Chapter Thirteen

NO.

Seriously. That couldn’t be how he saw our relationship. Had I got it wrong all along?

“Did you want me to invite you to stay?” I asked tentatively.

“Of course,” he said as though it were the most logical thing. “Didn’t you want to be my friend? It always seems like I’m pushing myself into your sphere. You never try to be my friend. You never come to my parties or take me up on my offers for you to come to Melbourne. I said I’d pay the cost of the flight.”

I placed a cautious hand on his shoulder. He was finally opening up to me, and I didn’t want to blow it.

“The reason I never push myself into your life is because I felt like you were using me.”

“Using you?” he said with astonishment. “How?”

“For sex.”

A look of incredulity came over his face. “You think I was using you for sex? Ha.” He laughed, but it wasn’t a nice laugh. It was sardonic and mocking. “Shane, I could get sex from so many people without even trying. They just want to bed a footballer and brag about it to their mates. Did you really think I was desperate?”

When he put it like that, it was kind of insulting to him.

I felt shame, and I’m sure it showed on my face. “I thought you might’ve been using me for… you know… the gay sex? It’s not as easy to come by, and you’d have to trust the guy not to out you.”

This time there was more amusement in his laughter as he said, “Shane, we must move in completely different circles if you think gay sex is that hard to come by.”

That was so unfair. “Are you telling me that I’m gay and I struggle to find a date, yet you’re not gay and you can get it freely?”

To my amazement Ambrose dropped a kiss on the end of my nose, moved away, and left me sitting on the washing machine. “You struggle to get a date, Shane, because you always have your head in your book. You’re oblivious.”

I scrambled down off the machine and followed him through the kitchen. “I am not.” The empty box of Lean Cuisine was still on the counter. I’d microwaved a meal and forgotten about it. I pressed Reheat.

“Are too.”

“Am not, and besides, I don’t want to argue about this. I want to discuss this… thing.” I didn’t know what to call it. Dilemma? Misunderstanding? “You say you’re not using me for sex. Okay. I can see I was mistaken about that. You could probably find someone ten times better than me. So that begs the question, why me?”

Ambrose flopped back down on the couch and rubbed his face. “You’ve got to stop putting yourself down, Shane. All this ‘why me’ stuff is ridiculous. You’re a good-looking guy.”

“You’re deflecting again. Answer me one thing straight, Ambrose. Are you gay?”

This time he sighed and slumped back on the couch to stare at the ceiling. “You asked me this last year, and I’ve been thinking about it since then. I hadn’t really thought about it in terms of gay or bisexual or whatnot. I guess technically I’m bisexual.”

The microwave beeped behind me, and I rushed to pull it out. “Technically? That doesn’t sound like a rousing agreement.” I removed the tray from the microwave and pulled another from the freezer, which was full of the ready-made meals. They were on special a couple of weeks back, so I stocked up. “I thought working it out was rather easy. If you’re turned on by girls, then you’re straight. If you’re turned on by guys, then you’re gay. If both do it for you, then you’re bi.”

“It’s the flip side that has me confused, Shane.”

“What?” I pulled out a knife and fork from the drawer, placed the black plastic tray on a plate so it wouldn’t burn his lap, and carried the meal to Ambrose. “Here. Bon appétit. And good luck.”

“Good luck?” he asked as he took the meal from me.

“I read a study recently about bacteria in ready-made meals. So it’s like a kamikaze exercise each time I have one. Will I make it out alive?”

Ambrose laughed as he stuck his fork into the food and scooped up a mouthful. “The Shane version of walking on the wild side.” He put the food in his mouth and grimaced. “Shit. This tastes as bad as I remember.”

I ignored him and went back to the kitchen to get drinks. I pulled out some mineral water and two glasses. “Explain the flip side.”

“Huh?”

The microwave beeped to tell me my meal was ready as I placed the glasses on the coffee table between the couch and the TV. “You said the flip side of working out your orientation has you confused.”

“Oh. That.” He leaned forward and took his drink. I was silent as I gathered my meal, allowing him time. “Tell me,” he said abruptly. “When you’re walking down the street and you see a guy who’s hot, you think ‘I’d like to fuck that,’ don’t you?”

