Don't lose who you are, in the blur of the stars
Seeing is deceiving, dreaming is believing
It's okay not to be okay.
Sometimes it's hard, to follow your heart
Tears don't mean you're losing, everybody's bruising
Just be true to who you are.
-Jessie J, "Who You Are"
"Jake, is everything okay?"
"No," I breathe, shaking my head slowly. I lift it from my knees, so I can look into his eyes, and I can tell that he's genuinely worried.
He closes the distance between us, sits next to me on the bed, and wraps one arm around my shoulders.
"Jacob... talk to me, you look really upset," he says, pressing his lips to my shoulder. I can't be this close to him and say what I need to say, so I shrug him off, scoot to the center of the bed, and cross my legs under me. Edward's eyes are wide, watching me move away from him, and I see them flicker nervously to his laptop.
"Yeah," I tell him, acknowledging that I saw what was on his computer. He opens his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. "It's okay, I'm not mad. I mean, you have really shitty taste in porn, but I'm not mad."
"Jake, you need to listen. Jasper sent me those links. That girl? We went to high school with her. He just thought I'd want to see it out of curiosity," Edward says, reaching out to grip my knee. "I swear, you can read my email. I just watched it to see if it was really Jessica."
I can tell that he's telling the truth. It comforts me a little, to know that he wasn't seeking it out, but it doesn't change anything.
"But you liked it," I tell him, softly. "You were watching this before I came home and it made you... it turned you on."
Edward shrugs and crosses his arms over his chest defensively. "I guess... I mean I wasn't jerking off or anything, but it's porn. It made my dick hard."
"It's straight porn," I correct him, staring down at my knees. He cuts me off almost immediately.
"Well I'm fucking-" he says, stopping abruptly in the middle of his sentence. I lift my eyes to meet his. It's quiet for a minute, and I give him time to make up an end to the sentence, to say something other than what we both know he was going to say, but he doesn't.
"Straight, right? That's what you were gonna say," I prompt. He shakes his head, but his mouth stays closed. He drops his head to his hands and hides his face for a minute before sliding his fingers up into his hair.
"I don't know." His voice is quiet, sad, strained.
"Yeah, you do. You like girls," I tell him, adding in a whisper, "and I'm not a girl."
He goes from sad and vulnerable to angry in the time it takes me to blink.
"Are you fucking kidding me, Jacob? I like girls, but I fucking love you. Jesus, are you seriously telling me you doubt that right now?" He's practically shouting, and his anger stirs mine.
"I know you love me, but I also know I'm never going to be enough for you! If you stay with me, you can't be a 'straight guy' for the rest of your life!" I shout back, scrambling to get off the bed, to get some distance. I pace the length of the room, my hand rubbing the back of my neck, trying to catch my breath. "I'm never gonna make you happy, not in the long run. It's not gonna work. You're gonna leave me," I tell him, leaning back against the far wall, dropping my eyes to the floor.
"Bullshit," he says, quietly.
"What?"
"I said bullshit!" he yells. He jumps off the bed and strides over to me quickly, purposefully. "That's bullshit and you fucking know it. You make me happy every goddamn day; you're just making excuses. I changed everything for you, Jacob. Everything! Do you know how long my longest relationship was before we got together? Two fucking weeks." Edward leans into me, slamming one palm against the wall beside my head.
"You know I'd never even thought about another man like this. And then everything that happened with us... when you saw me jerking off, and then that first night, in your bed... fuck, I was so fucking confused, but it felt so good, and it finally felt right. I'd never had all these fucking feelings attached to sex before, and it scared the crap out of me," he confesses. His voice is starting to waver and his eyes are watering, but he still looks angry.
"Edward, I-"
"No, just fucking let me talk," he spits. "I couldn't reconcile it. I wasn't gay, so it didn't make sense. I fucking tortured myself trying to figure out what was so wrong with me, that I could be attracted to girls and still be fucking falling in love with you."
I reach out to touch him, because I need him closer. His words are breaking my heart, and my resolve. I wrap my hand around his hip and try to pull him to me, but he won't budge.
