Just like it was now.
I’d chosen a spot closer to the fire while we’d eaten dinner and begun sorting through my pack for the umpteenth time, though it hadn’t been necessary. I’d just been going through the motions so I wouldn’t keep checking to see what Bennett was up to. I’d seen Aiden approach him several times out of my peripheral vision, but every time he’d touched Bennett, I’d had to force myself to look the opposite direction so I wouldn’t be tempted to get up and go knock the man on his ass. I mean, for Christ’s sake, we were on a fucking wilderness expedition, not in some nightclub. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the assholes snuck off into the darkness to have a go at each other.
The thought of Aiden bending Bennett over some rock just like he’d talked about doing the day before, along with the words he’d thrown in my face tonight, had my anger building all over again.
I have a part of him you never did.
I’d figured out I was gay the summer just before things had fallen apart with Bennett. I hadn’t understood at first why my heart had suddenly started racing every time I saw my friend, or why my palms would get so sweaty and it would be hard to breathe whenever he touched me. Not to mention the constant boners I’d started to experience around him. It had gotten so bad near the end that I’d been afraid to go swimming with him in the pool in case he could spot my predicament in the clear water. Which meant we’d had to limit our swimming to the small pond on his parents’ property, and since his father would yell at us every time we’d done it, we’d resorted to only swimming in there at night after everyone had gone to bed.
Once I’d realized that what I was feeling for Bennett went beyond the bounds of friendship— and this only after I’d rubbed one out in the darkened woods as I’d walked back to my house after a particularly handsy swimming session— I’d worried about what it would mean for our friendship. I’d never gotten any kind of hint that Bennett was experiencing the same feelings I was, and he’d often talked about girls in his class he’d thought were cute. So, I’d done my best just to pretend that the feelings didn’t exist. By the time I’d been close to finding the courage to tell Bennett the truth, he’d started to pull away from me, and I’d been afraid that telling him I was gay would widen that divide between us even further.
After the chance meeting at the playground when we were five, we’d become inseparable. Despite the fact that Bennett came from Greenwich’s upper crust and my parents had been firmly rooted in the middle class, Bennett had always been a pushy little shit. He’d pestered his parents to keep taking him back to that particular park every day until they’d finally given in. The park had been within walking distance of my house, but for Bennett’s family, it had been a good ten-minute drive. The only reason he’d even been at that playground that first day had been because he’d made his nanny stop there on the way home from a doctor’s appointment.
All because he’d spied me through the car window sitting on that swing and had decided I looked like I needed a friend.
I smiled to myself at the memory and involuntarily glanced up to search Bennett out. Electricity fired through me as I saw him watching me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d somehow known I was thinking about him. He was still telling the kids the horror story he’d loved scaring me with when we were kids about the boy on the antique roller coaster.
“CRACK!” Bennett boomed, and the kids all jumped where they sat around the fire.
Several of them cursed under their breaths and one of them blurted, “Seriously, B? Shit!”
Bennett just started laughing the way he always did when he got to the part about the boy finding the skeleton in the coaster right as the coaster begins to break apart.
“Then the skeleton grabbed the boy to keep him safe, but when the boy looked down, it was nothing but twigs wrapped around his arm,” he continued. The firelight glinted off his amused eyes, and I couldn’t hold back a smile.
He’d fucking loved telling me that story because he’d known it scared the shit out of me every single time.
The first time he’d told it to me had been when we’d convinced our fathers to let us sleep under the stars down by the pond on the Crawford’s estate. We’d rolled out our sleeping bags next to each other and had started a little fire after making a fire ring with some rocks.