Finding North (5 page)

“Tell me you’re still open,” Angela—a woman we shared an English class with in high school—slurs, practically tripping over her feet as she climbs the porch stairs.

“Sorry ladies, already called last drinks.”

“You can’t deny us liquorrr. It’s our God-given right as women … and I’m a bride, damn it.” The shoeless wench stamps her foot, her voice louder as she shoves Angela out of the way and glowers at me. She cocks her pointer and thumb and mimics holding me up with a dainty little finger gun. “Give us all your booooze.”

“Shh, he won’t give you anything if you point that gun at him,” Angela says, attempting to hide the finger from view.

Barefoot and Bogan turns to her friend. “Goddamn, this guy is hot.”

“Sooo hot,” Angela agrees.

Yeah, tell me about it
. I look at North, leaning against the open door. None of them are paying him any attention.
Well this just got more awkward
.

“Seeeriously why are all the gay ones this goddamn sexy? How are we s’posed to complete with that?”

“Oh shut your whore face. You don’t have to compete with anything anymore now that you’re marrying Nick,” Angela says, and they both let out dreamy little sighs.
I’ve never wanted to vomit more in my whole goddamn life.

“Sorry ladies.” I chuckle, because bimbos are kind of entertaining when they’re shitfaced. “Can’t sell liquor after midnight.”

“Please? It’s Julie’s hen’s night.” Samantha—a busty brunette that has more than half the men in town eating out of the palm of her hand—whines. She bats her fake lashes and folds her arms with a pout, deliberately pushing up her tits. I want to tell her the effort is wasted on me, but she likely already knows. Julie leans against the railing and looks as though she might take a tumble backwards onto the lawn. None of these women need any more booze.

“And yet we’re fresh outta ‘I give a fuck’ tonight.” I begin to close the door, forcing North to shuffle back out of the doorway and onto the pub’s wide porch with the drunk women. He glares at me, like he expected to stay until we talked shit through. No way was I about to spend any more time alone with him.

He takes another step back, as though my rejection dealt him a physical blow, and bumps into Victoria, the designated driver—at least I hope that’s what she is, because she’s the one holding the keys.

Victoria dated North for all of two seconds in high school, and he left her pining for him when he decided the grass was greener elsewhere. From the time he was old enough to flash that perfect smile, this arsehole left a whole fucking village worth of broken hearts in his wake, and yet no one ever seemed to blame him for it.

No one but me, that is
.

“North?” Victoria asks, touching his shoulder. He turns towards her.

“Hey, Vi. It’s been a long time.” He gives an anxious smile and runs his hand over the back of his neck. I glance down at the rigid cock tenting his pants and when I roll my eyes up his hard body, North’s gaze is firmly fixed on mine. Victoria’s is, too. Her eyes dart from him to me and back again. North squirms like he’s on trial for murder and attempts to cover his cock by clasping his hands in front of him.

“Did we interrupt something?” Victoria says, and her accusatory tone draws the drunk bitches like moths to a flame. They abandon their ridiculous plan to break into my bottle shop for more booze and turn their attention to the three of us.

“What? N … no,” North says, and for the first time ever I see him falter over his words. The mask slips, and somehow he looks both panicked and relieved.

“OMG! Is that a huge erection in your pants?” Julie—the shoeless wonder—shouts as she lunges forward, making grabby motions towards North’s dick while her friends attempt to hold her back.

“Julie, you can’t just reach out and grab a man’s penis,” Samantha purrs, grinning at North as if he were prey. “You have to have introductions first.”

“But … but … I wanna touch it.” Julie pouts.

I’m sure her fiancé would be thrilled
.

“Well, most women buy me a drink first,” North says playing this whole thing off with that ridiculous smile the way only he can.

“Let me go,” Julie shouts. “He said I can touch it.”

“No!” Victoria says.

“Looks like you found that hot piece of arse you were looking for, huh?” I say to North, while the women jump all over their friend in an attempt to restrain her. The four of them go down in a heap, cackling at the top of their voices. “It’s been fun, but if you arseholes could kindly get off my property and try not to rob me, it’d be very much appreciated.” I slam the door and lock it behind me.

Victoria says, “Wow he’s … still really unpleasant.”

“Nah, he’s okay once you get to know him,” North says. I don’t stay to hear more of their conversation, and a short time later Victoria’s SUV revs out of the gravel parking lot.

When I open the door to my apartment, I shuck off my boots and head straight for the shower. I run the water and slip under the hot stream, and press my fingertips to my lips, remembering North’s mouth on mine. Unsurprisingly, I’m still hard. I stroke my cock and silently admonish myself for thinking about him at all. Instead, I force myself to think of Josh, a regular
Grindr
hook up. He’s a defence attorney from Newcastle, and about the closest thing I have to a friend. Josh is blond like North, blue-eyed too, and he keeps himself in shape. He fucks like a goddamn champion, and he’s one of the few people I can sit and have a beer with before and after sex and not want to gnaw off my own arm in order to escape.

He’s a decent guy, but he’s not North. He doesn’t send a swarm of kamikaze butterflies hurtling around my insides, he doesn’t make my balls tighten with longing, and he doesn’t make my heart beat faster. Only North does that, and I loathe him for it.