"But I did it, Jake. I made sense of it, I made it fucking work. I swallowed my pride and my fear and I dove into a relationship with you because... because you're it. You're my person, the one person that has ever made me feel this happy, or crazy, or turned on."
"And now... now you're telling me that you don't think it's gonna work? Because I'm too straight? You're telling me that you don't think you can make me happy when you're the only person who ever has? That's bullshit, Jake, you know it. This is your issue, not mine." His words cut into me, exposing my fear and my insecurity and making me feel small.
"I just... fuck, E," I tell him, wrapping my other hand around his waist, fighting to pull him closer. I manage to bring his body closer to mine, but he holds himself rigidly and refuses to lean into me. "Edward, I'm just so fucking scared that I'm gonna lose you. That if you're not sure that you're gay, you're not sure about me... and I'm gonna lose you."
"Jake, if I said to you right now 'I suddenly don't find women attractive anymore, ever, I'm one hundred percent gay,' it's still no fucking guarantee that we'll be happy forever. You're not being logical. If I swear off girls, what's to say I won't leave you for another guy?" he asks, pulling away, twisting out of my grasp. The thought makes me sick to my stomach. Edward leaving me for a girl is bad enough, but the idea of him with another guy? I couldn't take it.
"Maybe I'm just... afraid of you leaving me either way," I tell him. Edward turns, walks back to his bed, and sits at the head of it, leaning against his headboard. I follow him, hoping he won't turn me away, and sit at the edge of the mattress, facing him.
"What have I done to make you think I'm leaving? Because this is the longest relationship I've ever had, and I thought it was going pretty fucking well. I don't know where all this doubt is coming from," he says, sounding defeated.
I suck in a deep breath, trying to relieve some of the tension in my body. I scoot a little closer to Edward and wrap my hand around his ankle under his soft, brown khakis, needing some kind of connection with him.
"At the farmer's market," I tell him, and he turns his head towards the window, breaking eye contact. "You seemed... you were so angry, and I thought you were ashamed, and I guess it felt like... it felt inevitable then, that you would leave because you couldn't come to terms with being gay."
Edward swallows, and I can see one single tear fall from his eye. He wipes it away roughly, quickly, before he speaks.
"I was ashamed of how I reacted. How out of control I was. Yeah, I guess I was embarrassed when he called us... when he said what he said. I just reacted without thinking, and then I felt guilty for being embarrassed," he admits. "Jake... all of this... trying to figure out who I am and how to like, define myself... it's been really fucking hard for me. And I felt like... I felt like I couldn't ask you for help, because it would make you doubt me."
He looks so hurt, so fucking sad right now, and I know it's because I've proved him right. He's been doubting himself, struggling to find his way, and I've just made it worse.
"I just don't know how we have a future," I tell him honestly. "If you're always going to be thinking about what you're missing out on, you know?"
"But that's the thing, baby," he tells me, leaning towards me. "I'm not thinking about what I'm missing. I'm not missing anything. You meet all of my needs, every single fucking one. I mean, yeah, I got a little turned on by watching that stupid video, but I didn't like, jerk off to it in secret or run out to fuck some girl. I came to you."
"You weren't hard, after. You lost it while you were blowing me," I challenge him, embarrassed to admit that I'd noticed, that it hurt my pride. He laughs, a low chuckle, and reaches out to wrap his hand around mine, so we're both clinging to his ankle.
"Jake, notice anything different about what I'm wearing?" he says, and I look him up and down. Brown pants, t-shirt from a concert we went to two years ago. I figured he'd changed out of his old jeans to go to the store.
"I came while I was sucking your dick," he says, his ears and his cheeks filling with color as he admits it. "Just from... from feeling you and watching you."
"You did?" I ask, incredulous. He nods, blushing harder, and looks down at his hand covering mine.
"You always... you just have this effect on me," he says. "You drive me crazy. And it's not going away, Jacob. I need you to trust me," he pleads.
"I do trust you," I interrupt.
