I knew I’d messed up as soon as I did it.
I'd been standing near the back wall of the bar with a group of six or seven people, half of them I barely knew, just faces that rotated through our Friday nights depending on who was dating who that week. The girls we'd been talking to were friends of Andy's coworker, both of them in those tight tops that left their midriffs bare, both of them laughing at whatever Don was saying while he gestured wildly about some girl who'd supposedly ghosted him after three dates. I was half-listening, half-watching the door because Duke had texted he was running late, and something in my chest always settled wrong when he wasn't around.
Then I felt him before I saw him. Hands on my waist, warm through the thin cotton of my shirt, and his chin dropping onto my shoulder like that level of physical intimacy was second nature. Because it was. Duke touched me constantly, slinging an arm around my neck when we walked, pressing his shoulder against mine on the couch, grabbing my wrist to pull me toward him when he had something to say. It was just how he was. How we were.
My whole body went rigid.
The girls were right there, still laughing, and Don was still talking, and Andy was nodding along, and all I could think about was how Duke's hands felt spanning my waist, how his breath ghosted against the side of my neck, how if any of them looked over they'd see the way my pulse was hammering in my throat. They'd see how much I wanted to turn around and pull him closer instead of shrugging him off. They'd see everything.
So I wriggled out of his grip.
It wasn't graceful. I twisted my torso and stepped forward and his hands slid off me like I'd shed water. I laughed, some sharp thing that didn't sound like any of my real laughs, and said something like "Dude, you're clingy tonight" and turned back to the conversation like nothing had happened. Like his arms around me hadn't been the best thing that had happened all week.
I couldn't not look, though. One glance, quick, just to check his reaction. Duke was standing a step behind me with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, and his jaw was set in that tight way it got when he was trying not to show something, and his eyes—his eyes were doing that thing where they went flat and distant, like someone had pulled a shade down behind them.
He'd looked at me like that once before, junior year, when I'd canceled on his birthday because some girl I'd been trying to date wanted to go out the same night. I'd told him it wasn't a big deal, that we'd celebrate later, and he'd just nodded with that same shuttered expression and said sure, no problem. It had taken me two weeks to realize he'd stopped texting me first. Two weeks of me messaging him and getting one-word replies before I showed up at his apartment unannounced with a cake from the bakery he liked and he'd finally let me back in.
This was worse. This was that same hurt but fresher, rawer, right there on his face for half a second before he locked it down. I'd done that. I'd put that look in his eyes because I was too scared of what people might see if I let him hold me in public.
The conversation kept going around me. Don had moved on to complaining about his boss. One of the girls was asking Andy about his tattoo. The bass dropped and someone cheered and the night continued like normal, like I hadn't just done something that was already carving a hollow space in my ribs. I stood there with my back to Duke and my hands wrapped around my beer bottle and my throat so tight I could barely swallow.
When I finally turned around again, he was gone. Not gone from the bar—I could see him across the room, leaning against the counter with his own drink, talking casually to some guy I didn't recognize. Gone from me. He'd walked away without saying anything, without making a scene.
We weren't dating. That was the thing I kept reminding myself, the refrain I'd been chanting in my head for months now every time he got too close, every time I felt myself leaning into him like a plant toward sunlight. We weren't dating. He was my best friend. He was straight. The fact that we'd kissed—three times now, each one seared into my memory—didn't change that. The fact that the last time he'd pinned me against the wall of his apartment with his hands flat on my chest and his hips grinding into mine and his mouth claiming my lips like he owned them didn't change that.
I'd come in my pants. Like a fucking teenager, like someone who'd never touched another person before, I'd felt his cock hard against mine through our jeans and I'd lost it completely. My whole body had shuddered and I'd gasped into his mouth and he'd kept kissing me through it, kept rocking against me, and when I'd finally pulled back with my face burning and my breath ragged he'd just looked at me with those dark eyes and said "Yeah?" like he'd known exactly what had happened and was proud of taking me apart in that way.
But that was just hormones. That was what I told myself in the shower afterward, scrubbing at the dried come in my pubes, replaying the moment and then forcing it into a box labeled Physical Reaction Only. He was my best friend. He was straight. I was the one with the problem, the one who'd been in love with him since sophomore year and couldn't seem to stop no matter how many other people I tried to date. If I let myself act on it, if I let him hold me in public, if I let myself reach for him the way I wanted to, I'd ruin everything. I'd make it weird. I'd lose him entirely.
