Boyfriend Material

by Jerry Cole

  “Yes,” Jason replied, as quietly as before. “I suppose it does.”

  “So call his parents, Mr. Mailer, and if they don’t answer, then call his siblings. And if they don’t answer—”

  “Yes, thank you,” Jason said. “I got it. The sooner this is someone else’s problem, the sooner it isn’t mine.”

  “Well, you said it. Not me. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  Jason nodded. He sighed as he watched her walk away, knowing that what she said made perfect sense and hating her for it a little bit. Though he hated Blaine a lot more for having put him in the situation that he had. Blaine’s family, unlike Blaine, had always been nice to Jason.

  The last thing he wanted to do was call them with some fucked up news about their fucked up kid. He hoped that he may not been able to find her number, but of course, he wasn’t that lucky.

  Blaine’s mother’s number was a prominent part of most of her social networking profiles. Of course it was.

  He dialed her number, hoping that it would be outdated or that she wouldn’t pick up the phone, but she picked up after two rings. Of course she did, Jason thought bitterly.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey,” Jason said. “I know this must seem like a weird phone call, Mrs. Roth, but --”

  “Oh my word, is that you, Jason Mailer? God, I haven’t heard from you for years! How have you been?”

  “I’ve been fine,” he said, smiling at how happy she seemed to be to hear from him. He had always liked her a lot and he had thought it a shame that when he was breaking up with Blaine, he would also have to break up with his family. And now, the only contact that he had with them would be one in which he would be delivering terrible news. “Listen, Mrs. Roth --”

  “Oh, no. It’s Blaine, isn’t it?”

  “I’m really sorry to be the one to tell you this,” Jason said. He really was, and there was no hesitation in his voice when he said it. “Mrs. Roth, I had to take Blaine to the hospital.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Yes,” Jason replied. “I think so, anyway. That’s all the nurse will tell me. She said he’s physically okay, but she can’t say anything else to me because I’m not next of kin. But she won’t say anymore and she told me that she needed me to get in touch with you.”

  “What happened?”

  Jason swallowed, trying to get rid of the knot in his throat. As bad as Blaine was, his mother didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve for Blaine to have done it, and she didn’t deserve to hear about it from someone that wasn’t even really in his life anymore.

  “I don’t really know,” Jason said. “One minute, everything was kind of okay. Then it wasn’t anymore.”

  “Where are you? In Tampa?”

  “No, Mrs. Roth,” Jason said. “Blaine came to see me. I’m at the North Florida Hospital, in Gainesville.”

  “He went up to Gainesville?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “We haven’t spoken for far too long, to be honest with you,” she replied. “Okay. Thank you. I’m glad he had you there with him to take him to the hospital.”

  “I wasn’t really -- I wasn’t really with him,” Jason said. He wasn’t sure that she could hear him, but he also wasn’t ready to raise his voice up any higher than it already was. This phone call was already so weird and awkward, he didn’t want to disclose the relationship between him and Blaine the way it stood. She probably wouldn’t be pleased to hear that it didn’t exist, that the reason Blaine had been brought to the hospital in the first place was only because Jason didn’t really know what else to do. “He just showed up at my house. Mrs. Roth, I really think you need to come up here. I can’t take care of him. Blaine and I --”

  “I know,” she said, interrupting him. Saving him. He remembered how much he liked her and why he liked her so much then.

  “Thank you,” he said. “When will you get here?”

  “Are you with him right now?”

  “No,” he replied.

  “Oh,” she said. “Won’t they let you go in the room?”

  The question wasn’t necessary. They both knew that Jason could walk in Blaine’s room, if he wanted to. He could ask him if he was okay. He could ask him what happened. That was as long as he was awake and the nurses and medical staff had given Jason no indication that he was still unconscious or even asleep. But she must have needed to make sure that Jason didn’t care, because she still asked the question, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “They’ll let me in,” Jason replied, after what seemed like forever. “I just -- I can’t.”

  She was quiet again. When she spoke, her words were soft, and spaced too far apart. “I understand. I’ll be up there in a couple of hours if you can manage to wait for me.”

  “Of course, Mrs. Roth,” Jason said. Then he repeated, again, because he really wanted her to believe him. “I’m really sorry about all this.”

  “It’s alright, dear,” she said. “This is hardly your fault.”

  “I’m sorry anyway,” he replied.

  “Yeah,” Mrs. Roth said. “I know.”

  ***

  When he was done talking to Mrs. Roth, he didn’t feel any better. It was weird. He hadn’t expected to, he had expected to feel a lot worse, and then he was talking to her. Somehow, the moment she spoke, he expected that everything would start being easy again once she hung up. But it wasn’t like that. The burden of Blaine hadn’t just passed along as though it was nothing, she had taken it harder than he thought she would. Even though everyone knew Blaine was a disappointment, Pamela Roth most definitely included.

  He couldn’t worry about that anymore. Like the scary nurse had said, he had done everything he needed to do. His reward was the ability to move on with his life. The first that he had to do was call everyone that had called him and left him messages when he had gone MIA.

