Oliver

I hadn't gone home after leaving Enrique back at the cafe, now wandering Le Jardin des Plantes on my own, taking in the free time I so rarely gave myself. It was nice being out so early in the morning, the bliss of silence interrupted only by wind blowing through the trees and the sound of my own footsteps. I wanted some time to think. Or… not think?

I had spent the last five years doing everything in my power to forget about him, kept myself as busy as I possibly could so that intrusive thoughts wouldn't even be something I had time for, and he had ruined all of it. In less than twenty four hours he had brought me right back to square one. Shame now overflowed through my body at the realization he still held so much leverage over me, going from telling him everything I had practiced saying in my head since he had abandoned me to the comforting weight of his bare chest pressed up against my own.

We had made love… I had been the one to initiate the act. It was weird and awkward and uncomfortable and yet it had been compassionate and erotic and everything I had been dreaming of and more. It was something I would never forget in my life, allowing him to see me in my absolute most vulnerable state, but I had meant what I'd told him afterward: It could never happen again. I was absolutely not that sort of person, wondering now in the back of my head if Enrique had realized that. I didn't know why I had felt the need to lie to him, It wasn't as though I'd never slept with anyone, I had been in a relationship; it hadn't taken us long to explore intimacy, not to mention the fact that I was the one who had given him a condom, which I'd had in a bedside table, but I was confident he could tell that I wasn't as experienced as I had claimed, seeing as his own history was the exact opposite.

I knew I couldn't stay here all day, eventually needing to get back to my normal life and wait out the months it might take to erase Enrique from both my mind, my heart and my body. It had hurt knowing he hadn't believed his behavior could affect me the way that it had. Although we lived quite far from one another, we really were the absolute definition of best friends, always managing to find a way to get together long before either of us had a license. Hell, we never even stayed the night in one of the others guest rooms, very commonly ending up asleep in the same bed during overnight stays, usually giggling like school girls until one of our parents or siblings had enough and inevitably threw the door open in order to tell us off. There was one night where I'd had so much difficulty getting him to stop snoring that I accidentally kicked him straight off the bed and onto the floor, both of us getting scolded when we had been unable to stop laughing afterward.

Every cherished childhood memory by the time I had hit secondary school, he was a part of. Slowly as the years had gone by, those memories had stopped making me smile, entering into a gray void that had begun forming the day I realized he had left. He had left because of me.

Stepping slowly, I attempted to make the time last as long as I could while walking my way back to the car. Something about leaving the area we had sat together for the last time felt painful; the final thing I did before truly deciding to leave him behind. If we even wanted to become so much as acquaintances again, we would need to start at the pace of a snail. I would need to hold myself to the absolute highest standards in order to always remain one step ahead of my emotions. I couldn't let him so much as touch me, recalling the feeling of being held tightly in his arms, my head resting comfortably on his chest as I listened to his heart beat.

Now the only way I could say goodbye was through the rear view mirror.

XXX

Enrique

Hey.

It was my only attempt at texting him so far, the message now almost a week old. I still had not heard from Oliver; I thought about doing what we used to when we were teens, when we made up a game of seeing how many languages we could type and send the word Hello in before one of us got bored enough to stop. He always won, but it didn't stop me from playing. It was the sort of friendship we'd had, Johnny and Robert rarely understanding our inside jokes and just shrugging us off.

Maybe I should start up again, send him another message and being a little more playful this time. Then again, whenever I tried to be playful with him while we'd been at the cafe together, it seemed to get on his nerves, like I wasn't taking seriously what I was doing. If I text him again, I sound clingy and push him further away. Yet if I don't try again at all, I prove to him that I'm just going to leave again.

Maybe I should call him instead.

Before I could come up a reason to stop myself, I tapped his name and brought the phone up to my ear, waiting impatiently for it to begin ringing once… twice… three times…

"Oliver?" I asked right as the call connects, as though it would have been anyone else.