Naturally then, North is the only man I think about when I jack off. I slide my soapy hand up and down the length of my cock, and I’m both proud and immensely fucking pissed off at myself for pushing him away tonight.

What if I hadn’t said no?

I lean against the shower wall and fist my dick with a brutal force, as if I could punish myself for that lapse in judgement.

A leopard doesn’t change its spots, Will. Get a fucking grip.

The bitter pang of loneliness smacks into me as my come spills over and runs down the drain, along with my regrets.

N
orth hands me the homemade bong, consisting of a ratty old plastic water bottle I found in the recycling and a length of garden hose. I cut it out the back yesterday to replace the one North melted last time he was high as a fucking kite and got a little Zippo happy.

We’re at his house. The same little rundown shack in the same room North has slept in since he was a kid. It’s no bigger than a storage closet, but we’ve never worried about having separate beds. Sometimes when he’s at my house he takes the floor, or I do, or neither of us do—it doesn’t really matter. I would have slept on the couch tonight because his dad’s comments about the two of us being poofters always hit home a little too hard, but he’s passed out drunk and there’s no way of moving him. So instead, I quietly revel in the fact that I’ll get to sleep in the same room as my best friend. He’ll fall asleep, and I’ll lie beside him listening to his soft snore and edging as close as possible, as carefully as possible, without making it seem gay.

He tosses me the Zippo and I cover the bong’s mouthpiece with my lips as I light it up. Smoke burns my lungs as I hold my breath, and my chest battles for air, and when I breathe out I glance up and notice North staring at me. Not just looking like he’s waiting for his turn, but really staring at me.

“What?” I say, blowing out the remainder of the sweet smoke from my lungs. I cough a little from the sharp burn of it. “Do I have something on my face?”

North continues to stare. “You know you’re like a really pretty human being.”

I laugh. “What the fuck? Are you high?”

“Yeah, but I’m serious. If I was a chick, I’d totally fucking bone you, man.” He looks at the floor in confusion.

Is he fucking with me right now?

I’d never had the courage to tell North how I felt, I’d always figured that he knew. I was terrified of losing him. I still am.

“Hey, earth to space cadet,” North says, slamming me back to reality.

Realising that I’m doing a pretty good impersonation of a slack-jawed bogan, I point out the obvious. “You know chicks can’t bone anyone, right?”

“Well, if I was a chick I’d find a way to bone you.”

You don’t have to be a chick
.

God, I wish I could just say it. I wish I could get it out there and not have to keep it a secret anymore. My dick twitches, and I glance down at the worn carpet because I’m afraid if I hold his gaze too long, he’ll know. He’ll read it on my face, and then I’ll be screwed. And that’s exactly the reason I haven’t told him, because I’m afraid it will ruin everything we are.

That’s my greatest fear. I don’t care that everyone will find out, and I wasn’t really afraid that my dad might disown me once he learned the truth. But losing my best friend? That would kill me.

“Can we change the subject?” I say.

As usual, North ignores me. “Do you ever wonder what it’s like?”

“What?”

“Fucking a dude?”

My heart stops. He knows.
Oh fuck, he knows
. And this is the part where he calls me a lying homo and tells me that he never wants to see me again. “No. Now hand over the fucking bong, dumbarse. You’re hogging it.”

North doesn’t move, but his eyes burn holes in me. “You never thought about it once?”

“I don’t know.” I shrug and lean over, snatching the bong from him. I hastily pack another cone, but my fingers tremble and I wind up dropping half of the pot in my lap. Hopefully he’s too high to tell. The weed is already fucking with my head, so I don’t even want another hit, but I don’t know what else to do.

“How come you never fucked Jessica?”

“What?” I snap, still unable to look at him.

“You dated her for six months,” North says. “Fine piece of arse like that and you never stuck it to her?”

“I don’t know, man.” My voice is all high and whiney, and my mouth is too dry. I busy myself with filling the cone properly and I light it, sucking back big gulps of smoke into my lungs and slowly blowing it out. “She was religious.”

“Yeah, I remember. She cried God’s name every time I ate her out,” he says, and this time I do look at him.

“What?”

“I had sex with her.” North says, and it hurts like a motherfucker, because it’s not just that he broke the bro code and slept with Jess, it’s the fact that he’s testing me. My best friend has always been competitive, especially when it came to women, and I’ve always played along because it was a good cover.

In eighteen years, I’ve had three girlfriends, and all but Jess were covers. I thought if anyone could turn me hetero, it would be her. I couldn’t take her virginity though, because that would have been screwed up, and she deserved better than some arsehole on the down-low sticking it to her, and imagining someone else while he did it. Someone with a cock.

“I fucked your ex-girlfriend, Will,” North says, his face sombre now.

“What the fuck, man?” I demand. My gut twists with rage, not just for me, but for Jess. Or maybe at her, since I now have the mental image of the two of them together and it burns the inside of my mind and rips my heart in two. North is the epitome of everything I tried to shelter her from. She deserves better than both of us, but I guess he’d never lied to her. At least her first time had been with someone who wasn’t wishing she was someone else.