Page 31 of For All It's Worth
Chapter Thirteen
Charlie
Somethingwordlesswasdifferentbetween me and Max. I’d felt it that day a few weeks back when we’d had lunch and hung out at his place. Things had been strange. There had been a weird need to be closer to him, but I couldn’t make myself move any closer. I knew that he caught me looking at him more than once since he was always looking back at me. We danced around the new tension and awareness of each other, pretending that everything was cool.
Working with each other after our talk became easier, probably because we weren’t alone often so there was a lack of opportunity for something to flare up. I found myself enjoying the job more than I thought.
Part of the new tension between us was probably me just overreacting to the revelation of my feelings for Max and him being weird because I couldn’t help acting differently around him. At least that’s what I was attempting to pass it off as.
Max had changed, though. There was a new confidence in him that had him standing taller. Not all the time, though. There were moments that his old self-consciousness slipped in and took over, but as he served customers, he was all sweetness and smiles.
He had this glow; his pale skin was luminous and my fingers itched for my camera when the light would hit him just right. He looked angelic but had a devilish smile that he only used for me. He had begun touching me more since we cleared the air. Putting a hand on my lower back, just above my ass, as he moved past me behind the counter. Standing just a little bit closer than he used to. I got the feeling that he’d be open to more than we were, but not being sure had me drawing back just in case I was wrong.
Clearing the air had been good for us, but I didn’t want to go back into the best friend box. I just didn’t know how to navigate the move to boyfriends.
Being able to help Max out, to be useful instead of having him look after me, was my way of working to make up for what I put him through. My way of repairing our friendship. He insisted that it wasn’t what my working there was about. He just wanted me around and did need me for the first week at least, since he was in the middle of taking more staff on since the place was busier than ever.
“Charlie, could you help me with this?” Heather, one of the supervisors I worked with asked.
“Sure,” I went over to the bookstore to the new LGBTQIA literature section that she was setting up. There was everything from fiction to self-help. “Where d’you want these?” I indicated to the box of fiction paperbacks I’d just opened.
Heather scanned the titles. “In the fiction section, in alphabetical order by author’s last name please.”
We worked side by side until I unearthed one particular title that caught her eye. “Ooh, I’ll have to tell my son about this one. It has a trans character with an enby partner.”
I must have given her a questioning look and she passed me the book so I could look at it and read the blurb.
“These characters are like my son; he’s trans and his partner is non-binary. He loves seeing himself represented in books. It’s part of the reason I campaigned to Max to get this section up and running. The ones that we’d had in before sold well so really it was just good business sense to expand it to a full section.
“Yeah, that’s a great idea. D’you want to go message your son about the book?”
“Nah, I’ll just use my staff discount and get it for him later.”
I’d thought she was cool before, but the way that she talked about her son really did it for me. Nothing but true love and support for them both, unlike my father. Will had thought Father was being progressive with his attitude, but it was nothing but paying lip service to calls for diversity. I’d heard some of the things he’d come out with. Maybe it was his old-fashioned Greek upbringing, but he was happier when Will was with Helena than with Ethan and it had nothing to do with their personalities. He tolerated me being gay, but it wasn’t at all the same as the way Heather supported her son.
Since I was only helping out Max part-time, I’d had a lot of time to work out. I practically lived at Farmer's Fitness, so much so that Andy had asked me a couple of times to join their Friday group for their gym trips. He even offered to move their hang out afterward to some other place instead of the bar that they liked, which was pretty cool of him, but unnecessary. Things with Will weren’t there yet, and I always declined. I knew I needed to make more of an effort for us to be okay, but there was just too much going on for me.
Sobriety was harder than I thought. It wasn’t that I craved the alcohol, just the way it took me away, softened the hard edges of my reality. With the work I was putting in with Evan, still visiting his office twice a week, I’d identified some emotional triggers. Mom was one of them that I had not seen coming. I loved her, but I’d never noticed the way she treated us all differently, and how that affected my self-confidence. As expected, I’d identified some daddy issues too, more with how he bulldozed me into following him into the crazy pressured world of finance. He’d gotten me to give up photography, the one thing that I’d loved, and it was only with Evan’s prompting that I’d seen how much of a soul wound that was. It was the turning point for me with no outlet for my feelings and a whole lot of stress to manage.
Weekly family dinners at the insistence of Mom were uncomfortable but I saw the value in them. Will and I were slowly working on our relationship, which was more than could be said for Alex. With him, there was more and more of a gulf between us. Evan had stressed time and time again that the issue belonged to Alex, not to me. It still stung.
With being at Farmer’s Fitness a lot, I’d been spending a lot of time with Henry and he ended up asking me to watch the reception desk once a week, and monitor the gym floor another day in exchange for a paid membership of his gym. It was a sweet deal and it felt good to have someone trust me with something important like that. I loved being there and under his watchful eye, I began to notice some significant changes to my body and I felt good about my shape for the first time in a long time.
It was my day on the desk and Holly was on the floor. If I wasn’t gay, she’d be my type. Whip-smart and wicked funny, always cracking me and clients up, I loved working with her almost as much as working with Max.
The phone rang and I answered, “Hello, Farmer’s Fitness, how can I help you?”
“Charlie it’s me, Henry.”
“Oh hey man, how’s it going?”
“It’s going.”
“Like that, huh?”
“Pretty much. You busy?”
“Nah, it’s pretty quiet just now. I was looking through your invoices like you asked.”
