Twenty-Four: Not My Finest Moment (1/2)

Josh had hoped he would get to Mark's, bury his head in a pillow, and pretend to sleep. He'd hoped, but he'd known his best friend enough to know it wasn't going to happen.

Mark welcomed him with said pillow, clean sheets for the couch, and an interrogation. "What happened? From the beginning."

"What do you want me to say?" Josh was feeling belligerent. "I went out, met a guy, and all I could think of was that if we got it over with quickly I could go on with my to-do list. Didn't really make much sense to even begin, did it?"

Mark gestured for him to follow him into the bedroom and buried his head in the closet, voice muffled. "That's not the beginning. Why were you out in the first place? Weren't you going to have dinner, watch something, and pretend you and the boy toy aren't dating?"

"I don't have to pretend." He was still feeling on edge, but Mark wouldn't look kindly on him kicking the furniture. "Yes, I was going to stay home. Then he made dinner, and... Damn it, this sounds stupid when I say it out loud."

Mark's face reappeared. "Everything sounds stupid when you say it out loud. Emphasis on both the 'everything' and the 'you'. Here."

Josh caught the pair of lounge pants Mark threw his way mid-air and didn't bother rising to the bait.

"Do you need a t-shirt?"

"No, these are fine."

They made their way to the kitchen by unspoken agreement, where Josh decided to forego anything else and just attack Mark's crunchy peanut butter with a spoon. His best friend side-eyed him in disgust. "Aaaand that's all yours now. Take it home, make love to it, do whatever you'd like but leave it out of my fridge."

Josh narrowed his eyes at him. "Can a man not have some comfort food?"

"A man could," Mark replied, "but a barbarian just slobbered all over the jar, so now a man can't anymore."

"I don't slobber," Josh protested. He was already feeling better, though whether it was the peanut butter or the banter was anyone's guess.

"You? Never!" Mark put a dramatic hand on his forehead. "Perish the thought! Back in the real world, what's going to sound stupid said out loud?"

He really wasn't getting out of this conversation tonight, was he? "There was sauce on my face."

"Ah, so he kicked you out of your own house because you slobbered all over dinner? Smart man."

Josh snorted. "Yeah, you got me. That's exactly what happened. The End."

Mark crossed his arms and waited him out, knowing Josh would have no choice but to go on.

"There was sauce on my face and he wiped it and if I stayed there another minute I might have kissed him so I left," he mumbled in one breath.

Mark raised an eyebrow, a skill Josh found himself perpetually envious of. "And, instead of coming here, you figured you were in the perfect state of mind to hook up with a random guy?"

Josh ate another spoonful. "Not my finest moment."

"And you don't think this is getting ridiculous?"

"Of course this is getting ridiculous! But it's not like there's much I can do about it, is there?" Josh let out an exasperated breath, shoulders slumping on the exhale. "Will you keep your ear to the ground for me? I know I told you I was taking a break, but I could use a client to focus on right now."

"I may have one for you already. I told the family you weren't taking clients for now, but they asked me to keep them posted for when you started again, so I think you're in luck. I'll call them in the morning."

A weight came off his shoulders. "I could kiss you right now."

"Ugh. Slobbered all over dinner, slobbered all over my peanut butter and now you want to slobber all over my face? This is how you repay my hospitality?"

"I'm actually going to repay your hospitality," Josh said, sliding out of his jeans and into the pants Mark had lent him before grabbing the jar again, "by going to sleep."

"Right," Mark took the jar from his hand and moved it to the living room, placing it on the coffee table and sitting on the couch, an effective move to prevent Josh from making the bed. "Because I'm not going to make you finish this conversation or anything."

"Come on, Mark, what more do you want me to say?"

"Have the two of you ever talked about it? Has he explained his behavior? Apologized?"

"Explained?" Josh couldn't quite believe he was hearing this from his best friend. "Do you really think there's anything left to explain? I won't go near the subject with a ten-foot pole."

"You'd rather just be miserable and carry on with the long looks and the self-pitying sighs? This from the man who told me I couldn't see what was right in front of my nose?"

"I don't sigh," Josh said, and then betrayed himself by sighing. Fuck.

"Yeah, I can see that."

"Shut up. You weren't supposed to pull a 180 on me, not in this."

"I didn't mean to." Mark looked a little contrite, the two-faced bastard. "But there's not much else I can do when the man has the potential to be the best thing that ever happened to your emotionally constipated self."

