for a straight woman.”
Fredric ran his tongue over his bottom lip. “So,” he said, then stopped because his voice was rough. “How did you get here?”
“Neither of us were willing to give up,” he said, like it was a simple as that. “We had a second date that was slightly better than the first. Then we decided to be friends, but we couldn’t stay away from each other. Eventually we just said fuck it. I took her to a play, then we got wasted and spilled everything we were afraid of, then we fucked for the first time in the backseat of her car. After that, we just decided we were better together than we were apart.”
Fredric let out a small laugh, his heart glowing with both happiness for them and hope for himself because maybe…if he wasn’t wrong that Ilan wanted him too…maybe part of that story could be his. “I’m not giving up,” he said. “I’m just trying to give him time.”
“I know.” Fredric started a little when Teddy’s hand fell on his shoulder, but he didn’t pull away. “I didn’t think you were, but you’ve been looking sadder lately, and I just needed you to know that the hard work is worth it. And so is believing in yourself.”
So now he stood in front of a raw chicken with a brine bath waiting and twenty-four hours to figure out how to make Ilan understand that this was real. “This is going to be a disaster,” he muttered, and Agatha let out a small sigh.
“It’s just chicken. Even I can make chicken.”
Fredric shook his head with a grin. “No. I mean tomorrow night when he gets here, and I tell him that Corinne was wrong. There’s no other person—there’s only him. That I want him to give me a chance, even if it risks the only family he’s got left.” He distracted himself by reaching for the little jar of dried herbs, and he pressed his pen against the circle tab, his heart clenching when Ilan’s voice drifted out from the speaker letting him know it was oregano.
“Do you think Julian would do that?” Agatha asked as Fredric began to crush the herbs into a little pile. “Would he really abandon his best friend just because he’s dating you?”
“I want to think he wouldn’t.” Fredric scooped up the pile of dried leaves and felt for the bowl, then dumped them into the brine. “My son has always been more forgiving than most. Especially with Ilan.”
“Are you worried he’ll hate you, then?”
And well, he couldn’t say that wasn’t part of it. “I’ve given him a lot of reasons to hate me over the years,” Fredric admitted. He went quiet as he read the next line on the page, then reached for the bowl of oranges and grapefruit and the knife. He felt for the center, then carefully sliced it in half. “I like to think that falling in love with his best friend isn’t an unforgivable sin—but it might just be the last one he’ll forgive.”
“But you’re going to risk it,” she pointed out, and yet again, he felt like a bastard of the worst kind, because yes, he was. His heart wouldn’t let him rest until he tried, and if he walked away with it broken, well, he’d survive. Just like he had with everything else. “Have you thought about talking to Julian first?”
He hadn’t, mostly because that was the one fear he was letting dictate his actions. Better to ask forgiveness than permission—or something like that. He hated that saying, but right now, he was happy to embrace it, just to buy himself a little more time.
“I won’t keep him in the dark forever,” was the only thing he was willing to offer at the moment.
Agatha left not long after he got the chicken into the brine and the sides all prepped for the next evening. Bas was snoring in his bed beside the sofa, the TV was off, and Fredric was once again left to his own thoughts. The last two weeks had been an endless void of his own company, punctuated by his neighbors from time to time, but mostly he was forced to sit and face himself.
It felt a little profound, in a way, to realize he hadn’t done much of that after his divorce. He’d been consumed with separating his life from Jacqueline’s, with making sure his children would be alright, with finding stability and a home once he made the decision to