I watched him from across the crowded bar for the next hour. Every time he laughed at something the new guy said, my stomach clenched. This was what I'd been afraid of—him pulling away—but I'd done it to myself. Now he was across the room not looking at me, and the hollow in my chest was expanding by the minute.
I started drinking harder after that. Traded beer for shots. Liquor that burned down my throat and sat hot in my stomach and made the edges of the room soften. I did three in quick succession, then another one when Don bought a round, then two more when I wandered to the bar by myself. The hurt and regret didn't go away but it got blurrier, easier to sit next to without flinching. I laughed louder at things that weren't funny. I talked to one of the girls about her job in real estate and barely registered what she was saying. I kept checking where Duke was and kept finding him on the other side of the room and kept adding another shot to the tally.
By midnight I was sloppy. Somehow, I found Andyand told him I needed to go and he nodded and said he'd call me tomorrow, and then I was standing outside the bar trying to remember how to get home and failing.
That was when Duke appeared again.
He didn't say anything, just materialized next to me on the sidewalk with his jacket thrown over his shoulder and his keys in his hand. He took my arm and steered me toward his car and I went, stumbling a little, letting him guide me. Even though he was mad at me, even though I'd hurt him, he was still here. He was still taking care of me.
The drive was quiet. I leaned my head against the window and watched the streetlights streak past and tried to say something—sorry, maybe, or I didn't mean it, or please don't be mad at me—but the words kept tangling up in my mouth and coming out wrong or not coming out at all. Duke's hands were steady on the wheel. He didn't look at me. He didn't touch me. The silence in the car was so heavy I could feel it pressing against my skin.
We pulled up to a familiar building. Not my apartment—his. I didn't question it, didn't have the cognitive capacity to question it. I just let him lead me up the stairs and through the door and into his bedroom.
He lowered me onto his bed and I went down easy, sinking into the mattress that smelled like him—like his detergent and his cologne and his sweat. I lay there with my eyes half-closed and my limbs heavy and watched him standing over me.
He'd taken his shirt off at some point after we’d gotten to the bedroom. Duke shirtless was a specific kind of torture. The broad span of his shoulders, the definition in his chest, the lines of muscle that ran down his stomach and disappeared into the waistband of his jeans. I'd seen it all a thousand times and it still hit me like a fist every time, still made my mouth go dry and my pulse kick up and my hands want to reach out and trace every divot.
He was looming over me, one hand on his hip, looking down at my face with an expression I couldn't read in my blurred state. His jaw was still tight. His eyes were still careful, still guarded, still holding whatever he was feeling behind that shutter he'd pulled down at the bar.
"I'm sorry," I finally said. The words came out thick and clumsy, soaked in alcohol, but I meant them. I meant them so much it was the only thing I was certain of in that whole spinning night. "Duke, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have—I didn't want to push you off. I just—"
He didn't acknowledge it. Didn't nod, didn't speak, didn't soften. Just stood there looking down at me with that same unreadable expression, and the silence stretched out between us like something physical, like something I could reach out and touch if I wasn't so drunk my hands wouldn't cooperate.
The desperation crept up my throat. I couldn't stand this—the distance, the cold shoulder, the way he was looking at me like he saw right through me. I'd rather he yell at me, punch me, tell me I was an asshole and a bad friend and he never wanted to see me again. Anything but this quiet, careful removal of himself from my reach.
My hand caught his wrist and I pulled. It wasn’t hard or coordinated, just a graceless yank that caught him off balance. He fell toward me, catching himself with one hand on the mattress beside my head, his other arm bracing against the bed on the other side of me. He was above me now, hovering, his face inches from mine, his chest bare and close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from his skin.
His eyes weren't flat and distant anymore. They were burning. There was anger in them, yes, but there was something else underneath it, something hotter and more dangerous, something that made my stomach drop and my cock stir even through the fog of alcohol.
Not like the other times. Not like the careful, questioning kisses we'd shared before, the ones where his lips had met mine and then paused, giving me time to decide if I wanted more. This was different. This was him claiming my mouth like he was going to war over it.
