Chapter Twenty-Two
“I’m really glad you decided to order pizza instead of cooking,” Riley said between bites, happy noises escaping him as he chewed. “Not that there’s anything wrong with your cooking, but…”
“I know what you mean. I couldn’t have eaten anything else tonight. There’s something comforting about being able to feel your arteries harden while you eat.”
Riley chuckled, which made Brent smile. He was starting to feel as though he was recovering from all the crap that had happened over the past week, and Riley was mostly responsible for that.
“There is,” Riley agreed after a moment. “The company helps.”
“You’re not gonna say your body is a temple?” Brent asked.
“I think that’s elevating it above what it needs to be. My body gets me around and lets me experience the world in the few short years I get to be a conscious human being for. It’s a gift, and I’m enjoying it to the fullest.”
“That… sounds way better than a temple.”
“I’m very smart,” Riley said, without a hint of irony in his tone.
Riley was smart, though. It had been strange to be reminded he’d never actually been to college. Not that college made you smart, and not that people who didn’t go weren’t perfectly capable of being intelligent and well-rounded.
It just struck Brent that up until his parents died, he’d lived his life on a very traditional path. In a way, he was lucky things had changed. He might have been bored out of his skull by now if they hadn’t.
Not that it was a good thing, losing his parents when he was twenty-two, but maybe it wasn’t an entirely bad thing.
Riley would have said it just was, and there was no point making moral judgements about random events. No matter how big or important they seemed.
“You are very smart,” Brent agreed. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too.” Riley leaned back on the couch. Brent had put a movie on before the pizza had come, but they’d both been ignoring it the whole time. It was just background noise. “This reminds me of when we were kids.”
“That was kinda the idea,” Brent said. “We haven’t gotten to do this in a really long time, y’know? And you told me to follow my heart, and my heart says hang out with Riley more.”
“Oh,” Riley said softly. “Well… I like the way your heart thinks.”
“I just… I was thinking about what you said a lot on the way home, and about how I didn’t ask for everything that happened, and… I don’t resent it, you’re right, but there are things I regret. I regret the way our friendship changed when I suddenly had a kid to look after.”
“I didn’t mind,” Riley said. “Helping out, I mean.”
“No, I know, and you were always there, and you always helped me make sure Emily had what she needed, and you dragged me out of bed when it all seemed too hard and forced me to get on my feet again, but… we never really got to be young together. We got to be kids, sure, but then there’s this huge gap and now we’re grownups. Real grownups.”
“You might be,” Riley said. “Personally, I live in a van and I don’t have a real job, so…”
“You’re easily one of the hardest-working people I know,” Brent pointed out. Riley never had any one job, but he was always doing a million things, even though he didn’t really need to. His inheritance had been enough, with some careful management, to keep him going for a long time if he’d wanted it to be.
And apparently some of that management had paid off, and Riley suddenly had more money than he had use for.
Brent was happy to hear that. If he couldn’t give anything else, a nudge toward financial security was something worthwhile.
Accountancy might have been a boring job, but people always thanked him when they suddenly got to stop worrying about money. It sucked that money was such a big cause of anxiety for so many people, but Brent liked being able to help them out.
“Don’t say it so loud, you’ll ruin my image,” Riley said. “I actually haven’t taken this long off in years. But I’m not inclined to rush back to work just yet.”
“You’ve been doing stuff the entire time. None of this has been a break for you. You’ve spent it looking after me.”
Brent wished that just once, he could look after Riley instead of the other way around. Riley was always looking after him. He appreciated it, but he wished he could return the favor.
“I enjoy looking after you,” Riley said, grabbing another slice of pizza. “You’re very rewarding to look after, and it makes me happy to know you’re alive and well.”
“I like knowing you’re alive and well, too,” Brent said.
“Which is why I send you pictures of sunsets and delicious things I’m eating and weird signs I’ve seen all the time. I like to make sure you know I’m okay. And I want to be sure you’re okay, too.”
“I think… I think I’m getting to the point of being okay,” Brent said. “Thanks.”
He was a little afraid to say it, since he still had it in the back of his head that Riley would leave once the problem was solved, like he always did.
“Good.” Riley chewed on his pizza. “And I promise you that sitting around on the couch eating pizza with you is no hardship for me. This may be hard to believe, but I like spending time with you. Even when you’re sad.”
Brent huffed, the worst of the tension in his shoulders fading. He was worrying too much about what Riley thought of him, and that was stupid. He’d never worried about it before.
He had no idea what was going on between them, but Riley didn’t seem to be freaking out over it. Why should he?