I sat beside him and considered the question. “I guess if he’s within the boundaries of what I consider hot, then yeah. I mean, just because I’m gay, I don’t find every guy I meet attractive. Some are too young, and some are too old to interest me. But if a handsome guy with lots of muscles walks by me, I wonder what he’d be like in bed. But that’s not to mean I don’t like guys who I didn’t think were hot when I first met them. I’ve been on dates where I thought the guy was nice enough, but it’s only after I got to know him that the attraction really started.”

“So you look at your poster of Alex Rance and feel attraction?”

I blushed. The poster that didn’t exist? I thought about the games I’d watched when he was playing. “Yeah. Attraction also works the other way. I could meet Rance and find out he’s an arsehole, and the attraction would wane really fast.”

Ambrose reached for his drink again. “Nah. Alex is a really nice guy, actually. You’d like him.”

“Okay.” I didn’t consider Rance’s niceness relevant to the conversation, but I did find it funny how Rance was on a first name basis with Ambrose. He really did move in a different world from me. “But even if Alex is a nice guy and super hot, there’s a difference between thinking the guy is attractive and actually going to bed with him. I mean, I can look at a woman and know that logically she’s attractive, but I wouldn’t ever go through with it. Is that what you’re getting at?”

He sighed and put his finished meal aside. Part of the leanness of Lean Cuisine was that there wasn’t a lot on the plate.

“No. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about that I don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“Get attraction. I don’t get the ‘Hi, you’re hot, let’s do it’ stuff. Most of the footballers do it, at least in the early years. Picking up is easy when you’re a football player. I mean I don’t get the wanting to jump each other’s bones.”

I was confused as all fuck. “You don’t get wanting sex? How can that be? We have sex.”

Ambrose stared at his hands. “But we’re friends.”

I stared at him. “Okay. I’m seriously not getting this. I mean, we haven’t really talked about sex with other people, because… well, actually I don’t know why. Perhaps because originally I thought you were straight and you wouldn’t want to hear about sex between two guys. And then, after we slept together, it was a little… indelicate to speak about other encounters. So, this is going to come out really weird but… do you actually have sex with other people? I mean, not just me?”

Ambrose kind of shrugged with one shoulder, and I thought I could see a flush on his face. “Yeah. Sometimes.”

“With Kendra?” I pressed. He nodded. “What about Jenna? Stacey? Tori?” He nodded as I named all the women he’d dated that I’d known about over the years. “Okay. Well, what about someone you haven’t been officially dating? Do you have sex with them?”

He turned those dark eyes on me. “You.” He looked at his hands again. “And another guy who’s one of the support workers at the club. He’s in the closet, but a really nice guy. He’s terrified of coming out. And, well, one of Dan’s friends. He set us up and we kind of dated for a while, but on the down-low.”

My eyebrows raised. “Dan knows you like guys as well as girls?”

He looked shocked. “Of course. He knows all about you.”

Daniel Egan knew about me?

Daniel Fucking Egan? Former Hawthorn player and one of Ambrose’s best friends, knew about Wallpaper Shane?

I realized I still had a mouthful of rice and nearly choked. I tried to swallow the ball without chewing it first and ended up choking for real. Ambrose thrust a glass of water under my nose, and I chugged it down thankfully.

“You okay?” he asked with a worried note in his voice. He took my plate from my lap and placed it on the coffee table.

I shook my head. I didn’t think I was ever going to be okay again.

“Do you need more water?”

I sat back on the lounge and tried to breathe through my nose, figuring the air would bypass my mouth and not draw any more rice grains into my lungs that way.

“You going to survive at least?” Ambrose leaned over me.

I tried to smile at his joke. “Maybe.” My voice was croaky and weak.

“I told you those Lean Cuisines aren’t any good for you.”

“Here I thought it was the salmonella that was going to do me in, and instead it was simply choking on the rice.”

Then the air changed between us. It was like our old relationship was back again, full of happiness and teasing. And with it came sexual awareness.