His lips crashed against mine and his tongue pushed into my mouth and I opened for him because what else could I do, because I'd been wanting this, wanting him, for so long that even drunk and sloppy and desperate I couldn't have refused him if I'd tried. He kissed me hard, aggressive, his teeth catching my lower lip and his tongue sweeping through my mouth. His hand came up and gripped my jaw, holding me in place, angling my head exactly where he wanted it, and I let him. I let him take control of the kiss because it was what I'd been craving without knowing how to ask for it.
The taste of him flooded through me. The beer he’d nursed all night mixed with the flavor I'd been chasing in every kiss we'd shared and every fantasy I'd had about him. My hands fisted in the sheets because I didn't know where else to put them, because I was afraid if I touched his bare skin I'd never let go.
He kissed me until I couldn't breathe, until my lungs were burning and my head was spinning worse than it had at the bar, until I was dizzy and gasping and so fucking hard it hurt. The kiss felt like a punishment for pushing him off at the bar, like he was showing me exactly what I'd been turning away from, like he was making sure I understood what I'd almost lost.
It was abrupt—one moment his mouth was on mine and the next he was gone, lifting himself off me and standing up from the bed in a single fluid motion. I lay there with my lips still parted and my breath still ragged and my chest heaving, staring up at him like he'd just ripped the ground out from under me.
He looked at me for one more second. His eyes were still burning, his jaw still tight, his chest still rising and falling with breaths that weren't quite steady. Then he turned away.
"I'm sleeping on the couch tonight," he said.
His voice was flat. Controlled. Like he hadn't just devoured my mouth with an intensity that made my whole body ache, like he wasn't walking away from me again.
He left the bedroom. The door stayed open. I heard him moving in the living room—the creak of the couch as he lay down, the rustle of him arranging himself, then silence.
I turned onto my side and pressed my face into his pillow. It smelled like him. The whole bed smelled like him. I breathed it in and closed my eyes and felt the tears building behind my lids, and I didn't stop them because there was no one there to see, because he'd chosen the couch over staying in this room with me, because I'd pushed him off in front of everyone and now he was pushing me off in return and I deserved every cold inch of the distance he was keeping between us.
I succumbed to my drunkenness eventually, falling into a dark, dreamless sleep that felt more like passing out than resting. But even swallowed by the blackout, I couldn't escape the feeling of his mouth on mine—the aggression of it, the desperation of it.
Morning crashed into my skull like a hammer on a rusty pipe. I peeled my face from the pillow, the fabric damp and cold where my breath and tears had soaked through the night. Duke's scent had faded from it, replaced by something stale—my own misery, sweat, and the sour tang of too many drinks.
The bedroom door was still open. Light sliced through the gap, too bright, too ordinary.
I swung my legs off the bed and stood, the room tilting. My clothes from last night clung to me like a second skin I wanted to claw off. I shuffled toward the sound of movement, each step sending a fresh pulse of pain through my temples.
Duke stood at the counter with his back to me, pouring coffee into two mugs. He'd pulled on a gray t-shirt at some point. The tension in his shoulders was visible even from here.
"Sit," he said without turning. "You look like death."
I dropped into a kitchen chair. The cold metal seat bit through my rumpled jeans. "Duke—"
"Coffee first." He set a mug in front of me, black and steaming. His fingers lingered on the ceramic a moment before withdrawing.
I wrapped both hands around it, letting the heat seep into my palms. He sat across from me, cradling his own mug, his eyes fixed somewhere past my shoulder.
"About last night," I started.
"What about it?" His voice was flat, controlled. The same tone he'd used on the couch before he'd walked away.
"I shouldn't have—" I stopped, swallowed. "At the bar. When you touched me, I—"
"You’re my best friend," He finally looked at me, and the raw hurt in his expression made my chest cave. "And you treated me like I was something shameful."
I opened my mouth, but the words tangled. What could I say? That I'd spent years burying how I felt? That his touch made me want things I couldn't let myself want? That I'd rather die than lose him, and that terror made me shove him away?
"I don't know how to do this," I whispered.
Duke exhaled, long and slow. He set down his mug and leaned forward, forearms on the table. "What if I told you I've been waiting for you to figure it out? That every time I got close, you found a reason to run?"
My pulse thudded in my ears. "Duke..."
