Page 73 of Ship Happens

“I told you that we could do numbing cream,” Owen nags, sinking deeper into the couch. “But no, you had to be the big man who didn’t need numbing cream because it’s for babies.”

“Do you want to know the truth?” Jacob asks, careful curiosity in his voice.

“The truth?” Owen asks, watching Jacob nod. “About what, exactly?”

“About why I didn’t want the numbing cream,” he says, cheeks flushed. “I, uh . . . I thought it’d impress you.”

“What?”

“I thought not doing the cream would impress you,” Jacob repeats, only further embarrassed.

Owen pauses, looking Jacob right in the eye. Then he bursts out laughing. “That’s so stupid.”

“I know . . .” Jacob hides his shame by covering his face with his hands.

“It’s there to make your experience less painful, Jacob. I literally offered it to you,” Owen tells him, like it’s not obvious.

“I know! I know!” Jacob parrots. “I just wanted you to think I was cool!”

Owen smiles so tenderly at the man who captured his heart and has refused to let go. “You’re silly.”

Jacob smiles back. “But it worked, didn’t it?”

“Not really,” Owen says, still able to recall the appointment. “You cried, remember?”

“But then you had to comfort me,” Jacob says with a satisfied smile. “So I got the attention I wanted.”

“And somehow I wasn’t completely turned off by you.” Owen chuckles.

“I like to think my winning personality and dazzling smile made up for it.”

“Your tip was pretty generous too.”

“Yeah it was!” Jacob blurts out, holding his hand out for Owen to take.

“I’m not rewarding you for that,” Owen says, unable to hide his smile at the memory of that night.

Afterward, as Owen wrestled with getting the thin layer of Saniderm off the application sheet, Jacob had looked down at him and asked, “Do you want to go on a date with me?”

Owen had hesitated, completely caught off guard.

He’d dated before. Boyfriends, girlfriends, partners. None of Owen’s relationships lasted for long, though. Either they fizzled out or ended up being far less serious than Owen wanted them to be. It’s not like he was desperate for a soulmate; he didn’t want to find the love of his life at the ripe old age of twenty-five.

But . . . maybe he did?

Maybe that’s what he’d pictured when he thought of asking Jacob out. And yeah, maybe he’d spent too long romanticizing this fictional relationship with a man he’d never worked up the courage to ask out himself. When he thought about Jacob, he thought about laughter. He thought about warmth, about that smile. He thought about the gap between his two front teeth, and the freckles on his shoulders that Owen noticed the first time he saw Jacob in a tank top. He thought about Jacob hunched over his laptop as he watched some new documentary just minutes after it dropped. He thought about the dinner that Jacob tried to make for the two of them one night, burning the chicken until it was charcoal before he offered to order off DoorDash.

He thought of care, and joy, and laughter. Of home.

And love.

“Yeah,” he’d said, smiling at Jacob. “I’d love to.”

Now Owen scoots back into the couch, situating a throw pillow behind his back so that he can lie stretched out again, keeping his leg elevated. Only, he can’t get comfortable. The movie finally wraps up, and Jacob entertains the idea of forcing Owen to sit through a Star Wars movie but instead pulls up old episodes of Family Guy, another straight-boy habit that Owen couldn’t break him of. At least the edible makes it a bit funnier.

“You’re feeling okay?” Jacob asks, hopping up to rejoin Owen on the couch.

“Yeah,” Owen tells him, stretching out his limbs back and forth slowly to test his range of motion, the shoulder still tender.