Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It(72)

Ohhh.

“But where I’m from…being gay wasn’t really a thing, as ridiculous as that might sound. I had no reference point.” He shrugs again. “I knew there was something different about me, though. I was never interested in girls the way my friends were. But I just figured I hadn’t met the right one yet. I didn’t start to put the pieces together until I moved out here for college. I hadn’t had any gay friends before, and then we met Alex, and I was so jealous of him.” Ironic, considering how jealous Alex has always been of Jonathan. “It took me a while to figure out where that was coming from, and once I did, I refused to acknowledge it. I just kept convincing myself I was waiting for the right girl.” He huffs a laugh under his breath. “So I kept dating girls, never really feeling anything. There was even a time when I convinced myself that you had to be the one.”

“Me?” The admission makes my stomach drop.

He nudges me with his knee. “Don’t act all surprised. You’re my best friend, we get along so well, you make me laugh…I could very easily spend the rest of my life with you.” He looks at me with a tenderness that makes me ache. “You’re my soulmate, Pheebs. The only problem is, I don’t want to have sex with you.”

I can’t help but laugh. The thing is, I think I understand exactly what he’s saying. I’ve had the exact same thoughts. When it comes down to it, I’ve never really been able to picture having sex with him, either.

“Oh god.” I bury my head in my hands. “My parents are gonna be crushed.”

“Ha! Well, they can get in line,” he jokes, but I can’t help but frown, knowing how difficult things will be with his family.

“One step at a time,” I tell him.

“Right,” he agrees. “I guess my next step would be telling our friends.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“Just you.”

I nod. “Well, I’ll be wherever you want me to be, whenever you want me to be there. If you want.”

“I want.”

I smile reassuringly. “So…” I gear up for the question I’ve been dying to ask. “When did everything start with Finn?”

The corner of his lip curves upward into a faint smile at the mention of Finn’s name. “Have you heard of the app Hanger?” he asks.

“I don’t think so?”

“It’s pretty new. Basically, it’s a way for guys in the closet to hook up without having to worry as much about your profile getting out. If you take even one screenshot, you get kicked off the app. And every message disappears after a minute.”

“Wow,” I marvel. “That’s intense.”

“I downloaded it about five months ago. I thought maybe, if I got it out of my system once, I could forget about the whole gay thing.” He scoffs at himself. “It had the opposite effect.”

“You learned just how gay you really are?”

“Exactly,” he responds before I have the chance to cringe at my word choice. “So I kept doing that for a few months. Finding guys on Hanger and sneaking out once you were asleep. I met up with Finn for the first time in July. He was the first guy I really had any interest in seeing more than once because, well, you know….”

“He’s perfect.”

Jonathan nods.

Finn is perfect. But the more I think about it, the more I realize he isn’t perfect for me. He’s never made my breath hitch in my throat the way it did when Matthew reached out to steady me. He’s never made my stomach turn to jelly the way Matthew did when I first saw him playing with his camera. He didn’t light my skin on fire when our arms brushed together. He’s never made me playlists that add up to the exact length of my flight.

Finn is my work friend. Matthew is more than that.

“Yeah, that,” Jonathan agrees with my sentiment, pulling me out of my own head. “We met up a few times over the summer, we had fun, but it was never anything serious. We were both pretty guarded, so we didn’t share many personal details. Not even what we did for work. Maybe if we had, then I could have been better prepared for what was coming. The second you said the name Finn, I had a sinking feeling in my gut. I just knew it was him. I knew it before you even sent that picture of the two of you on the playground.”

“Whoa.” I haven’t been more riveted by anything since the season six finale of Law & Order.

“So I ghosted him. I completely stopped answering his texts.”

My hand flies to my open mouth.

“I know, not my finest moment,” he continues. “I was living two lives, and I panicked at the thought of them intersecting. It ended up happening anyway, though, that night at Jeffery’s. I’d been dodging him for about a week, and then suddenly, there he was.”

I replay the whole scene in my head. Jonathan’s panic when I mentioned Finn was coming. His bizarre behavior that I had mistaken as jealousy. Finn’s stoicism when he saw Jonathan sitting in the booth.

“That was the first time I had seen Finn since I stopped responding to him. I didn’t know how to handle the situation. So once everyone left the bar, I went over to his apartment to explain myself. And that is the night when things really started. I told him all about you, how close we are. We started talking all about friends and family. He comes from a conservative family, too, you know. He’s been putting on the same show as me, dating girls and feeling nothing. It felt so good to talk to someone who got it.” He exhales, running a hand through his curls. “And so I kept going back.”