15. Boston

CHAPTER 15

BOSTON

Kale unwrapped his sandwich and smoothed the white paper out like a plate in front of him. I was slower with mine, more careful, like if I pulled at the tape wrong it would set off an alarm that told my brother I was in some weird kind of pseudo-relationship with one of his best friends.

"Does Ford bother you?" he asked, opening up the bread and plucking off the pickles. He tossed them toward me without asking because, in addition to being the straight brother, I was also the pickle brother.

"In what way?" My voice cracked, but Kale didn't notice.

"Any way." He glanced up and smashed his sandwich back together, taking a bite a chewing before he finished his thought. "But I meant with the flirting and all of that. I've told him a thousand times you're not into men."

Something in the center of my chest constricted, twisting like a rag getting wrung out. I hated lying to my brother, but I wasn't a fool. I knew better than to tell him about Ford, and especially knew better than to tell him before Ford and I were on the same page about telling him. Whatever was happening between me and Ford was so new and fragile, something neither of us had expected and something Ford hadn't even wanted. Keeping it secret, just for the two of us, felt like the best way to make sure it was sustainable. There was definitely another secret, though. One that was my place to tell, and probably needed to come first anyway.

"I might not not be into men," I said, following the bombshell up by taking a huge bite of my sandwich that made it impossible for me to speak.

Kale's head snapped up, his jaw slack and eyes wide, then he narrowed his stare at me, one brow winged right up into his hairline. Chewing felt like I had resistance bands around my jaw, but I managed to get through the bite and get it swallowed.

"Explain," Kale said, once my mouth was clear.

"I've been wondering lately, and I just think that maybe it might not be fair to say so definitively that I'm not interested in men or people who aren't women."

"There's a lot of qualifiers in that sentence," he murmured, stare still fixed on me. "Have you met someone?"

Obviously, I'd known Kale my entire life. He knew me almost as well as I knew myself, sometimes better, and I knew what I could lie about and what I'd never be able to get away with. He was smart enough to know that my interest in men wouldn't have come out of nowhere, that it would have been triggered by one man in particular. I cursed myself for not having the foresight to know that about him, and I took another huge bite of my sandwich to buy myself some time.

"That's a yes," he said, taking a bite of his own sandwich while I worked on swallowing down mine .

"It's a yes," I confirmed.

Now Kale was chewing, and it seemed to me that was a perfectly acceptable way for us to battle through this conversation. The time to chew would hopefully stop either of us from saying something that we couldn't take back.

"Where did you meet him?" Kale asked.

I finished the bite I'd been working on and decided to stick as close to the truth as I could. "The office."

The corner of Kale's left eye twitched, and I fidgeted with my glasses, lifting and settling them back down in the same spot on the bridge of my nose.

"He works in the building?"

"Yes."

I managed another bite, dreading how the conversation was going to go after we were both out of food to act as a buffer. For good measure, I shoved one of Kale's pickles into my already full mouth.

"Who started it?" he asked.

I swallowed. "I did."

Kale sucked in a breath, clearly caught off-guard by the answer, but it was as much the truth as it was a lie. Ford had been flirting incessantly with me, but I was the one who'd touched him first, who'd propositioned him, who'd negotiated him into bed. He hadn't taken advantage of me in any way. If anything, I'd taken advantage of him, even if it hadn't been intentional.

Well, it had been intentional.

Deliberate.

But not malicious.

"What brought this about?" he asked, shoving another bite of sandwich into his mouth before he'd even finished asking the question.

I didn't think there was an easy answer, even though the truth felt a little murky to me. Especially when Ford wasn't around. When I was with him, everything made sense in a way it never had before. I wished this was a conversation he and I could have shared before my brother started in on me about the whole thing. It was impossible to not hear the accusation in my brother's voice, even if he meant well. He'd always been protective in an unfair way, considering we shared the same birthday and the same opportunities.

"I thought he smelled nice," I admitted honestly, "and he made it hard to breathe."

"Did he smell like chloroform, Boston?"

I huffed a dry laugh, shaking my head and popping another pickle into my mouth.

"No, not like chloroform. But I mean…being near him took the air out of the room."

Kale dragged his tongue across the front of his teeth and I knew he couldn't argue about it because I was certain whatever he'd just gone through with Christian had to be comparable.

"And I assume it wasn't Chanel No. 5," he said.

I shook my head again and he let out a long and slow breath.

"If it's any consolation, I don't think I'm gay."

He rolled his eyes at me. "I don't care if you're gay. I just want you to be happy."

Little did he know, but sooner or later I was most likely going to be putting the validity of that statement to the test .

"It's too new to say one way or the other." I put the last bit of sandwich into my mouth, watching Kale carefully while I chewed. He didn't say anything, so after I swallowed, I told him, "But it's nice for now."

"Are you being safe?"

"Please don't do this." I shook my head, reaching up from underneath my glasses to rub my eyes.

"It's just… you know that when two boys love each other very much…" He stopped, unable to manage his laughter.

I balled up my sandwich wrapper and threw it at his face. It bounced off his cheekbone and landed on the floor near his feet. "I wasn't born yesterday."

Kale snatched my wrapper off the floor and tossed it into the trash can, then gathered up the scraps of his sandwich and added it to the pile.

"This is so exciting. Like losing our virginities all over again."

"Your virginity is so far gone it's not even an afterthought," I said.

"Not yours!"

I clasped my hands together in front of my face, the sides of my pointer fingers pressed against my lips and reaching toward my nose. "I'm begging you, Kale."

