me down, and I didn’t have to watch what I said. And you were fun. Like going out somewhere with my mates. That’s why I wanted to remain friends. Because I can ask you stuff, and tell you stuff, and discuss stuff. So that’s why I’m talking to you about my dates.”

  It was like I was on an emotional roller coaster. On one hand, I was so happy he liked talking to me, but so angry that he couldn’t see it potentially hurt me too. I was sad he couldn’t talk to his friends about the gay stuff, but chuffed he’d chosen me to confide in. I was furious that he thought I was good fun and great to talk to, but wasn’t romantically interested in me, however I also understood that sometimes you really need someone to talk to who got the whole “I’m gay” thing.

  I didn’t know how to respond. Should I call him out and tell him he was blind—here I was, the perfect guy for him, and he didn’t see it? Should I put aside my own emotions to be empathetic with his?

  I opened my mouth and said, “Look, Callum. I think—” just as the bedroom door flew open.

  It was Tammy.

  I gasped in surprise. She was holding her hand out in front of her with a panicked expression.

  “Bee.”

  Fuck.

  I spoke rapidly into the phone. “Callum. Emergency. I’ll call you back later.” I threw the phone aside and jumped off the bed, rushing to my best friend.

  “Where?” I demanded. Tammy was anaphylactic to bees. I knew the drill. She pointed to the back of her hand and I could see the stinger still lodged in her skin. That was bad.

  I scraped at it with my fingernail to get it out. Some people say you should wait and use tweezers, but while you’re searching for tweezers, that little stinger is pumping into you. After Tammy’s last episode, Todd and I had agreed that it was really best to get it out. I pulled Tammy into the bathroom and we flooded her hand with water, then I found the antihistamine tablets in her bedroom and had her swallow one. Then we waited. I sat her calmly on the floor of the kitchen while I applied ice to the spot and found her EpiPen.

  Then we waited some more. Swelling at the point of the venom site, shortness of breath, any swelling of her airways, nausea, dizziness…. I was watching for them all.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked. I could see the anxiety in her eyes and tried see past what was panic to what were actual symptoms.

  “I feel okay at the moment. Nothing too bad. I was just checking the letter box and there must’ve been a bee inside because I put my hand in and….” She took a trembling breath. I sat on the floor next to her. The floor was much better than a chair, because if she fainted, she didn’t have far to go.

  “It’s okay,” I soothed, and rubbed at her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry for being a pain,” she said tremulously, looking down at her hand where I was holding the ice pack. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your phone call with—” She stopped abruptly as her chin flew up and she stared at me. “Callum?” she said sharply.

  Oh, them fucks just doubled.

  “Let’s concentrate on you and—”

  “As in Callum Brown? The Callum you were supposed to be ignoring and blocking?” she screeched. “Edward!”

  I winced. The full name was never a good sign.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” I said, hoping to dodge the bullet. Plus her lips were starting to look a bit puffy. “Tammy, I think—”

  “No, you didn’t. You didn’t think. You were thinking with your dick and not your head. Why do you do this to yourself?” She drew in a deep breath and I could hear the wheeze as she struggled to get the air in through what were probably narrowing airways.

  “I—”

  “No. You listen to me. You will find someone for you. I know you will. You’re lovely, and once people get to know you better, they fall helplessly in love with you. This Callum guy was blind, and you need to cut the ties. What do they say? Something about cutting the apron strings? No. That’s your children. You cut your losses. That’s it. You cut your losses and move on. You need to have more self-esteem than you do. This Callum doesn’t see how great you are. You shouldn’t let people— Don’t walk away from me, Ed. You need to listen to this.”

  I stood calmly and grasped the EpiPen, taking time to read through the instructions again while ignoring Tammy going on about my lack of dating success. She was focused on me and hadn’t realised how strangled her voice was becoming. I pulled the lid off the EpiPen and clasped it in my fist like I’d been taught. I’d never done it before. I’d attended the course with Tammy and Todd, and I’d watched Todd administer an EpiPen to Tammy when she was stung last year while we were at the park. This would be my first solo effort.

  Tammy was still going on about how Callum should’ve been smarter and snatched me up immediately, when I knelt at her side.