“I just… I have regrets.” Too many to count, starting with missing out on so much with Riley and stretching all the way to not asking him to stay. Not even once.
Maybe Riley kept leaving because Brent had never told him otherwise. Never mentioned that he wanted Riley to stay, not just that he was welcome to. Those, he was beginning to see, were different things.
“Don’t,” Riley said. “There’s no point in regrets. They don’t do anyone any good. You make amends—with yourself or whoever you did the wrong thing by—and you move on.”
Riley always made things like that sound so easy. Brent wondered how much of his own advice he took, sometimes, but Riley… Riley did really seem to have stuff figured out, for the most part.
Brent still remembered him mentioning that he felt lost, that he felt as though he didn’t have a home. He’d never seen Riley that vulnerable, and his mind wanted to shove the whole incident to one side, because it didn’t fit with what he knew about his best friend.
He was forcing himself to remember it, though. Riley had meant that. Some part of him wasn’t totally happy with how his life was, and Brent wanted to change that.
“You say that like you can just do it,” Brent said.
“You can. I’m not saying it’s easy, but I am saying it’s possible. And the more used you get to not thinking of things in terms of what you should have done, the easier it gets. We all make choices. When a choice is hard, you’ll always regret the one you didn’t make.”
“I could have sent Emily to live with our grandparents,” Brent said. “In Maine.”
“But you didn’t,” Riley said. “And I don’t think you really regret that, but it would have been okay if you made that decision. It took a lot out of you to take care of her.”
“I had you,” Brent said. “And I think that’s the part I regret. I forced you into thinking you had to help when you were still free to do whatever. I took months of your life away from you.”
That was why he’d never asked Riley to stay. It hadn’t seemed fair to drag him into that situation. No matter how much Brent loved Emily and he wouldn’t have changed deciding to look after her himself, he knew it had been too much. Definitely too much to ask someone who wasn’t really involved.
“I never once felt forced,” Riley said. “So if that’s been bothering you all these years… I’m sorry. If I made you feel like I didn’t want to be there for you, I can’t apologize enough. But I did want to be there. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you those were some of the happiest months of my life, but I will tell you that they were the most purposeful. I felt like I was doing something worthwhile. Preserving Brent Morrison for the world. The world deserves more people like you.”
“Accountants?” Brent raised an eyebrow.
“Good, kind men,” Riley said, giving Brent a look that told him they weren’t joking anymore. “I know you’re not going to believe this, but you’re everything that’s right with the world. I don’t hang out with you because I don’t have any other choice. I hang out with you because I’ve been out there and met hundreds of people and I keep coming back to the best of them.”
Brent swallowed. He had no idea what to say in response to that.
Well, except that he loved Riley, too.
That was what this felt like. An I love you.
Not the kind of one that Riley handed out easily, because he genuinely did love everyone and everything. A bigger, heavier one. More than just acknowledgment that Brent was important to him.
And that was terrifying.
Terrifying because Riley had told him to follow his heart, and his heart just kept pulling him back toward Riley.
How was he even supposed to start with that?
“Thank you,” Brent said eventually, deciding that was the safest option.
He was too raw and vulnerable to respond to that tonight. Right now, he wanted to curl up next to Riley and never leave his side again, beg him to stay forever, tell him that what he really wanted, now that his life was his own again, was to spend it with the person he loved most in the world.
The person who’d always been there for him.
The person he’d never once told to stay, because he’d been so afraid of losing him if he held on too tight.
“You don’t need to thank me for that,” Riley said. “My choice of you as my best friend is entirely selfish. I’m constantly amazed that you put up with me.”
“Hey, you’ve got a lot of great qualities,” Brent responded. “None I can think of right now, but…”
Riley smacked his arm gently, but he laughed at the same time. “Here I am pouring my heart out to you and you’re laughing at me. I’ve changed my mind. I want a friendship divorce.”
“No you don’t,” Brent said, confident for once that Riley really did want to be here.
He didn’t know what that meant, not entirely, but he knew that it was true.
“No, I don’t,” Riley agreed. “You’re stuck with me.”
“I’m okay with that.” Brent grabbed another slice of pizza, knowing he needed to get in fast before Riley finished it all off. He seemed to have a completely bottomless stomach.
Not only was he okay with being stuck with Riley, he wanted to be stuck with him.
If following his heart was what he was meant to do, then he needed to say something.
Tomorrow, he promised himself. Tomorrow after lunch, he’d sit Riley down, hand him a beer, and tell him how he really felt. Riley could either take it or leave it, but Brent had to let him know.
If he didn’t, he’d regret it for the rest of his life, and there was no making amends for that.