He must have seen the disgruntled brotherly love flash across my face because, for whatever reason, he relented. Leaning back in his chair with a laugh, he fondly rolled his eyes at me. "I'm here if you want to talk about it," he said.

"Thank you."

I stood up and gathered my things, ready to go jump out of a window instead of spend another half-hour with my brother. I wanted to talk to him about life and other things, but not under the weight of the confession I'd just lobbed into the space between us. There would be another day and another time.

"Unrelated to this revelation, I may need a few days off soon," I said.

He waggled his eyebrows at me. "Romantic vacation?"

"I owe Mom and Dad a visit."

At the mention of our parents, his expression sobered, and I gave him a small and sad smile in return. I knew my affinity for the farm had him nervous. There were lots of times that I'd stayed up late, imagining leaving the city and moving back to the farm for a while with our parents, but I wasn't sure if I was bold enough to actually go through with it. I'd recently started to wonder if it was farm life that appealed to me or the comfort of being taken care of, but it was too hard to think straight when Ford was in my orbit so I hadn't put too much thought into it.

"A visit?"

"I'm not going anywhere, Kale," I assured him.

He looked somewhat mollified, but not anywhere close to calm.

"Just let me know when," he muttered.

"Thank you." I pushed my chair in and went to the door, ready to get some fresh air when his voice behind me brought me to a quick halt.

"Boston."

I glanced over my shoulder at him.

"Don't let Ford know about this new development with your sexuality," he warned .

I pulled my bottom lip into my mouth, worrying it between my teeth while I debated the best thing to say.

"I'm not scared of him."

"He has a way of getting what he wants," Kale said.

Yeah, so did I apparently, but I wasn't going to lob that one back at him just yet.

"I'm not going to quit my job over your over-sexed best friend, Kale." It was an honest promise and as much of the truth as I could give him. "You don't have to worry about that."

I hadn't promised not to sleep with him, and Kale thankfully didn't catch on to the deliberate oversight.

"Let me know about your trip," he said. "And we'll get lunch again soon."

"Dinner," I offered, gesturing vaguely at the glass and stainless steel that made up most of his office. "Better ambiance."

"Fair enough." Kale's phone rang and he looked down at the caller ID with a smile. "Will you close the door on your way out?"

"Sure thing."

I latched the door behind me and walked as normally away as I could. The glass walls of the office would have given him a direct line of sight to my desperate escape if I'd broken into a run like I wanted to. I made it to the elevator before my composure started to crumble. I was in the lobby when my hands started to shake, and I had one leg still in the revolving door before my body gave out entirely.

I ran out the door and spun, bracing myself against the wall of the building, desperate to catch my breath. Thankfully, it was New York and nobody cared that I was on the verge of a panic attack in the middle of the day. Nobody except Kale's third best friend, Astor Brooks, who strode around the corner with a smile on his face and Ford right beside him.

When I saw them both, I turned away, threading my fingers into my hair and starting off toward the opposite end of the block.

"Boston," Ford shouted after me, the clack of his dress shoes against the concrete loud and insistent as he ran up behind me. He smoothed one hand against the small of my back and grabbed my wrists with his other, pulling my hands down and turning me toward him in one easy motion.

Immediately, my stare flew to Brooks, who watched us from the other side of the door with a tight and unreadable expression on his face.

"What are you doing?" I asked, trying to shake him off me.

"He knows," Ford said, fighting against my flailing arms. "He knows, Boston. Brooks knows."

"Why did you tell him?" I croaked. I could breathe, but I didn't know for how long. My heart was angry, slamming furiously against my ribs with every beat.

"He didn't," Brooks answered, coming to my other side and leaning against the wall to my right. He folded his arms in front of his chest and sighed so loudly, I heard him over the cabs honking in the street.

"How?" I rasped.

"Because I have eyes," Brooks said, "and I'm not head over balls for a prince the way your brother is or he would have noticed it too."

"I told Kale I'm attracted to men," I blurted, scrubbing my hands down my face and dislodging my glasses in the process. Ford carefully unfolded them from both of my ears and cradled them in his hand.

"How did that go?"

"He was ready to give me the birds and bees talk again." I let out a nervous laugh. "Then he told me to make sure I never told you about it."

Brooks chuckled, and Ford glared at him.

"Kale isn't stupid," Brooks said. "The two of you are more obvious than you think, and if you want to keep this from him, you're going to have to do a lot better."

"I didn't even think…"

"Ford looks at you like he wants to eat you for dinner and you can't keep a blush off your cheeks to save your life," Brooks answered my unspoken question.

Ford exhaled softly and handed me back my glasses.

"I don't want to lie to him about this, so whatever is going on between the two of you, keep me out of it."

"With pleasure," Ford deadpanned.

Brooks shook his head, distaste clear as day across his face.

"I'm serious," he warned. "The two of you need a better plan and a book full of alibis if you want this to work."

With that, he leveled one last glaring look at Ford, a softer, more sympathetic glare toward me, and he disappeared past the revolving doors and into the building.

"So, I assume there's no point in asking how your lunch date went?" Ford asked, teasing me.

I slid my glasses back onto my face and blinked him back into crystal clear focus. The knot that had been wringing itself dry in my chest unwound completely at the sight of him, and for the first time in my life, I started to wonder if it was home I missed or just the feeling of home. And more than that, if the feeling of home could be a person.

"About as well as yours, I'd imagine," I muttered.

"Do you want to come over later? We can get dinner and talk about…" The corner of his mouth twitched and he gave me an apologetic shrug. "Talk about all of this, I guess."

"Yeah." I swallowed hard. "I think we should."