Time Out (Dear Lonely Guy #2) - Alison Hendricks

Prologue

Keith

Today was the day. I was finally going to tell my best friend I was head over heels in love with him.

It'd been a long time coming. Brendan and I had been close since the second grade, when he stuck gum in the hair of some little jackass who was bullying me for the stutter I had back then. I'd followed him around like a little lost puppy after that and, to my surprise, Brendan didn't find me obnoxious the way most people did. He liked hanging out with me, and we'd been inseparable ever since.

Things were about to change though. It was finals week, and that meant there was only one summer left before Brendan and I started separate lives. He was on track to be some crazy successful doctor, and I was just... drifting. As aimless as ever, with no clue what I wanted to do with my life.

Even though we were going to be in the same city -- Brendan was going to the University of Florida and I was enrolled for fall semester at Santa Fe Community College -- we were going to be in completely separate worlds. He'd live in the dorms while I kept living with my parents. I'd probably get a part time job and eventually move out, while Brendan would buckle down and study his ass off.

He'd make new friends. More mature friends. People who were actually doing things with their lives. He'd probably meet a nice girl, too. Somebody kind and quiet who his father approved of. Maybe somebody Brendan actually wanted.

I'd never been able to confirm if he was into guys or not. We'd never done anything together; I just got the feeling sometimes that he was checking me out, and that his feelings for me weren't the usual bro vibes.

I could've been projecting. Just desperately hoping he wanted me the way I wanted him. Tonight was the night to find out, though.

We were laying in the bed of his rusted-out pickup truck. He'd bought the thing from this shady guy who had a good fifty cars on his property, all just sitting around and collecting dust. He'd only paid $1,000 for it, and it definitely showed. The pedals stuck when it was hot, the gear shift needed a forceful shove back and forth to get it moving, the AC didn't work for shit, and the whole interior smelled like feet, despite Brendan having cleaned it out top to bottom.

But it was his, and it'd become ours. We went out like this a lot, just to talk and think. Sometimes to share a couple beers where nobody could see us. Once to roll some joints and decide neither of us were cut out to be potheads, since it'd made us both paranoid as fuck.

Most of the time we just... laid out in the bed and stared up at the sky, talking through everything we couldn't say to anyone else. It was how I'd first come out, a couple years back. I'd talked through it with Brendan, giving voice to all of my fears. We'd figured it out together, just like we always did.

"Still can't believe it's over," I heard him say, and I turned my head to look at him.

He'd always been handsome, but over the last four years of our high school career, he'd started to bulk up, losing his baby fat and gaining muscle. He also had patchy little tufts of hair on his chin now that he hated, but I thought were adorable. Every time I saw them, I wanted to run my fingers over them; press my lips to his jaw and feel the tickle of them under my nose.

"I can. I don't know what school you went to, but this last year has dragged ass," I grumbled. "So much pointless bullshit."

"Yeah. I don't know. To me, it just feels like August was a month ago. To think about being somewhere else in a few months now, taking college classes... it's a lot."

"Yeah," I answered, my hand resting on my stomach as I turned my head again to look up at the stars.

I didn't think it would be a lot for me. The classes I'd signed up for were the same things I'd been learning in high school. Sure, it was college, and if I fucked up an exam or decided not to show up for a lecture, nobody was going to try and save my ass like they had here. Maybe because there weren't stakes to