"Yes?" He asked with uncertainty.

"It's Enrique."

"I know."

Right… he would know. I was the one who had texted him as well, even if my number wasn't in his phone contacts currently he would still recognize it.

"I… Well…" I paused, "How are you?"

"Why are you calling me? You hate talking on the phone."

I couldn't help but sigh a breath of relief, he didn't sound annoyed or upset or anything, he was just blunt; he always had been.

"I texted you and you didn't respond, I just wanted to make sure my phone was working- I mean, you're phone was working."

"It's working."

"Oh! That's great! Anyway, I wanted to say hello, so… hello."

He sighed into the phone and I swear I could hear the sound of his eyes rolling on the other side. My sweet talking was basically the only skill I had. Why would it choose now to bail on me? I was talking as though I had forgotten all except the bare minimum of my English.

"I'm fine." He said after a moment. "Listen, I have a lot to do so if you don't need anything-"

"Oh, yeah. I just wanted to see if you wanted to meet up sometime. I know you said that you work a lot, so not necessarily super soon but-" I paused for a moment, relaxing my voice and forcing myself to slow down. "It was nice seeing you again, Ollie."

"I'm gonna start calling you Ricky if you don't knock that off."

I smiled, body relaxing significantly at the realization that he wasn't just going to hang up on me.

"I could even come to you again if you wanted, I could actually take a plane this time."

He went silent for a moment, taking his time to decide on what to say. Although it couldn't have been for more than a few seconds at most, the dialogue break felt like minutes, causing an internal debate amongst myself regarding whether or not he had hung up on me now.

"You drove here last time?" He eventually asked. "Why on earth would you do that?"

"I don't know," I shrugged, "I guess I didn't want to have to wait around on an airplane and have the opportunity to chicken out. Driving kept my mind busy."

Another pause. He was taking the time to think about what it was he wanted to say to me.

"Listen, Enrique, I have to get back to work, I'm gonna be stuck in a freezer decorating an ice cream cake for at least an hour and we're also backed up on other orders, so could we talk about it later? I can probably text you tonight."

"Yeah." I grinned. "Whatever you want."

He didn't say good bye, just hanging up the phone and leaving me listen to nothing but a silent abyss until my arm allowed me to pull the phone away from my ear. He hadn't completely given up on me, something that I wouldn't have blamed him for in the slightest, and he didn't seen to feel awkward speaking to me after our last encounter. I debated if I should send a quick text, just making it clear that I wasn't trying to do anything like that and truly just wanted to be able to see him. I didn't want him to think that he was no more to me than the one that got away.

Who he had been before I left still resided within him. Hell, I had seen glimpses of him attempting to keep it contained. Although I knew he struggled to let down the walls he had built, it also seemed that he couldn't completely keep them up, bricks he had stacked but never properly sealed, now propped up only by the fear he had of allowing me to get too close. The bitter, hurt person who I had gone back to wasn't him. It was his coping mechanism.

I could remember exactly how it had gone when he'd told us those few years ago. We had all seen him throw himself in the spotlight more times than we could count, inviting us to violin recitals, to art showings, trying to get Johnny and me to miss our own graduations so that we could go to his after he skipped a year; never fearing in the least the idea of being the center of attention.

He had been different that day, though. For the first time in his entire life he appeared to have stage freight and he wasn't even on a stage. He had trembled when speaking and to be completely honest he'd made it seem like he was about to tell us his family had gone broke or that he was being investigated for first degree murder and needed us to help move a body.

"I think I might- I mean… I'm pretty sure- I like men."

He didn't think, though. He knew; he had known for years but had been too afraid to tell anyone. If I recall correctly I believe he'd only told his parents the week before. His sister it had only been the day before. There hadn't been a doubt in my mind that his parents would accept the information immediately. His mother was well known in the arts, primarily theater, when she was young. She'd already had close friendships with gay men and women, and his father was quite open minded in his own way, even if the idea would take getting used to. His parents loved him very much, their only real question being why he thought he'd even have to keep it a secret. He'd said that he had known since he was ten, but had questioned it long before that.

