24
RYAN
I’m calling it: this dinner is going to be a nightmare.
Just strap in and get ready for the humiliation of my coworker falling on her face to get into Stefan Baker’s pants tonight—and me having to endure every second of it over a basket of spicy onion rings.
“Ready?” I ask him when we reach the door to the wonderful diner Dana chose for tonight’s festivities. Note my enthusiasm.
Stefan nods at the door. “Sure thing.”
“You alright? You seemed kinda stiff during the ride over.”
For a second, Stefan looks like he wants to say something. He holds back instead, gives his head a shake, then gets that familiar cocky look on his face. “It’s ‘cause I went to that old gym you said was still open. My muscles are literally stiff as fuck. Unlike you, who got to sit your butt in a desk chair all day.”
I roll my eyes. “I do get up and pace my office worriedly now and then, to be fair. Plus, the staff lounge is on the opposite end of the whole damned school, so I get some cardio in whenever I want to have lunch and not starve myself for the day.”
“Oh, your life is so hard,” he teases me, then pulls open the door. “Bros first.”
When I pass through the door, I murmur quietly to him, “Just brace yourself. I don’t know who Dana’s friend is, but Dana herself is a barrel of fireworks, and the pair of them might literally try to devour you whole. Like, you’re probably on the menu to them.”
Stefan quirks an eyebrow. “Could you maybe make that sound a skosh less sexy? Then I might take your warning seriously.”
I shoot him a look. “Really? Sexy? After last night when I massaged your butthole with my tongue for the third time this week?”
His face straightens up at once. “Ryan …” he mumbles under his breath in warning.
“I’m just warming it up.” I bite my lip. “Y’know, for when I get the real thing in it.”
“Your cock’s going nowhere near my ass.”
“You say that now.”
“And I mean it,” he states, his words as hard as hammers.
Fuck, I love when he gets that face and talks like that. It’s going to make the reward of actually having sex with him all that much more sweet. “On that note, let’s go have some dinner with a couple women who want our nuts.”
“I’m putting you over my knee when we get back,” he warns me, his voice still hard and low. “And you’re not getting off of it until you’re red as a cherry and begging me to stop.”
I shoot his own words back at him. “Uh … could you perhaps make that sound a skosh less sexy? Then I might take your warning seriously.”
He growls at me.
I chuckle, shake my head, then lead the way.
The pair of us find the pair of them in the far corner of the restaurant by a bunch of windows that look out onto the street. Dana’s eyes light up as she waves her hands to draw us over to their table, which is a tall, circular one with tall chairs to match. Dana’s friend is like a carbon copy of herself: sexy and striking with a wild mane of brown hair and tiny heart-shaped lips. She has about a tenth the vigor of Dana, however, which makes her come off downright meek in comparison.
“This is Angela,” Dana announces, presenting her friend. “And you must be Stefan Baker.”
“Just Stefan,” he tells her teasingly with a sexy wink and a lopsided smile.
Dana giggles—ugh—and then extends her hand, her mile-long red nails touching his palm first in the handshake. “It is lovely to finally meet you.”
“Well, according to you and my boy Ryan here, we’ve already met, though I was covered from neck to ass in beer. Apologies for that awful first impression.” He gives me a quick, hearty nudge, then extends a hand over the table to Angela. “Nice to meet you too, Angela.”
She nods, squeaks out a word that none of us hear, and takes his hand, shaking it daintily before reclaiming her seat.
Stefan and I sit next to each other with the ladies on either side of us. After a bit of small talk—where Dana explains what she does in the front office, Angela reveals she knits sweaters and rainbow-colored scarves, and Stefan asks them a question or two about their respective interests—we are approached by a waiter with a man-bun who’s missing a front tooth to offer us menus and semi-cloudy glasses of water. The menus stick together, but we manage to inspect them long enough to make our orders and then wonder whether we ought to wash our hands after touching them before we get our meals.
The last thing on Dana’s mind is the stickiness of the menus, judging from the frequency of her lip-licking and the way her eyes drink in the sight of Stefan. Angela, sweet and quiet, just sips her water and listens, her big brown eyes staring at Stefan, too. After some time, our meals are served, and Dana and I each get our margaritas that we ordered, courtesy of me. I didn’t forget.
“Tell me about how you two met,” Dana suggests, stirring her margarita with a straw as her eyes flit back and forth between us.
“Little League.” Stefan turns his eyes to me as he answers, the hint of a smile on his lips. “We played ball together. Both made the high school team.”
“Mmm. Ryan told me that part. Bet you two made a cute pair of ballplayers,” Dana murmurs, then throws me a little wink.
I smile because I’m polite.
Or there are ants in my pants and I’m trying not to scream.
