Chapter 3

I layon the spare bed in Annie’s room thinking about what the fuck just happened between me and Rich in the kitchen. Everything about the contact had been so loaded with sexual tension. It had to be the drink talking because there was no way that man was interested in me. I was his kid’s best friend. He very clearly was straight. But, Christ, that one interaction had me hard as fuck and thinking about how much I wanted someone to look at me with the intensity Rich had. Even if I was imagining it.

I wasn’t sure when my interest in Richard changed from my best friend’s dad to something more. I mean, I had been friends with Annie since we were three. We met in playschool, and we had been best friends ever since. Inseparable. But there was a point in my teenage years when something changed. My first gay crush was Harry Styles. He was my ‘ah-ha’ moment, the one who changed everything. Annie had been amazingly accepting of me the moment I told her what, or rather who, I wanted.

“Do you think you’re gay, then?” she asked when we were thirteen. I had thought about it for a nervous minute, not because I wasn’t sure of the answer, more because I wasn’t sure how my friend would react. I loved her, though, and I trusted her. The thought of not telling her was more unsettling to me than confessing my sexuality.

“Yeah, I think I am.”

She nodded, took me by the hand, and looked at me sternly. “Well, that’s okay, as long as you don’t want Niall because he’s mine.”

“Oh, God, no. He’s not my type.” I laughed in reply. “I like Harry.”

That was all it took. From then on, Annie had it all planned. She was going to marry Niall; I was going to marry Harry. We had every last detail mapped out to perfection. Double wedding, the other band members singing to us about our love. Everything. I laughed every time I thought back on how beautifully na?ve we’d been back then.

I think things really changed for us a few years later when the band broke up, and then the bottom dropped out of Annie’s world when her mum announced she was leaving Rich.

The divorce had been hard on both of them. Annie felt abandoned. For a while, she derailed. She was sneaking around and drinking, hanging out with the scummiest boys in our school. There was a moment that even I thought our friendship wouldn’t be able to last the turmoil. I tried to keep in mind that she was hurting a lot from her mum’s absence, but it was hard to watch my friend self-destruct and be powerless to do anything about it.

Rich had also taken it hard. Not only had his wife, Phillipa, been climbing the corporate ladder, apparently, her biggest leg up was getting her leg over with the boss, Portia.

Rich had turned to drink; his ego had taken a battering. He had on more than one drunken occasion asked me whether he was not enough of a man that a woman could outdo him in the bedroom. I was sixteen then, and I didn’t know what to say to him. At that age, I was just starting to really come out to people and try openly dating boys. The mid-life crisis of my best mate’s dad post-divorce was not something I was ready to take on. I mean, sure, he was a little rough around the edges, but he still had a dazzling smile, a full head of slightly greying hair, and his dad bod wasn’t that bad. A little gym time and he would be back on track. If I was honest, thinking about Rich like that was something I didn’t want to do for too long. The man was lovely, and there was something about him I had started to like. Crushing on my best friend’s dad seemed like a recipe for disaster, so I tried as best as my immature little heart could to put it out of my mind for the most part.

Annie spent a lot of time in my house back then too, only going home if I went with her. She was struggling with her mum’s abandonment enough without having to deal with her dad’s drunken depression too. My mum was incredible with both of them. Annie got all the TLC she needed, and Rich got the wake-up call he deserved. My mum had got divorced when I was only eight, and she’d seen it all before. At first, she let them grieve, then she let him drink and wallow and lick his wounds. And she turned a blind eye to Annie’s behaviour for the most part too. But she also didn’t let it go on for too long. After three months for Annie and ten months for Rich, my mother’s tough love instinct kicked in. Annie was told that her mum didn’t deserve to ruin her future just because she didn’t want to be with Rich anymore. Mum told her that her GCSEs were coming, and the last thing she needed to do was throw it away because her mum made some dickhead choices. Once she had helped Annie through the worst of it, she politely took Rich aside and told him that for the sake of his daughter, he needed to give his sorry ass a good shake and snap out of it. That Phillipa leaving wasn’t about him, and as much as it hurt him to accept it, Annie was his priority now, and he needed to do right by her.

I don’t think I ever saw another drink in Rich’s hand from that day on. He went to night classes for cookery and sewing. He made friends, he got out of the funk he was in, and he became a much better parent to Annie. It showed when it came to our exams in school because she aced them.

Annie and Rich had become a team, and Phillipa came around to see Annie less and less. Surprisingly, Annie seemed to take that in her stride, secure now in her place in the world with a dad who had her back at all times. She thrived, aced her A-Levels, and we headed off to university together.

But as I lay there, trying to ignore how painfully hard my cock was, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to see my friend’s dad in the same way again.