"No, you don't. You don't trust me to choose you. But I've always chosen you, Jake. I'm not gonna stop now," he insists. "Look, I just... I can't honestly go out and proclaim to the world that I'm gay. Maybe someday I will, but I don't know for sure. And I can't promise that I won't ever look at a girl and think that she's hot. But fuck, you can't say that you're never gonna look at some other guy, right?"
I shrug, unable to deny his logic.
"Do I... do I make you happy?" he asks, quiet and tentative. "Do you still want me?" His uncertainty hurts, makes me realize how much I've fucked this up. As much as I've been feeling insecure, Edward's been going through the same questions, but it must be worse for him. I've been out since high school, and I knew I was gay for a long time before that. But for Edward to be questioning his identity, the sense of self that he'd been building for his whole life, and worrying about my reaction at the same time... it must have been impossibly hard, and I've only been concerned with myself.
"Of course, baby," I tell him, sitting up on my knees. I reach for him, wrap my arms around his shoulders and hug him hard. "I always want you. You make me so happy, when I'm not being an idiot."
Edward folds his legs underneath him and rises up on his knees, too, so he can hug me back. We hold each other, kneeling together on the bed, and he whispers that he loves me.
"I love you, too," I tell him, turning my head to kiss him.
But he ducks his head and pulls away from my lips. Because he's not done talking yet.
"I need... Jake, I need to know that you choose me over the label. You're more important to me than being straight, or gay, or whatever. You're more important to me than any woman or man could ever be. I need to know if you're okay with that. I need you to choose me," he pleads.
I don't even have to think about it. I know that if we can talk about this and get through it, that we can talk about anything. That what I have with Edward means more to me than what anyone else thinks.
"I want you. I choose you. You're my person, too," I tell him, holding him impossibly closer. I try to kiss him again, but he tilts his head back, still avoiding me.
"And you have to promise me that you'll talk to me or something if you get worried about shit instead of trying to push me away," he says, squeezing me tightly.
"I promise," I tell him. "And you promise to come talk to me if you're feeling confused or embarrassed or whatever, and we'll talk about that shit, too."
"I will," he says, dropping his head, burying his face in my neck. "Jake, remember when we started fooling around? You told me to let go of what I thought was the "manly" thing to do and just do what feels good? I think that's what we need to do."
"Fool around?" I ask, and I can feel the apple of his cheek brush my skin when he smiles against me.
"I just mean that we should do what feels right to us and not think about whether it's straight or gay. We can just be... us," he says, rubbing small circles on my lower back. It's awkward, kneeling with him like this, so I flop down onto the bed and pull him down with me. I land on my back, with Edward held tightly against my side.
"I think that sounds great, baby, but I have to tell you that it won't be easy. People are gonna try to put you in one box or the other, and you'll be forced to figure out what you want to call yourself. To friends, to family, to new people we meet," I tell him, honestly. "And my friends are gonna want to know why my boyfriend has a subscription to Playboy."
He laughs a little, resting his chin on my chest so he can look up into my eyes. "It really does have good articles, I swear," he says. "But things will be okay, right? If we talk about it? And try to have a sense of humor about shit?"
"Yeah, I think it'll be okay," I say. I'm answering his question, but I think I'm reassuring myself, too. That despite all my worrying, all my fucking insecurity, I really can make this relationship work. Because it's Edward. My best friend, my boyfriend, the one person who has always supported me. I'm overwhelmed with the need to tell him that I love him in a million different ways, starting with one.
"Can I fucking kiss you now?" I ask, tangling my fingers in the hair at the back of his head.
He smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkle all adorably, and he leans up to brush his lips against mine. "My Jacob," he whispers, just before pressing his lips more firmly to mine. The kiss is long and deep, sweet and tender, but with an undeniable spark of passion and the promise of something more.
A/N: *sniffle* So that's the end of this story. There is, however, an epilogue... if you'd like to know what happens to our boys in the long term. I'll post it soon, this weekend I think. I don't have any teasers to bribe you with, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the resolution here-please leave a review!
The song I quoted at the beginning is lovely and appropriate for this story. Einfach_mich sent it to me while I was writing because it reminded her of my boys. Check it out on youtube:
www . youtube . com / watch?v=lHYhErv_fWQ