  His mother was his first phone call because after what had happened with Mrs. Roth, he really felt that she needed to know that he was okay. She would fill his siblings and his father in, so they were taken off the list. Then his boss at the salon, because cool as Jody was, she would probably want to hear the reason that he was randomly skipping out on work without talking to her. They were kind of friends, he guessed. He would probably invite her to his birthday party if he ever had one.

  Then there was the gym. He posted an update on social media so that his friends knew that he was okay, then he started checking his voicemail.

  That was when he heard Taylor’s message.

  It took him a long, long time to process it. He listened to it four, five, six, seven times, until it finally sank in that yes, that was the hot guy from his Salsex class who he had kind of flirted with but not really flirted with because he was straight, at least as far as Jason could tell. But he was fumbling during the phone call, and he had been awkward, and he had even called him Jase.

  As if they were friends and that was just something that Taylor called him. Only people really close to him called him Jase, and it was kind of an in-joke at the gym. He supposed that Taylor had heard someone say it and had taken it for himself.

  If Taylor had been anyone else, then Jason knew that he would have found the attempt at forced intimacy annoying or off-putting. But Taylor wasn’t anyone else, he was Taylor. He was the person that had been taking up most of Jason’s time before the clusterfuck with Blaine had happened. It was cyclical. Jason would think about Taylor, about how good looking was, about whether he should ask him out. Then he would decide that he shouldn’t because Taylor was most definitely one hundred percent straight, and he didn’t want hitting on him to be a deterrent for Taylor to keep going to class. Taylor had only gone to one class so far, but he seemed to have a real knack for it, and he seemed to be enjoying himself immensely.

  Had he been right? Had Taylor been flirting with him? From the way his voice was shaking, there was no way that there wasn’t something there.

  The least Taylor deserved was a cal
l back, whatever his motivations were. He had gone out of his way to find Jason’s phone number, he had gone out of his way to call him and ask him if he was okay. Well, no, he hadn’t gotten that far, but Jason could make an educated guess that that was where his message was going.

  He would call him back once he went home and everything was in order, though. He really wanted to get his head on straight before he tackled someone like Taylor.

  Mostly because he wanted to make sure that he was doing it right.

  Chapter Ten

  Taylor stretched on the sofa and tried to pay attention to the movie that his roommate had put on, but his mind kept drifting.

  It was already Saturday and Jason hadn’t called him back. Not that he had ever really expected Jason to call him back because he had made such a mess of things when he had called. Maybe he should have just asked him out, like a normal person. Not on a date-date, that would be ridiculous, because Taylor was not prepared to ask another man on a date. Especially not if he didn’t know whether that was what he was interested in or whether something had just gone wrong in the way he was thinking about it.

  But now that Jason hadn’t called him back, that was all that was on his mind. How had he been so stupid? How hadn’t he prepared? Jason probably thought that he was a creep and Taylor would never be able to show his face at the gym again. It was a good thing that he had access to the university one. He just hoped he wouldn’t bump into Jason on the street because he wasn’t sure how he was going to stop himself from feeling like a fool then.

  Elliot looked at him and raised his eyebrows. “Yo, you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Taylor said. “Well, no. God, honestly, dude. I don’t know.”

  “Is it your arm?”

  “My -- arm?” Taylor replied, completely confused.

  “Yeah, you know, the thing that hasn’t let you play football for weeks now,” Elliot said, not very helpfully. In truth, Taylor had completely forgotten about his arm when he was thinking about Jason. Something that hadn’t happened when he was thinking about anything or anyone else. Something that hadn’t happened ever since he had broken his arm, really, and after he had called his dad about it.

  “No,” Taylor said. “It’s not my arm.”

  Elliot nodded. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Taylor replied. “Part of me really wants to talk about it, but then I’m kind of worried that if I do, I’ll just sound more like an idiot than I already feel. And to be clear, I feel like an idiot. Like a very, very dumb idiot.”

  “I think that’s implied in the word idiot, dude,” Elliot said.

  Taylor laughed. “Yeah, thanks.”

  “I’m not going to judge you, you know. You can feel safe with me.”

  “Thank you,” Taylor said. This time, he meant it. It was as if Elliot knew the words he had to say, exactly the right ones, so that Taylor would feel comfortable opening up to him. “Do you promise?”

  “Dude, yeah, of course I’m not going to judge you. Do you want me to pinky promise or something?”

  “No,” Taylor replied, laughing and shaking his head. “It’s just something I’m kind of confused about.”

  “Is it about what we were talking about the other day?”

  “Yeah,” Taylor said, licking his lips. “How did you know?”

  Elliot looked away for a few seconds before he answered. “You know I’m bisexual, right?”

  Taylor laughed, shaking his head. “Sorry, what?”

  “I just thought I should tell you,” Elliot said. “It’s not really something I go around telling people, but like, it sounds to me like you are somewhere I’ve been before.”

  “You’re saying I’m bisexual?”

