Page 24 of Catch Me (Becoming Us #4)

Travis

While I added flour to my stand mixer, I glanced over at Roman. I promised myself that I wouldn’t make it weird if he put on the socks, but he looked so out of place with them on, what with all his tattoos and surly disposition. It was extremely hard not to laugh.

When he saw me struggling to hold it in, he narrowed his eyes. I held up a hand, even as I failed to keep myself together.

“Don’t get mad,” I said through the lulls in my laughter.

“Don’t be a dick.”

“I’m not. You look adorable.” My eyes watered, and I pursed my lips in an attempt to quell this shit that would probably get me stabbed.

“Are we gonna paint our nails and do face masks next?”

“Hey, no toxic masculinity here. I get enough of that during the season. And no, we’re not doing that. I’ll leave the polish to your stepbrother since he pulls it off way better than I ever could. Facemasks are a Sunday thing.”

“Fucking gay.”

My eyes rolled as I cut butter into the mixture. “One, I’m gay. Two, self-care and flawless skin are not gay. You think Hugh Jackma n looks as good as he does in his fifties by neglecting skincare? Not a chance.”

“He’s a celebrity.”

I laughed and turned to face him fully. “We could argue that I am too, or I’m on my way to be. Are only celebrities allowed to stay healthy and hot?”

He shrugged dismissively, but I could see him mulling over the information.

I was dying to know what had influenced him to be this way.

From what I knew, his mom didn’t used to be as comfortable with the sexuality spectrum as she was now, but I couldn’t imagine her ever being outwardly hateful or aggressively gendering simple things like soft clothing and skincare.

It could very likely be his dad. I knew nothing about him, and the only time Roman had mentioned him was when he told me he’d planned to spend most of break with him. He seemed content to cancel those plans, which made me wonder about their relationship.

Maybe it wasn’t either of his parents. Views like his were common and they tended to bleed into people without them even being conscious of it. We absorbed shit rapidly as we grew up. School, churches, friends, television; they all deposited information that could leave an impact on us.

I was thinking too much about it. We weren’t supposed to become more than professional acquaintances, but that was because of his beliefs.

I might’ve been misinterpreting or reading into it, but I felt like those things inside of him were shifting, even after only a week here.

He lived with Tilian for a couple years after their parents got married, so it couldn’t be that he’d never spent enough time around a gay person to humanize them.

He came up beside me, and I realized that I’d stopped working. I was going to continue with the butter, but he took it and did it for me.

As I studied him, I thought about the question of his sexuality. He said that he was always lost. Just a few days ago, he’d been on a video call with Tilian, which I was a hundred percent certain wasn’t a normal thing for them. It’d probably never happened.

Was he trying to work through the things inside of him? If so, it felt like I should try to be more supportive without letting on that I wanted to help him with his journey. He would immediately get hostile and retreat into himself, which couldn’t happen .

Maybe I could just shift the boundaries I’d put into place. If I was wrong about what he was doing, it was whatever. Worst case scenario, I put in the effort to befriend him and it ended up being futile. He’d be gone in a couple of weeks anyway.

“Now what?” he asked.

“We turn it on. Roman—”

He pushed the little lever too far and the mixer went entirely too fast, making flour fly out of the bowl. Immediately, he shut it off and grimaced.

“That’s like glitter,” I noted. “It’s gonna be everywhere.”

“Shit, sorry.”

“It’s not gonna hurt anything. See?”

I grabbed the scoop from the flour container and flung the powder directly at his face. He blew some out of his mouth and used the back of his hand to wipe it off his cheek, but there was still so much more.

“You fucking asshole.” He coughed and made a disgruntled sound. “You could kill someone with that. Pretty sure it’s attacking my lungs.”

“That’s dramatic.”

He snatched the scoop from me, and I swore as I backpedaled. He managed to hit me on my cheek and neck with flour, but before I could gloat, he threw a handful at me.

“Jesus,” I shouted. “What’s this pocket sand bullshit?”

As I rubbed my eyes, I heard him start laughing. There was flour on my tongue and it was disgusting. Suddenly, he touched my arm, so I opened my eyes. When he offered me a towel, I was going to thank him, but he was the reason I needed it.

His face was still patched with white, so I started wiping it off. I followed when he took a step back.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“Just shut up. It’s almost gone.”

I felt a little awkward as I continued. He was watching me, or more accurately, staring at me. My gaze shifted to his eyes, which were locked on me. What was most unnerving was that he didn’t look away. Roman always looked away.

“What’s wrong?” I asked casually.

“Nothing.”

“Something’s up. ”

“Yeah, but nothing’s wrong.”

“Don’t tell me you’re studying me to draw later.”

He smiled and the intensity eased. “That’ll be when your face was covered in flour and you looked like you’d been betrayed.”

“I was. Can’t you see I’m madder than a wet hen?”

He snorted a laugh. “You can take the boy out of Texas...”

I crossed my arms stubbornly. “You making fun of me?”

“You started this.”

“That doesn’t sound like me.”

I gave him a taunting look before I tossed the towel onto the counter and returned to the dough.

There were no mishaps this time, which made it quick.

Roman leaned against the counter the whole time, watching the process.

I wasn’t ignorant of the fact that his eyes were mostly on me, but I didn’t know how to interpret that, so I just decided not to.

“It has to rest,” I said.

“What do we do in the meantime?”

“You choose. What’s the best way to pass a couple of hours?”

“Well, we could...” His brows furrowed, then he glanced over my shoulder. “A movie. Wait, you don’t like TV.”

“I’m cool with a movie. It’s just boring if I’m alone.”

“Oh. Yeah, let’s do that.”

I set a timer to remind me the dough existed, then sat on one end of the couch. After I put my feet on the coffee table, I navigated to one of the streaming apps. I had no idea which one was the best, so I chose at random.

“Holler if you see something that looks good.”

“Okay.” He seemed to have sunk back into his shell, but that was better than him being hostile, at least.

“Fair warning, I tend to talk during movies and I have an uncontrollable urge to look up the actors to figure out where I know them from. If we make guesses, we can turn it into a game.”

“Or I could use one of your sharp knives.”

“I thought we were past that. Friends don’t stab friends.”

I felt his stare again, but I ignored it while I scrolled through the list. There were so many movies, and they all looked terrible.