  In the two minutes since I’d noticed her lips getting puffy, her eyes had begun to swell and she was now squinting at me. Her words were slurring slightly from her puffy lips and what was probably a swollen tongue, and she was flushed red. She was croaky but hadn’t noticed as she got on her metaphorical high horse about my sex life. “So you’re going to block his number like I— What’s that for?”

  I grinned as she noticed the EpiPen in my hand and stopped her sermonising. She reached up to her face and touched the swelling. “I think I’m going to enjoy this,” I told her.

  She put up a hand to stop me. “No. Give me a chance to ready myself for—”

  I jabbed the needle into her thigh as I had been taught and heard the click. I waited as Tammy drew in a sharp breath. With a hand that only shook slightly, I pulled the needle out, examined the EpiPen to see if it had discharged correctly, reached up to the counter, grabbed the phone handset, and dialled 000, all while keeping a watch on Tammy. She closed her eyes—or that could’ve purely been the swelling.

  “Hi. I need an ambulance? I’ve just given my friend an EpiPen.”

  ~~~~~~~~

  Chapter Five

  What do you do when your best friend nearly dies, and you’re shaken and need to talk about it, but there’s no one around?

  If you’re me you press redial on your phone and call the one man you should be avoiding.

  “Hello? Ed? Are you okay? What happened?”

  I sank onto the cold pavement outside the hospital emergency department, leaned back against the cold wall, drew my knees up to my chest, and tried to stop shivering.

  “Yeah,” I managed to croak out, not quite sure what I was agreeing to. My chin dipped until I was resting my forehead against my knees. I clenched my jaw to stop my teeth chattering.

  “Ed? Where are you? What happened? I sent you like twenty messages.”

  “You only sent me six,” I shot back.

  “Which you didn’t answer,” he replied. “Where are you?”

  “Fiona Stanley,” I rasped, naming the hospital as another series of violent shivers came over me.

  “You’re at Fiona Stanley?” Callum cried. “The emergency department? Why?”

  “My best friend was stung by a bee.”

  Such a simple thing. But Tammy was now inside, red hives covering her torso, neck, and face, her eyes and mouth swollen, and her breathing hampered. I had kept it together while dealing with her and the paramedics who had arrived and administered more Adrenalin. I’d been calm and supportive while t
hey rushed her to the hospital. I’d answered a dozen questions about her health—including telling people seven times that I was not her partner—and filled out forms for her. Then, when Todd arrived, I graciously withdrew and allowed them time alone.

  Now outside, I was reacting to the ninety minutes of stress.

  “She’s allergic?” Callum guessed.

  “Understatement.”

  “She okay?”

  “She will be. Her boyfriend has arrived and is with her now. So I’ve come outside for some fresh air and to work out how I’m getting home.”

  There was a pause. “You want me to swing by and pick you up?”

  In the back of my mind I knew that Callum’s house was close. I’d been there. I’d hoped to be invited back, so I’d memorised the address. It wasn’t the reason I was ringing him though. The ringing him had simply been something that felt normal.

  “Nah. I think I’ll be okay. I’m just going to sit here for a few more minutes or fifteen, then go find a taxi rank.” I gave a shaky laugh. “I’m so glad I’m not a doctor. I couldn’t give needles all day. And the stress of having someone else’s life depend on me was too much. I think I need a drink.”

  “And there’s my calling. I can get you a drink. So, hang tight for ten minutes and I’ll swing by and get you.”

  “No,” I immediately protested. “It’s not necessary. It’s very nice of you and all but—”

  “I’m on my way. Where will I find you?”

  I stopped my dissent because Callum coming past and picking me up sounded great. If he could detour past a liquor store on his way to my house, it would be even better. Then I remembered I didn’t have my wallet with me, only the house keys and my phone. I lifted my head and looked around.

  “Oh. I’m on the main drag into the hospital. Just follow the signs to the emergency room and then look for the pathetic guy freaking out on your way in.”

  He rang off, and I shivered again. I couldn’t even make myself feel glad that he was coming to get me. My emotions were swirling around the thought of what if Tammy had died. Lost in that swirl, I didn’t notice the passing of time until someone called my name.