29
RYAN
I lean against the doorframe of Rudy’s room, watching as his mother sits in a chair by his bed holding his hand while he sleeps.
“Dad knows.”
I turn to find Stefan standing there. He’s wearing a distressed pair of jeans that hug his thighs and crotch in a distracting way, which I really shouldn’t be surprised by at this point. A plain white t-shirt pulls across his pecs, squeezes his muscular shoulders, and stretches itself mercilessly to accommodate his big arms.
The words register late. “Knows what?”
“About us.” Stefan comes up to my side, leaning against the wall next to me.
I glance back into the room where Stefan’s mom, completely consumed in looking over Rudy, doesn’t appear privy to our words out here in the hall. I come around Stefan to get farther out of his mother’s earshot, then bring my voice down. “You … You actually told him?”
“Yep.”
“What’d you tell him, exactly?”
“All he needed to know.” Stefan meets my eyes. “What? Are you surprised?”
Surprised doesn’t cover it. “Uh, yeah. Considering what the last words we exchanged to each other were … and how terrified you seem to be at the prospect of others finding out about you.”
“I guess you can say I felt dared to do it.” He shoots me one of his lopsided smirks. “And you know how I am about dares.”
“I never dared you.” I face him completely and cross my arms. “Why did you tell him? You didn’t have to do that. Stefan, I need to get everything off my chest.”
“I needed to.”
“Listen.” Everything is moving too fast. I grab both of his wrists without thinking of who else in the hallway might see us. “I was wrong in pushing you. You ought to tell people in your own time—if you even tell them at all. It’s your right. What you call yourself. What you don’t call yourself. Whether we’re a thing or just two buddies who … have sex. That’s your right. And it’s wrong as fuck of me to go back on all of the things I said at Terry Park and make you feel like you have to choose.”
“Well, I chose anyway,” he states simply. “And I chose not to let you go a second time.”
My eyes flash. Strange. I’d thought the same thing. “Stefan …”
“I would rather call myself gay, or a homo, or a clown, or ‘just another dumb jock’ as you put it that day so long ago … I’ll call myself whatever the fuck you want me to, as long as I’m yours, and you’re mine.”
His words steal all the breath out of me. “I was going to say the opposite,” I confess. “Well, almost the opposite. I don’t want you to compromise who you are for my sake. This thing between us doesn’t need a name, and it doesn’t need to be presented to the world. Let us just be. Let us exist as we are—sometimes sexy, or frustrated, or at a total loss for words altogether.”
Stefan reaches up and holds me by the shoulders, my hands letting go of his wrists. Then, unexpectedly, he pulls me against him for a hug, wrapping his big arms around me and clinging to me tightly. With the side of my face pressed against his chest, I’m reminded of that first night when we … first crossed a boundary, so to speak.
I’ve never felt safer than when I’m trapped in his embrace. Maybe that’s what inspires me to suddenly get another thing off of my chest. “I feel like I could have prevented this somehow.”
“Hmm?” grunts Stefan, his voice deep and rumbling in his chest. “Prevented what?”
“Rudy came to my office last week. Sent there by his teacher. He was overloaded, I think. Failed a test. His teacher worried about him. I … I really should have said something to you.”
The guilt has been eating me alive ever since Dana poked her head in my office and dropped that Rudy’s-in-the-hospital bomb on me. I feel like I failed my job. My mind has been tumbling endlessly through a plethora of all the worst things that could’ve happened to Rudy—other things, horrible and tragic things. Stefan would never have forgiven me. I would never have forgiven myself.
“It’s okay,” Stefan assures me. “I’m glad Rudy had someone to confide in since I wasn’t there for him. And I’m especially glad it was you. I can’t think of a better person.”
“I can think of hundreds,” I mumble miserably.
He pulls me off of his body and forces my gaze up to meet his. “This isn’t your fault, Ryan.”
He smells so clean, too. I could hold him for days and just breathe him in—every single inhale, Stefan, Stefan, Stefan.
“My dad knows the pressure he put on him,” Stefan tells me. “I even talked to Rudy earlier when he was up. Rudy … isn’t even all that into baseball. Not now that he’s had a taste of high school. He wants to try other things. He’s … really, really into woodwork suddenly, in fact. He’s taking shop class. Maybe he’ll be into art next year. Or join the soccer team. Or the debate team. Maybe he’ll enroll in a college for video game design later on. Who knows?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I tease back, relieved to hear the lightness returned to Stefan’s words, relieved to see him looking at me the way he is right now, the fond way he used to.
He pulls me against him again, smirking. When our hips meet, he gives me a tiny hump. “I’m really into woodwork, myself.”
“Seems you got a bit of it in your pants,” I note.
“Some things never change.”
“I thought I lost you again, Stefan.”
His blue eyes harden, and his face straightens right up. Then he seems to reach mercilessly right into my gut when he replies, “You’re a fool if you thought that, Caulfield. Whether you want to be or not, you’re my bromo for life.”
My heart swells. Suddenly, anything in the world can happen right now, and I wouldn’t even flinch. With Stefan Baker in my life, I am invincible.