Josh's ears had to be deceiving him. "I'm emotionally constipated now? And how did he get a promotion from 'deadweight' to 'best thing ever'?"

"I'm not kidding, Josh. You never let anyone in except your clients. I should know — it took me long enough to get a seat at the table. And it's always just been the two of us at that table, us and whoever's dying, so you can pour all your love onto them and know you can move on safely in a few months."

"I don't—"

"Oh, please. You think you have your life all neatly organized, that it's everything you want it to be, but you don't let yourself trust people who can disappoint you long-term. You're formatted not to care. Much as I'm honored to be the exception, you're not happy. You don't know how to be happy, so you settle for happy enough, but they're not the same."

"So what, I'd suddenly find happiness if I'd become his exclusive sex worker? Is that what you're saying?"

"That's not what bothers you," Mark said, as casual as a remark on the weather. "It never was."

Josh was so stunned he could only stare at Mark, mouth hanging slightly open. "I'm sorry?"

"Aren't you the one always saying sex workers sell what's theirs and there's nothing wrong with that? If he'd told you the bathroom sink needed repairing and how much would you charge you wouldn't have been offended — why was this different?"

Well. He wasn't wrong there. He let out another sigh — damn it, he did sigh a lot, didn't he? His voice betrayed how bone weary the whole subject left him. "I think there's an answer you already think you have, so can you stop with the twenty questions and just tell me what it is you think you know about the inner workings of my mind that I don't?"

"No, you need to get there yourself. If he'd offered to pay for sex on your first week there, what would your reaction have been?"

"'Thanks but no thanks'."

"Okay. So why wasn't it 'thanks but no thanks' when he suggested it later? Why was it 'you've gravely offended me and now we must be mortal enemies until the end of times' instead? Why did you go all Inigo Montoya over a proposition that shouldn't have offended you in the first place?"

"Because it felt like more, Mark! Do I really need to explain it to you? Because he's... All people see when they look at him is the aloof millionaire in the tailored suit, but I got to see Emery beneath it all, especially when he was around Emma. He's fiercely devoted, incredibly passionate, loyal to a fault. You look at him and you won't think he's handsome in the beginning — he's got one of those faces that everyone has, that blend into the background — but the more I knew him the less I saw him like that."

Josh couldn't escape the tightening in his chest when he remembered all there was to love about Emery, despite their past. "You should see his eyes when he's talking about something he loves, the way they light up and suddenly you're staring at a whole different person. All of that just ganged up on me, and then he—"

He ran both hands through his hair, pulling it as he usually did when he was frustrated. "And then he called me into his fucking office to tell me he'd back away if I weren't interested and then when I said I was, that's when he offered to pay! After I'd all but told him I'd gladly put out for free. Can't you see how twisted that is? How demeaning? There's a level of cruelty there that I never thought he'd be capable of."

Angry tears filled his vision and he blinked furiously, horrified that the memory held the same weight now as it had on the day he'd lived it. Mark didn't interrupt — he knew Josh well enough not to give him the slightest excuse to veer off course — leaving him with no option other than to continue.

"What did he expect, that he'd have me at his beck and call like the catering company he used for meals? Let's just ring this bell, write a check and Josh will come running, why not? Never mind that he knew how I felt. He had to have known — I basically telegraphed it to him. And then like a stupid fucking idiot it's more than three years later and I still love him. I can't stop, Mark. I don't know if it's a hidden masochistic tendency or what, but I can't stop."

The expression in Mark's eyes had skipped straight over empathy into pity, and Josh hated it.

"It's never been this way before. Never this strongly, never this long. I don't think I'd ever been in love before, if this is what love is. This loss of control, of power, to someone who's just having a laugh at my expense? I don't want it. I can't forgive him. I won't. Today, for a minute, I almost went for it, but I can't. I wouldn't much like me if I did."

He fiddled with the beads on his bracelet for comfort, hoping to calm his racing heart. "And it makes no sense," he continued, "it never made any sense, that he'd do that to me, but then maybe it's just that I don't know him as well as I think I do, because he said it, didn't he? He set me up so neatly, I never even saw it coming. And you think I could talk to him about it? 'Hey, Emery, why were you so keen on spending money on what I was gagging to give to you for free?' That's completely out of the question. He's a good man in everything else, and I want him to have a good life, but I can't... Not with me. Never again."