Page 99 of The Build-a-Boyfriend Project

Eli’s ears perk up at that. “You’re watching porn? Well, now I have to see what gets your rocks off.”

Peter smiles. “Please.”

“Porn is all fake, even the kind that tries to be as real as possible. You shouldn’t judge your experiences based on other people’s anyway, porn or otherwise.” There’s a silence that stretches, and for a moment, Eli wonders if he said the wrong thing somehow.

“Do you . . . do you miss him?” Peter dares to ask him. “You don’t have to answer that question if you don’t want to.” These words come a little hurriedly, as if Peter’s realized he’s crossed some invisible line.

Of course, he’s surprised, to say the least. He wouldn’t have expected Peter to ask such a personal question.

“No, it’s okay. It’s just . . . tough to answer.” Eli lets out a low, soft sigh. “I do, and it hurts to feel like I still do.”

Eli pauses, and out of the corner of his eye, he can see Peter staring expectantly. He doesn’t say anything, though.

“He gave me seven years of himself. He gave me seven years of feeling as if I belonged, like I was wanted. He made me feel the way no other person did. And it still hurts that it’s just gone, that I don’t have one of my best friends anymore.”

“I think that’s what scares me the most, about all of this,” Peter says, crossing his legs on the bed. “That someone could just decide to . . . end it all like that. It’s scary.”

“Yeah, it is,” Eli says to him. “But, you know . . . that’s just a part of life. Something that you have to get used to.”

“How do you do that?” Peter asks.

Eli looks at him. “When I figure that out, I’ll let you know.”

Peter lets out a low, pitiful laugh, and Eli follows the lead to not make the situation awkward. But as the sounds die on their lips, the silence stretches before them, neither of them clear on what to do next.

“Is falling in love really as scary as it sounds, Eli?” Peter dares to ask.

“It’s terrifying,” Eli admits. Because it’s the truth. And it might be one of the few times he gets to be truly and totally unbiased with Peter. Because he really does believe that. “But that’s what makes it special, what makes it truly one of the greatest feelings in the world.”

Peter dares to smile, if even just for a moment.

“I hope I get to experience it one day,” he says.

And Eli has to look away. “Yeah . . . I hope you do too.”

* * *

Eli closes the apartment door behind him, peeking out the window when he walks through the empty living room. Peter’s still out there in his car, having offered Eli a ride home. The angle is just right for the two men to be able to see each other if Peter leans over into the passenger seat. Eli waves at him, and Peter waves back before he shifts into drive, pulling slowly down the street.

Despite how late it is, and how he feels exhaustion deep in his bones, Eli knows that he’ll never get to sleep, not with the unease that rattles around in his brain, so he sheds his outfit, only then realizing that he still has Peter’s hoodie.

He doesn’t mind, though. He doesn’t even bother putting on sweatpants, just undresses down to his underwear and puts the hoodie back on, wanting Peter around him as he walks through the silent apartment half naked, catching the scent of Peter every so often.

Eli busies himself, pulling up the John Carpenter classic The Thing for the Halloween ambience before he grabs his laptop and goes to Google Docs.

There, right at the top, are both articles about Peter, half completed. He has an entire night of details to add. The laundromat, Peter’s dreams of being a novelist, that shared fear of failure and your life’s work amounting to nothing. He writes about Peter’s empty apartment, the lack of interior decoration, how Peter felt trapped in a career he never wanted because he thought pursuing his dreams was too risky. He writes about expectations in the queer community and how people like Peter are rarely afforded grace for things entirely out of their control.

Then, knowing just what Michael will say . . . he deletes those last paragraphs.

He sits there on the couch, his laptop precariously perched on the arm, staring at his blinking cursor, at the little M icon in the corner that shows it’s been shared with Michael.

He could delete this entire article.

He could. It’d be simple to wipe the entire project off his Google Drive, marching into the Vent offices and showing Michael what he’s actually been working on. He goes back to his article on Peter.

The real article.

He reads through it again, and again, and again. And then the thoughts begin to appear, and he starts to question every single decision, every word. He wonders if the throughline is strong enough, if he’s shifted the focus just enough away from Peter to make this an article that hundreds of people can relate to. And the more he reads it, the more he despises everything he’s ever written.