“Yeah, totally adorable,” agrees Stefan, then throws an arm around my neck and pulls me into half a headlock, which I swiftly dodge, giving him a shove and stifling a laugh. “Hell, we were so ‘cute’ together that people even thought we were a couple.”
My head snaps to him at once.
“Really?” asks Dana, lifting her brows with amusement.
“Yep.” Stefan smirks and shoots me a look. “Apparently they all even talked about us behind our backs.”
I’m totally caught off-guard. Where is this coming from? For some reason, I don’t want Dana or her friend to think that I wasn’t privy to this information, so despite my widened eyes, I only give a little shrug and go along with it. “Yeah. Guys said a lot of shit back then. Teenagers are always bored and gossiping.”
“Gossiping,” agrees Stefan, though his bright blue eyes carry a strange glimmer of skepticism in them.
I return his odd look. What the hell was all of that about with him saying people thought we were a couple back in the day? Did he hear that somewhere, or was he making that shit up to be funny or entertaining?
I’m not entertained. I’m annoyed and unsure where Stefan’s head is at right now.
“But you’re not,” states Dana. “Right?”
Stefan and I turn to her at once. “What?” I prompt anxiously, my throat constricted.
“Everyone thought you were a couple,” she says, wagging a finger between us, “but you’re not. Right?”
My heart jumps out of my chest and lands in my margarita with a splash, then proceeds to pump furiously before our eyes.
Or not.
Dana has literally, in the space of one tiny conversation, dug up the meat of the conflict between Stefan and I and laid it right there in the middle of the table for all of us to witness.
Stefan leans back slightly in his seat, props an elbow on the table, flashes a cocky grin, and answers, “Nah.”
I watch him, studying every flinch and flex of his expression. Is that just a cover-up? Is he still obligated to some sort of public image where he can’t come out? Is he toying with them?
“What?” mutters Stefan with a careless shrug. “A straight guy can’t be close friends with another guy without everyone thinking they’re gay? Ryan’s my bro. My mate. My buddy. We’re close.”
I feel my stomach harden. I guess if Stefan’s plan of action is to play along, I can do the same damned thing. “Yeah,” I agree. “We’ve always been close friends. Even when we’re total dicks to one another.”
Or are holding one another’s dick. Either way.
“I can feel it,” Dana insists. “You guys just ‘get’ each other. Wow. It’s really cute. I get why people think you two are a couple.”
Stefan snorts and, after taking one kick-back of his beer, says, “I’ll take that as a compliment. No, I’m straight. Definitely straight, no doubt about it.”
The word is like a heavy mallet to my chest.
Straight.
Definitely straight.
Just like that, all the sexiness of the past week is obliterated. Click, recent browser history deleted. We don’t sometimes cuddle. We don’t do things that involve oil all over his body and tongues in certain orifices. We don’t totally do the gayest not-gay shit you can imagine two not-gay guys doing.
I realize Dana is staring at me—as if digging into my psyche and seeing all of this inner turmoil I think I’m hiding so well—so I straighten up my expression right away and mask the scowl I’m sure I was making.
“I have to use the lady’s room,” announces Angela so quietly, I almost don’t realize what she’s said until she’s already dismissed herself from the table.
The timing makes me wonder if Angela isn’t so comfortable with all of this gay talk.
Then Stefan speaks up. “I gotta take a leak myself.” He gives me a slap on the shoulder as he hops off his chair. “Be right back, bro. Excuse me, Dana.”
I watch him go, my throat dry and my appetite, gone. I have no idea what’s going on anymore.
“Hey, Ryan.”
It’s Dana. I flick my eyes back to her. “Yeah?”
“Don’t worry,” she says quietly to me. “I already knew.”
I swallow. “Knew what?”
“I knew it since I first met you. I think I have one of those gay-dars,” she explains with a tap of her long fingernail to her temple. “I always had a suspicion. It’s why I asked you out for drinks. I like you. I trust you.”
There are so many things happening to my nervous system right now that I don’t even know whether I’m happy, scared, sad, furious, or relieved to hear this from Dana.
Maybe I’m all of those things.
“It’s okay,” she assures me again, then reaches across the table to take my hand. “I won’t blab. Gay people are my favorite. Your secret’s safe with me. Promise.”
I slowly nod, unable to say anything yet.
Her hand is cold and wet from holding her margarita glass. That’s all I seem to notice at the moment.
“And also,” she adds, a bit of humor entering her eyes, “you know semi-famous people like Stefan Baker. That’s definitely a perk to knowing you, you lucky dog, you! Even if he is straight.”
I swallow hard, then glance off toward the bathrooms where he disappeared to. “The only semi-famous person I know is Stefan Baker,” I confess lamely.
Except I’m not sure that that’s even true. Maybe I’ve gotten it wrong this whole time. Maybe I’ve misinterpreted everything.
Maybe I don’t know Stefan at all.