Page 27 of Offside
Maybe he chose one close to his own, too?
“Thank you,” I hummed, an almost painful smile stretching across my face at seemingly nothing. “My food should be here in a few minutes, but we can start the movie now, if you want.”
“I can wait,” he said a little faster–a little more comfortable. “Mine should also be here in a few minutes, so we can just…talk, I guess, until then.”
“Don’t sound so excited–”
“I am,” he laughed softly, letting out a nervous breath I could hear. “It’s just weird. I’ve had time and privacy to think up clever responses to your messages for over a month now, so having to do it on the fly with no back button is nerve-racking.”
And there was Metal–I saw him in that nervous ramble. I suddenly saw every nervous ramble he'd had up until that point, only now I had some kind of voice and cadence to attach to it.
Oh god–this made it so much more real.
He was so much more real now–he was a real person, talking to me…
Oh god, and it felt so much better.
He was curing a lonely feeling for a month now, but this did something deeper. This made me actually long for just a little more of him again.
Any amount he could give me–I wanted every inch he had to give.
“I’ll try to go easy on you,” I joked, swallowing down my need to tell him every thought in my head. “Maybe the movie will–”
“It’s not just me, right?” he asked quietly, almost at a whisper. I picked up my phone, carrying it to my couch to sit with it like it was him. “Like…I don’t know–maybe it is.”
“I need some words, Metal,” I said calmly, but gently. “I can help once you give me some context, but I need a little more.”
He was quiet for a second, only the sound of his slow breathing confirming he was still there at all. I wasn’t going to push again, but I wanted him to ask–I was pretty sure I knew what it was.
And as scared of the answer as I was, I wanted to give it to him.
“No, it's dumb,” he sighed. “I’m overthinking a very basic thing between us, and all it’ll do is make this worse, so–”
“Okay, well, I really like you,” I said quickly, interrupting him and his dismissal of this thing. “I don’t ever even entertain anything for longer than a few hours with anyone, but I do with you… I tell you things that I’ve never told anyone before, and I look forward to every message and every night at home I get to spend talking to you, so if that’s what your thing is, then maybe don’t brush it off so quickly.”
Why all that came pouring out of my mouth was lost on me, but I just couldn’t dance around it anymore. He was brushing it off like everything with us was just maybe something I did with guys, but I needed him to know it wasn’t.
That it was special.
That he was special.
“It was that,” he said quietly. “I don’t really know what’s going on with me or anything, but I like you, too, Knight… I want to know you more and…I don’t know–I think I want to be something with you, but I’m also afraid I only like this so much because you don’t know me. I’m not worried about any of the real-life stuff with you because even like this, you’re still just the voice in my phone I talk to all day.”
“So, don’t worry about that stuff,” I offered kindly. “Worry about how you feel about me and only that… My situation is still my situation, Metal–I’m not coming out any time soon, so don’t worry about that. Just…say yes to this movie and dinner being a date, and we’ll go from there.”
“But–”
“Yes or no are the only options, baby.”
Metal let out a long sigh, but not in frustration–relief.
All I wanted was to give him that.
“Yes,” he finally said, a little twinge of relief in his voice.
It was all true–I could like him all I wanted, but that didn’t make me suddenly available. I still couldn’t just be boyfriends with him, and even if I could, who knows where home was for him–it clearly wasn’t Toronto.
I never brought it up, and he didn’t either, but clearly neither of us lived in Toronto. Our time zones matched up for things when I was home, so he must have been based somewhere on the Pacific coast, but that could just as easily have been Seattle or something.
