Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 78364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
The first year we were partners, he decided to just be around, all the time, a hundred percent accessible to me day and night.
The second year, he fucked anything that moved. Seriously. And that was fine. He was young, single, gorgeous, and everyone who looked at the man thought yeah, I want that. It made sense.
The third year, we moved to Chicago from Las Vegas, shared an apartment, and I got to see, firsthand, the revolving door of one-night stands. There were also repeat offenders, fuck buddies no more serious than he was.
The fourth year, I felt him putting distance between us. He wanted to buy a place, I agreed, and we told his buddy Joe, whom we were subletting from, that he could sell the apartment because we were both out. Bodhi got a nice place in River North, which had a great nightclub scene and enough restaurants that you never had to eat in the same place twice. It was high energy, very him, very hip and cool, a young professional’s paradise.
I moved to Albany Park, on Keystone Avenue, which was a gorgeous tree-lined street. My house was older, built in 1912, but it was renovated before I moved in, a sweet little two-bedroom, one-and-a-half-baths place with a garage underneath. It was slate blue with white trim, and to get to the front door you had to trudge up a steep set of stairs. I liked that for the most part, except on the days I went grocery shopping.
Not living together had taken a huge strain off my relationship with Bodhi. Just not having to watch him walk around the house with only a towel, showing off all his sleek gold skin over long, smooth muscles and washboard abs, helped my brain not short out at the beginning of each day. I didn’t have to dwell on all the sex he was having and the absolute zero that was going on for me. Apart, I ceased comparing my life to his, myself to him. I was older than him—when we first became partners, I was thirty-eight to his twenty-seven. Now, five years later, I was an old man at forty-three, and he was getting ready to tie the knot at thirty-two. In separate homes, I didn’t have to keep up appearances and look happy all the time. I could wallow in my misery alone.
There was one person in the world I could talk to about this, and that was a friend, Sergio Mata, who used to work for the DEA and was now a private detective in Las Vegas. He worked with Croy Esca, who used to work for Torus Intercession here in Chicago. Really, if you thought about it, the world was just not that big.
“You don’t think misery is overly dramatic?” Sergio asked me on the phone the other night.
“No,” I said defensively. “I’m miserable.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I missed out.”
“Or,” he began in that way he had where you knew he was getting ready to argue, “you could confess about the torch you’ve been carrying since the day you met, and perhaps he’ll call off his wedding and fall into your arms.”
“How many romantic comedies does your wife make you watch?”
“He likes rom-coms,” Beth called out since he had me on speaker. “I like action movies, Jed. You know that.”
I did. “Sorry.”
“But he’s right, you should confess. It’s so very Victorian of you to take this yearning to your grave.”
I hung up. Sergio called back, still laughing, and I could hear Beth as well. “I’m not above hanging up on you and your lovely wife again,” I warned him.
He coughed then. “Listen, just tell him how you feel. If he says no, I’m gonna go marry Henry—”
“Hayden,” I corrected.
“Hayden Birdman the Third, then—”
“It’s Burdine.”
“Like I care.”
“And why’re you adding the third?”
“Because you did the first time you told me about him.”
I didn’t recall that.
“But that’s not the point, Jed.”
No, it wasn’t.
“You have to come clean. It’s not fair to him, and since he’s your best friend and the guy who has to decide when and if to pull the plug if that decision ever needs to be made for you, you should probably tell him you’re head over heels.”
“It’s too late.”
“But if you’re gonna be sad, you should be sad because you tried and it wasn’t meant to be. You shouldn’t be sad preemptively because you never sacked up.”
“Nice. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” he replied cheerfully.
Was I sad? Yes. Was I more happy for him than sad for me? Actually, I was. Because that was the true test of friendship. The selfless bit. Easy to be a friend when everything was going great. Harder when literal testing was required. And honestly, I deserved to miss out on him when all I had to do was pull him into my life and stake my claim any of the four years I’d had all his attention. There was no one to blame for my stupidity.