And never, under any circumstances, drink when your closest friend and occasional fuck buddy tells you it’s time to “talk.”
He wasn’t in good shape. A few years ago he’d been fun to be around, enjoying the hell out of his life and giving zero fucks about the future. Sex had been a game he never lost and things had been simple. Easy.
Easier. At least, he’d been better at accepting the things he couldn’t change and used to hiding his feelings behind his usual masks of I-don’t-give-a-shit and sex appeal. But he hadn’t been able to for a while now and people were starting to notice.
In reality, he was just another asshole drowning in a sea of envy. He should be thankful for all the recent good fortune his family was being showered with. God clearly loved their batch of Irish, because he was passing out happy endings left and right. Rory didn’t expect it to extend to him. Fathers didn’t like him as a general rule.
He snorted as the lights of the city streamed by. In a roundabout way, his father was the reason for his current predicament. If good old Sol the Elder hadn’t been such an overbearing asswipe at Owen and Jeremy’s wedding, this past year wouldn’t have gone to shit in a leaky bucket, and the conversation with Rig might never have happened.
“He won’t like me springing it on you like this, but I thought you deserved to hear it from me.”
That stung more than he’d been expecting it to. Rig despised lying, so his behavior was no surprise, but David used to tell Rory everything. He’d been his confidant. His best friend.
But that was all BC. Before Christmas. Back then, he and David spoke or texted multiple times a day—when they weren’t hanging out at a diner or sprawled on one or the other’s couch watching TV and shooting the shit. As Rory’s hetero life partner—the term Essie Mills always used to describe her brother’s relationship with him—David was one of the few people who knew that his apathy was an act. That Rory was, in reality, a hot mess. An emotional pretzel twisted up tight with deep-seated issues and feelings of inadequacy. Rig knew it too. He could never hide his emotions from either of them, and he’d never wanted to… BC.
He knew things were different now, he just hadn’t acknowledged how different until tonight. None of them were on the same page anymore. Hell, at this point he wasn’t sure they were reading the same book.
He did a hell of a lot more than read with Rig, didn’t he?
Every time Rory thought about it he felt an ache in his heart and a twinge in his traitorous dick. He adjusted the Benedick Arnold in question and swore. He really was a twisted fuck, hence the abstinence. His cock needed to be on lockdown. It didn’t have Rory’s best interests at heart.
Your dick can’t be trusted, your friends can’t be trusted... Maybe it’s because you say hence. Or it could be the fact that you think your wang is out to get you. Maybe it has to do with you enforcing that off-limits rule with Rig for all these years. You made David a challenge. You know how hard it is for Rig to resist a challenge.
“Shut. Up.”
“You’re tripping, aren’t you? Is it Meth? Molly? I knew you were going to hurl.” The boy twitched nervously behind the wheel and Rory wondered if he’d taken anything this evening. Especially when he continued babbling. “I have a bad gag reflex, I swear, someone chokes on a chip and I’m one breath away from spewing chunks. And then there’s the smell. It takes forever to get the smell out of my car. My dad once— Thank you, Great Spaghetti Monster. We’re here.”
“You should stop waiting around outside nightclubs with that weak stomach of yours, kid. Pick up fares at the library. Hurling hardly ever happens.” He chuckled at his alliteration while the man blushed, then he stared at the sprawling home in front of them. “Um, I hate to break it to you, but this isn’t my apartment. My apartment isn’t even the size of this driveway.”
Uber Fail.
Or maybe it was Life Fail.
Arguing about vomit in a strange driveway was not where he expected to end up in the grand scheme of things. A few years from thirty with a good job and a good education—he saved lives for a living damn it—and Rory still slept in the same cheap hole in the wall he’d rented on his eighteenth birthday. He didn’t even own a real coffee table. It was just a bunch of milk crates artistically pressed together.
With everyone in his family deciding to go the adult route recently—except for his oldest brother, who was having a midlife crisis—it occurred to him that he might have officially reached the age when sexy player with his own pad morphed into dead-end loser with no life.