Page 21 of Twice Shy

Chapter Eight

“This is an interesting development,” Amy said the following evening, regarding Joel across her low coffee table with obvious interest.

He sighed. “I knew you’d say that.”

It had been a long day and Joel felt gritty and disgruntled after working on top of a poor night’s sleep. Yesterday’s PTA meeting had unsettled him. Not the meetingper se, but his encounter with Ollie. First, the expression on Ollie’s face when he’d spoken about the death of Rory’s parents. And then that excruciating hour when Joel had sat pressed up next to the guy, his whole body lighting up like the fourth of July, reverberating with a sexual tension he’d been surprised the whole table couldn’t feel.

A tension he’d neither felt nor wanted in years.

Panicked and overwhelmed, the whole episode had left him feeling off-balance and anxious and he’d phoned Amy this morning in hope of a last-minute appointment.

She smiled at him now, her calming non-judgmental smile. “And how does it feel, to be attracted to someone again?”

Electric. Terrifying. Intense. “Wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“You heard the part where I said he’s a parent at the school, right? And a guy? And practically a child.”

She cocked her head, frowning. “A child as in…?”

He waved his hand, embarrassed. “No. I mean— He said he’s ‘nearly twenty-five’.” He put heavy air-quotes around the words. “Which… What the hell does that mean? Twenty-four and three-quarters?”

Amy gave a soft laugh, unusual for her. “Well, excuse me for saying so, Joel, but from the perspective of over fifty there’s not a great difference between ‘nearly-twenty-five’ and ‘just-turned thirty-two’. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with being attracted to someone a few years younger than yourself.”

He shifted, uncomfortable with the memory of his body’s intense physical response to Ollie’s proximity last night. It had been so primal—nerves and synapses firing without consent, blood pounding, heart racing. Terrifying and arousing.

“So, let’s talk about his gender. You’ve had a serious relationship with a man before, in college...”

“Yes, Isaac. But that was—” He leaned forward in his chair, elbows braced on his knees, and looked out over Amy’s garden. More leaves had fallen since the day of the car wash. Their first winter storm had blown through that night, taking the last of the summer with it, and fall was here for real now. “It’s not that I have a problem with my sexuality. It’s just that… Look, I haven’t dated anyone since I came to New Milton. Nobody here knows I’m bi and I just…” He sighed. “I don’t see the point of coming out again, especially at school, just because I have an… inappropriate crush.” He looked up at her. “You see what I mean?”

“It sounds like you’re saying you don’t believe this attraction will lead anywhere, so why upset the applecart for nothing.”

“Right. Exactly.”

She hummed thoughtfully. “I guess my question is, why don’t you think it will lead anywhere?”

“Because—” Panic fluttered its wings behind his breastbone. “It just can’t. I don’t want it to.”

Into the silence, Amy said, “What do you think it means that you’re experiencing sexual attraction again, after over four years?”

That was something Joel hadn’t wanted to think about and he squirmed under her direct gaze, mind slipping away from answers he didn’t want to give. “Does it have to mean anything?”

“I think it’s significant, yes.”

His fingers, dangling between his knees, clenched tighter. “I think it’s a pain in the ass. I don’t want to feel it. This is thelastthing I want to feel.”

Amy studied him for a moment, folded her hands in her lap. “Coming out to Helen ended your marriage. She said the idea of you being sexually intimate with a man made her nauseous. And that was…an extremely hurtful betrayal from a woman you loved and trusted.”

He knotted his fingers, stared down at his whitening knuckles.

Thinking of you fucking a man? It makes me sick to my stomach, Joel.

He’d never forget the look of hurt on Helen’s face when she spat those words at him, as ifhe’dbetrayedher. As if his sexuality excused her cheating on him… Even now, the memory stung like a slap. He had to blink his burning eyes.

After a moment, Amy said, “What about Isaac? How did he feel about your sexuality?”

“Isaac? I don’t know. He teased me about it, I guess. We were kids.”

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