"I'm not straight." The words landed between us, simple and devastating. "I thought you knew. I thought that's why you kept your distance."
I stared at him, my coffee forgotten. The room seemed to shrink, the air thickening until I couldn't breathe.
He watched me, something fragile flickering behind his eyes. Then his jaw tightened, and he pushed back from the table. "Forget it."
The chair scraped against the floor as he stood. I watched him walk toward the bathroom, his stride rigid, and heard the door shut harder than necessary.
Alone, I pressed my forehead to the cool table. Stupid. Fucking stupid. He'd handed me everything I wanted, and I'd sat there like a mannequin, too paralyzed to reach for it.
The shower turned on. Through the thin walls, I heard water drumming against tile.
I lifted my head. My reflection stared back from the darkened window—hollow-eyed, clothes wrinkled, a person who'd been running for so long he'd forgotten how to stand still.
My chair scraped back. My feet moved before my brain caught up.
The bathroom door wasn't locked. Steam curled into the hallway as I stepped inside, the humid air thick with the cedar soap Duke always used. Through the frosted glass, I could see the silhouette of his body, water cascading down his back.
I pulled my shirt over my head. My hands shook as I unbuttoned my jeans, shoving them down with my underwear. Every layer I removed felt like shedding armor I'd worn so long it had fused to my skin.
The shower door slid open. Duke turned, his eyes widening as I stepped in, completely bare, the hot water hitting my shoulders and running down my chest.
"I love you." The words tore out of me, ragged and desperate. "I've loved you since that night in college when we snuck onto the roof for the first time and just talked all night. I love you and I've been so fucking terrified of ruining everything that I kept pushing you away, and I can't—I can't do that anymore."
Water streamed down his face, cutting a line down his chiseled jaw. His chest rose and fell, the muscles in his arms taut as he clenched his fists.
Then his hands were on me, pulling me close, and his mouth found mine.
The kiss was nothing like last night's angry collision. This was slow, deep, a question and an answer all at once. His tongue slid against mine, tasting me, and I opened for him like I'd been waiting my whole life for this moment. My back hit the wet tile, the cold shock swallowed by the heat of his body pressing into me.
"I've wanted you so long," he breathed against my lips. His hands roamed down my sides, fingers digging into my hips. "Thought I was losing my mind."
I arched into him, feeling his cock hard against my thigh, thick and hot even through the spray. I met his eyes just inches from mine. "I'm not pulling away this time."
He kissed me again, harder this time, his teeth catching my bottom lip. One hand wrapped around my aching dick, and I groaned into his mouth, my knees going weak. He stroked me slowly, thumb circling the head, spreading the slick precum mixing with water.
"Duke—" I gasped, my head falling back against the tile.
"God, you’re beautiful like this." His voice was rough, his own breath coming fast. "Say it again, please. Tell me this is real."
"I love you—" I choked out as his hand tightened on my aching dick. It felt so good. “Duke, I love you so fucking much.”
I spread my legs wider, bracing myself against the wet wall as he kept working my cock, his mouth trailing kisses down my neck while I shook apart under his hands.
I felt the thick head of his cock pushing against my thigh as he moved against me. I exhaled, relaxing into the overwhelming sensation of his body against mine. He gripped my hip harder as he relentlessly worked my dick up and down in his wet fist. The wet sound of skin against skin echoed off the tile, mixing with my moans and his ragged breaths.
"Fuck, I can’t get enough of you," he groaned as he sucked marks into my neck. "I want you so fucking bad."
His pace quickened, the friction building something hot and desperate in my core.
"I love you." His hand worked the head of my cock as he pulled back and his gaze locked onto my face. "I love you, too."
I shattered. Come spurting between our bodies was washed away by the spray. I couldn’t breath, just fell into his arms and shook. We stayed like that for a moment, both trembling, the water running between our bodies. His arms wrapped around my waist, holding me upright when my legs couldn't. I pressed my face into his wet shoulder, breathing him in—cedar and water and my best friend.
"I'm sorry," I murmured. "For wasting so much time."
He pulled back just enough to look at me, his thumb brushing my cheek. "Nothing was wasted. We’ve got all the time in the world, now."
I was overwhelmed by emotion in that moment. So I stopped thinking and just let my body decide how to show him my love and I sank to my knees.
