Riding With Brighton(19)
“That’s such bullshit,” he says, his face turning intense, borderline angry. “I mean, come on, man. I just gave you a hella long list of all the reasons I think you’re cool. And you haven’t even opened up to me. If you did that, all it would do is make me like you more. ‘Inferior.’ That’s such a crap excuse.” He’s propped himself up on his elbow now, and he’s practically raging at me.
I can literally feel my body temperature rising. I want to yell back at him; I want to get all this shit out of me. I want to jump on him and take all my pent-up aggression out with him. I want to grab his hair and kiss the shit out of him. And Jesus, now I’m hovering over him, sitting on my knees, my hands pulling on my hair. I close my eyes and try to rein myself in.
“Just fucking tell me,” he says, and the tone of his voice, a painful whisper, snakes through my body and releases the hold that I’m keeping on all of the secrets inside me.
“I don’t know who the hell I am,” I say, seething, my eyes still closed tight. “I wake up every morning in that fucking house and look in the mirror, and I don’t know who the hell I am. I’m scared shitless of the thoughts running through my head. I’m terrified of the feelings that erupt in me when I’m around you, and I don’t know how long I can keep denying the truth. How long I can keep lying to myself. But I know I have to. I know I’ll never get to be who I want to be. And the fucking truth….” I let out a long, exasperated breath and fall back on my hands, finally opening my eyes and looking at him. “Is that I think about you all the time.” I’m breathing hard like I just ran a marathon. My vision is blurry, but I can see that Brighton is sitting up now too. And he’s smiling at me.
“Yeah?” he asks.
I nod and let out another long breath, trying like hell not to pass out. “Yeah.”
“That’s cool. I mean, I’m flattered.”
“Shit,” I mutter to myself, running my hands over my face before collapsing back on the ground. It’s like everything inside me just got ripped out of my body with those words.
The longer I lie here, though, the more the panic and fear evaporate and something else is taking its place. Relief? Excitement? Happiness? I’m not sure. It’s something I’ve never felt before.
“You okay?” Brighton asks.
“Yeah. I think I am.” I can’t help but laugh.
“I thought you were gonna go all hulk on my ass for a minute there the way you were practically vibrating.”
“I can’t believe I just said that to you. It’s scary as hell.”
“You want to talk about it?”
Jesus, no. “I think that’s about as much as I can handle for now.”
“All right,” he says easily. “So, you want to get out of here?”
I turn my head to him, cracking one eye open because it’s about all the physical activity I can handle at the moment. He’s propped up on his elbows, his legs kicked out in front of him, every part of him looking totally content. No signs of worry or stress on his face, which seems wrong, seeing how he’s sitting so close to me. How can this hurricane of emotions I’m in the middle of not be sending at least a little gust his way? “Can I have a minute?”
“Yeah, take all the time you need.”
I close my eyes again and try to put myself back together. It’s like a bomb just went off inside me and tore everything apart. Which sounds gory, but maybe I can dig through the gooey mess and assemble something better than what I started with. Maybe this time I can get it right.
I lie there until my bones no longer feel weak and my head doesn’t feel like it’s completely covered in mud. When I open my eyes again, Brighton is gone, and I swear to God, a slimy vise clamps down on my heart. Shit. What the hell is that about? And when I see him, a little ways down the shore, skipping rocks into the water, I smile. Oh crap, am I giddy? For sure I’m nervous as hell.
What the hell do I do now that he knows how I feel about him? I mean in my fantasies—because, yes, I’ve had a ton of them—I confess how I feel about him, and he immediately takes control of the situation and practically rips my clothes off. I mean, he totally rips my clothes off. But, dang, that didn’t happen.
I search through the fog of my memories from the last however many minutes it’s been since I had my meltdown, trying to remember his exact reaction. He looked happy. But all he said was that it was cool and he was flattered. I don’t know why I assumed that just because I was into him he’d be into me too. Just because he’s gay doesn’t mean he’s gonna automatically want me. God, that’s a blow to the ego. And a total wrecking ball to my alternate fantasy world.
I stay where I am and just watch him, trying to process. But all I can do is watch him and lust over him.
He’s taken his sweatshirt off and the muscles of his back and arms are well defined under his threadbare T-shirt. His belted jeans hang low on his hips and pool into his combat boots. His sleek, black hair shines in the sun. The hand he’s skipping rocks with is covered in bracelets and rings. It never occurred to me that hands could be sexy, but Brighton’s big, jewelry-covered hands definitely are.
Here’s something that maybe should have been a warning bell, alerting me to the fact that I didn’t want to be like him as much as I just wanted him: I have every one of his baubles memorized. It looks like he’s kept every piece of string and leather that anyone’s ever given him and tied it around his wrist. The rings he wears are all silver: one is a bull head, the other has a huge turquoise stone in the middle and one is just a thick band. I could never get away with shit like that—wearing jewelry—but damn, is it sexy on him.