  “No! Oh my gosh, of course not,” Elliot replied. Taylor tried not to snicker when he said the word gosh. Elliot was religious and it was hard for Taylor to reconcile the imagine of Elliot, the religious football player with the image of Elliot, the bisexual football player. “No, look, only you can decide something like that. I’m just saying that I’ve been confused about interacting with other men before because I wasn’t sure what that interaction meant, and what my feelings toward those interactions meant.”

  “What do you mean?” Taylor asked. He was confused about what Elliot was implying. He never seemed to talk in riddles, except when it came to Jason. If Elliot had experience with this, Tyler didn’t understand why he wouldn’t just spell out how he was helping him. But that had more to do with his frustration than anything else, Taylor knew that. That wasn’t Elliot’s fault, it was his own.

  “I mean, like, okay,” Elliot said, taking a deep breath. “This Salsex instructor, he’s gay, right?”

  “Well, I don’t know if he’s gay, but he’s definitely not straight,” Taylor said.

  “Right, which is my point,” Elliot said. “Do you remember the other day, when we were talking about how maybe you only really liked him because you were jealous of him?”

  “But you were wrong,” Taylor replied, shaking his head. “You were wrong. I definitely like him, and not just because I’m jealous of how confident he is. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’m aware that I sound a little bit like a child, but I like him. I like him a lot, like, I want to --”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Taylor said. “Spend time with him? Get to know him?”

  “So, you have like a man crush on him?”

  “No, that’s what I’m telling you,” Taylor said. “I don’t think it’s so much a man crush on him as it is just a proper crush on him.”

  Elliot looked at him, narrowing his eyes and appraising him for a few seconds. “But you barely know him.”

  “I know,” Taylor said. “I don’t really know him at all, which is one of the many reasons why this is so weird. But I thought... I don’t know. It was stupid.”

  “No, tell me,” Elliot replied. “I mean, you’re this far into the conversation and obviously, this means something to you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have told me about it in the first place.”

  “You’re right,” Taylor said. “It’s just that I called him.”

  “You called him?”

  “Because he didn’t show up. I don’t know, Elliot, it was so stupid and I was so worried about him. Like why wouldn’t he show up? I thought, ugh, I don’t even want to say this out loud.”

  “You have to now.”

  “I thought that he liked me back. I thought that if he knew I was going to be there, he would show up and I don’t know, we would talk. Like last time after class, we talked.”

  “You talked?”

  “Yeah,” Taylor replied. “About my arm. I told you. I took him aside and was an absolute idiot in front of him and he humored me about it because he’s really nice and sweet.”

  Elliot bit his lower lip and Taylor wondered what was wrong with him. He didn’t look contemplative, he looked upset. And if anyone had the right to be upset then, it wasn’t Elliot, it was Taylor. Though Taylor expected Elliot to be making fun of him at that point and he appreciated that the thought hadn’t even seemed to cross his mind.

  “Look,” Elliot said. “I feel like this isn’t something I can really spell out for you because it’s a deeply personal thing, but to me, it sounds like you still just want to be him as opposed to being with him.”

  “I don’t understand,” Taylor replied. “How’s any of what I told you related to that?”

  “Because maybe you don’t want to get to know him to know if you would like him better,” Elliot said. “Maybe you just want to get to know him to find out if there if there is that much to be jealous about, right?”

  “I -- I guess?”

  “And that’s the thing, there probably isn’t,” Elliot said, waving his hand in front of his face. “And subconsciously, you know this. You know that you know this, so it may be why you’re trying to call him in the first place or why you’re self-sabotaging, maybe.”

  “Wait
, how does that relate?”

  “Because if you self-sabotage, and you never have to see him again, doesn’t that help with the whole jealousy thing anyway?”

  “How would it help?” Taylor replied, his mouth dry.

  “Because then you can focus on what’s in front of you,” Elliot said. “Instead of something that’s unattainable, and that you didn’t really want in the first place.”

  Taylor shook his head. “You’re wrong,” he said. “Are you talking about football?”

  Elliot shrugged. “I mean, sure. That’s part of it. I’m just talking about everything. If you didn’t have this Salsex instructor to focus on, what would you be focusing on right now?”

  “I don’t know,” Taylor said. “But like I said, I think you’re wrong.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I just do,” Taylor said. “I can feel it, like all over me. I know I sound like a crazy person but the moment we first started talking, I could tell there was something there. And I tried to deny it to myself at first, I did, but I don’t think I can anymore. Because, while yes, I was a little disappointed that he didn’t show up to the lesson because I thought he would want to see me as much as I wanted to see him, that worry I felt. That worry I feel right now. That’s real, Elliot.”

  “I never said that it wasn’t,” Elliot replied.

  “No, I know, but you may as well have said that,” Taylor said. “Because there was no jealousy when I called him. Legitimately, there was only concern. I’ve been thinking about it a lot -- seriously, I feel like it’s all I can think about lately. And yeah, I think I probably bombed my chances with him and that really sucks, but what I feel for him, I don’t know, that’s real. That’s definitely something that hasn’t budged, not even a little bit.”

  “What you feel for him? Listen to yourself,” Elliot said. “You barely know the guy. How can you be talking about him as if you have feelings for him?”

  “Well, that’s the other really weird thing about it!”