Dom? It’s Tyson. Let’s be friends again!
*click*
Or:
Hello?
Hiya, Dominic! It’s me, Tyson! Long time no talk? How you been, best friend (and guy I used
to be in love with then cut out of my life when you married someone else BEHIND MY FUCKING BACK)?
I’m sorry, I don’t remember any Tyson.
*click*
Or:
Hello?
Hi, Dom. It’s Tyson. I’m so sorry for being really shitty to you.
Hi, Tyson! Glad you called! Stacey and I were just on our way to church to renew our vows because we’re so madly in love! Would you like to join us? You could be my best man! Don’t worry about your heart. I’ve already stomped all over it. But you’ve had four years to get over it, which, as a normal human being, you clearly should have, because that’s how things work in the real world.
It’s been so long since I’ve heard his voice that I can’t bring myself to do it. I’m pretty sure if I called him, all I’d be able to do is squeak and grunt and he’d think a gorilla was having sex with a mouse on the other end.
The alternative is to see him face-to-face, and since that is completely out of the question, I’m stuck where I started.
“It can’t possibly be that hard,” Kori tells me as we drive toward town in Otter’s Jeep. She has a scarf around her head, large sunglasses covering her face. She looks awesomely glamorous. That is until she speaks. “You’re being such a fucking douche about this whole thing.”
“Why don’t you tell me how you really feel,” I grumble. “Seriously. Hold nothing back.”
“Someone has to,” she retorts. “You obviously have no common sense. Otherwise, this whole thing would have been resolved long ago. Men are so idiotic sometimes. I swear, you’d rather sit in a pile of angst than actually have a single conversation that could go a long way to resolving years of shit that you yourself were the cause of.”
“I was the cause?” I say, outraged, even though I have no real right to be. “I didn’t marry a woman!”
“Which affected you how?”
“It was… he should have… it was for….” Goddammit.
“Exactly. Should he have told you before the wedding invites went out? Probably. But you never gave him a chance to explain because you had this foolish romantic notion in your head about how this would all play out. He’d wait for you, and when you got done doing whatever the fuck you were going to do, he’d be there with open arms and you guys would be together forever.”
“Well, that certainly reduced my entire life to a few sentences of what-the-fuck.”
The scarf flutters around her face. “He’s straight, darling. You’re gay. He’s your best friend. Or at least he was. You were like brothers. He did love you, but not in the way that you would have wanted.”
“But Bear didn’t come out until—”
“I love Bear,” she interrupts, “to death. Don’t get me wrong. But it doesn’t surprise me he had no idea about how he was gay until it was blaring right in front of him. He’s not always the quickest on the uptake. Wait. Is he gay? Bi? What?”
I roll my eyes. “I don’t think anyone really knows. It doesn’t matter anyway. He’s got Otter and that’s all he’ll need. It’s sickening. Really.”
Kori grins at me. “Bullshit. You love it.”
“Yeah.” Because I do.
“But you’re not just gay for someone,” Kori says. “That’s not really how the real world works. Life isn’t some romance novel, no matter how hard we might wish it so.”
I sigh. “It’d sure make things easier, though.”