Finding North Read online

  “Besides, I happen to be pretty fucking awesome. Why would I want to be anyone else?” I down the rest of my drink and snatch up the bottle, pouring another. “You can’t control what people think of you, North. You don’t get a say in what makes them tick, in what they’re okay with and what they aren’t. That’s beyond even your capabilities. The thing you do have a say in is whether you’re okay with you.”

  “And if I’m not?” he asks.

  “If you’re not, then fix it.” My eyes lock with his, daring him to break through those walls he puts in place because of everybody else’s expectations. He knows exactly what I mean by that, but it doesn’t matter. Despite all his bravado, North is afraid, and he’ll never change. He cares too much what people think.

  Before he can pour another drink, I snatch up our glasses and walk over to the sink to rinse them.

  “I wasn’t finished.”

  “Oh, you’re finished here; trust me on that.”

  “Right.” He grabs the bottle off the bar and shakes it at me. “Well, thanks for the drink.”

  “It’s what I’m here for.”

  North slides off his stool and grabs his jacket from the empty seat beside him. I follow him to the door, turning off a couple of switches along the way, shutting off the overheads and leaving only the lights on in the stairwell and the neon signs above the bar.

  He turns abruptly, forcing me to run into him. I’m just about to make some snarky comment about him being drunker than I thought when he sets the bottle down on a nearby table and bunches his fist in my shirt. Our eyes lock. A beat passes. One moment ekes out into an eternity as we breathe one another’s breath, and then it snaps like a rubber band when North brings his lips down on mine. His tongue pushes into my mouth. Sharp molasses rolls over my tastebuds and rough hands slide into my hair to hold me in place.

  As if I would try to pull away.

  As if I could ever say no to him.

  I kiss him back, deeper, angrier, lashing my tongue against his as if it could absolve him of my irritation, of my greed.

  I should stop, but I won’t.

  North shifts his body against mine, grinding his hard-on against me. I want to shove him to his knees and push my cock so far down his throat that he chokes on it. I want to hurt him. I want to punch his goddamn face in for making me feel this way, but when his hand slides from my hair down my torso to cup my dick, I remember everything. I remember who we used to be, and who we are now, and I let out a disgruntled moan and push away.

  “Go home, North.” I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “What are you doing?”

  I rake my hands through my hair and glower at him. “Protecting myself.”

  “From me?” he asks, bewildered.

  “Yes, from you,” I say, furious with myself, and angrier still that he doesn’t know why I’d need to protect my heart from him. “Go home to your safe little hetero world. This never happened.”

  His brows shoot skyward in surprise. “Are you blowing me off?”

  “If I were blowing anything, you’d know about it,” I say and lean around him, opening the door.

  Four women get out of a silver SUV and run across the parking lot towards us—or they try to run. Most just stumble around on their stripper heels, and one girl has no shoes on at all. North freezes when he realises that we aren’t alone. I’m sure they didn’t see anything, but his reaction is damning. I give him a weary look that pretty much says I have his number, and he glances down at his feet.

  “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 do
wn 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.

  North 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.

  “I know.” He sighs. “I’m an arsehole.”

  “You think?”

  He leans back on the bed, arms folded behind his head, ankles crossed one over the other. He’s the picture of ease, but his gaze suggests everything but. North is like a dog with a bone, and this time I’m the one caught between his razor-sharp teeth. “I know you didn’t sleep with her, because the second you broke it off she came to me. Why do you think she did that?”

  “Because she knew you were a manwhore with no morals?”

  “Well, I am that,” he says, reaching for the bong again. I willingly hand it over because I’ve had two cones already, and a couple of beers that we stole once North’s dad had passe
d out, and I am tanked. I’m also not comfortable with North’s line of questioning, so I stand and stumble around on the spot a bit, trying to get my stupid fucking legs to obey.

  North looks up through his lashes. One hand is wrapped around the bong and the other holds the lighter, poised and ready to set fire to that little tuft of weed and drug himself into even more of a stupor. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going home,” I snap.

  “You’re half-baked.”

  “I’m fucking done, actually,” I say grinding my teeth.

  Images of North and Jess play on a loop and in my mind I see it all—the way he would have taken her with rough hands and made her pale flesh come alive, his head buried between her legs, her delicate fingers gripping blond curls that I’ve longed to grasp for too many years to count; him moving in and out of her, slowly at first, and then once she’d moved past the pain, after they’d been together a handful of times, he’d have fucked the shit out of that girl and relished every moan that ripped from her mouth.

  I know all of this because he told me. He always told me about his conquests. He never supplied names, and I never asked for them, and though it hurt to imagine him doing those things with any woman, there was never a face to go with those images. It was never my ex-girlfriend in the picture.

  Did they talk about me afterward? Did he come inside her? Did he feel any remorse at all? Frustration, jealousy and rage twist in my gut as if he’d just plunged a knife right through me to the other side, and I yell. Or at least I make some sort of sound halfway between yelling and mumbling my disapproval. “You know, you’re a fucking shitty friend.”

  “You didn’t fuck them, Will,” North says quietly, and for a brief second I think I see a hint of that remorse I want him to feel so badly, but it’s gone as quickly as it came. “Maddi and Kate were crazy bitches, so I don’t blame you for cutting your losses, but Jess?” He shakes his head in disbelief and sets down the bong. “Jess was begging you to fuck her, and you broke up with her instead.”

  “Good thing too, because clearly she wasn’t that interested in me,” I say through my teeth.