I hadn't known until I was eighteen, my interest in women easily distracting me from anything else my brain may have been trying to tell me. I believed I did understand in some way, though. I've heard people say that kids are too young to know things like that about themselves, but I had told my mother my first year of primary school that Imogen Rinaldi, my dark haired and olive toned classmate, was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my whole life and that I was gonna ask her to be my girlfriend, and my entire family had gone on and on about how much of a ladies man I would be someday. They used to joke that fathers would be hiding their daughters from me while telling kids like Oliver that they were too young to understand sexual orientation.

There was a double standard that I had never noticed before.

Sighing, I took a seat on my bed. Something inside of me continued to feel off ever since I came home and I couldn't quite put a hand on what. My bedroom looked exactly the same as it had when I was eighteen, now feeling a bit childish for my own liking, but it wasn't like I had never come to visit throughout the years that I had been traveling. I came home for Christmas and the occasional birthday and had never felt like a distance had grown between myself and my family during the time I was gone. If anything, we bickered less when I wasn't living in the house with everyone else, which actually improved my relationships with my older siblings, my oldest brother in particular finally hitting the point of viewing me as an adult for the first time and not the baby of the family who took time away from everyone else.

Maybe that was why I had become so distant around the time I had begun developing an interest in men. I was never in denial that being the youngest of six had made me spoiled rotten on top of the wealth that was my birth privilege. To put it bluntly, I was used to getting away with things, regularly sneaking out and easily avoiding things like school tutors or my childhood piano teacher. Even in the instances where I had gotten myself grounded it had been easy to get around. My parents were always busy, my oldest siblings had their own children to worry about and none of the ones close in age to me had any reason to care what I was doing in the first place. If I wasn't pampered, I was invisible, and I liked it that way.

This wasn't the same as sneaking a girl up to my bedroom to fool around when I was sixteen, though. This feeling was something that would suddenly get me viewed as different, and not in a way that could be mistaken as positive. Our public image, particularly within the Catholic church, would be effected. I was too old to be shipped off to some sort of Pray The Gay away camp against my will- not that I felt it was something my parents would actually do, but there was a good chance I would be removed from the spotlight, suddenly becoming the family member that no one talked about. I could prevent the entire thing so long as I only dated women and didn't tell anyone about the unclean thoughts I had. That was the major difference between Oliver and myself; the main thing that would always cause me to hold shame about leaving.

I had a choice.

He didn't.

He never would.

No wonder he hated me.

XXX

Oliver

I was struggling to keep my eyes open by the time I had gotten home, now regretting telling Enrique that I would text him. All I currently wanted was to take an aromatherapy bath and go straight to bed. Thankfully, I had scheduled myself the day off tomorrow and would only need to go in if someone called in sick and my help was desperately needed. My employees could handle decorating on their own and if I had any customers with custom orders they would just need to wait as all of my cakes and pastries were my own recipes which I shared with no one. I needed to make more vanilla extract anyway, which I could do just as easily at home.

Removing my shoes outside of my bedroom door, I flicked my light on while rubbing at tired eyes, pulling out the bun I had begun keeping my hair contained in and allowing it to fall past my shoulders, easing the slight headache that had come on, grabbing a boar bristle hair brush from off my vanity and bringing downward any natural oils that my scalp had created throughout the day and taking a look at myself in the mirror. I pulled down the collar of my turtleneck, checking the healing process of the two hickeys Enrique had left on my neck the week before. They were mostly gone now, thankfully.

I really should text him. I had told him I would. Given, I had said maybe, which gave me an excuse. I wasn't even actively avoiding him, I'd had an extremely long day and was exhausted.

I wasn't afraid, just busy.

We would talk a different day.