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Chapter Thirty-Five

Justin

The whole time I’m in Cumbria, all I want to do is get home to Drew.

To my boyfriend.

Whom I love, and who loves me back.

I kept catching myself grinning at random moments. There’s this flood of warmth in my chest whenever I think about Drew saying, “I love you too.” How his voice shook like the words were too big to come out smoothly.

On the train home, I try to wrench my mind away from thinking about Drew to start writing my speech for the upcoming class reunion.

Ten years. It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since high school.

I feel like I’m in a much better headspace to write it now than six months ago.

Six months ago, I was going to write some generic speech about career achievements and life milestones, the checkboxes on someone else’s definition of success. But now? Now, I understand real success isn’t about living up to other people’s expectations.

Drew’s helped me realize that all those years I spent trying to be the perfect quarterback, salesman, everything, were just different versions of hiding. There’s something incredibly freeing about being loved for your imperfections instead of despite them. About having someone who doesn’t just accept the way you spoil your cats or your obsession with correct roast potato methodology but actually finds those traits endearing.

I don’t know quite how to phrase this revelation in a speech I can share with my ex-classmates though.

I brought my old school yearbook with me on the trip to help me write the speech, and I flick through it now for inspiration.

I can’t help snorting when I stumble across the Most Likely To page. Some of the predictions are definitely off. Most Likely to Become a Millionaire: Seymour Washington , who I last saw posting on social media about living in his mother’s basement and his amazing opportunity selling dietary supplements. Most Likely to Never Leave Texas: Amy Rodriguez , who I know is currently teaching English in Japan.

Then I see the prediction that makes my stomach clench. Most Likely to Stay Together Forever: Justin Morris and Madeline Birwood .

In the photo, Maddie’s cheerleader uniform matches my letterman jacket, like we’re actors hired by central casting rather than actual teenagers. I remember how my hands shook when I pinned on her corsage at prom, terrified someone would somehow see through my carefully constructed facade.

Funny how we all made these grand predictions about each other’s futures when we didn’t even know who we were ourselves.

There’s something weirdly poetic about how wrong we all were. Maybe because we couldn’t imagine anything beyond the roles we’d been assigned at eighteen. The football captain marries the head cheerleader, the math geek becomes an accountant, and the class clown hosts a morning radio show. But life has this way of unraveling all our careful predictions. Like how the guy voted Most Likely to Stay Single Forever is now raising triplets.

The train jolts into King’s Cross, derailing my trip down memory lane. I transfer to the underground, but once I’ve arrived at the station, instead of heading straight to the office, I go past the fancy hot chocolate place Drew loves. I love seeing how he practically purrs over their Belgian dark chocolate blend.

I juggle the hot chocolate and my laptop bag as I push open the door to the IT department.

Drew’s sitting at his desk, and when he glances up, there’s a flash of something in his expression that I can’t quite read. Almost like panic, which doesn’t make sense because this is Drew, who I spent Christmas Day with, who told me he loved me.

“Surprise!” The word comes out breathier than I intended, my heart doing that fluttering thing it always does when I see him, like it’s trying to escape my chest to get closer to him.

“What are you doing here?” His voice sounds strange. “I thought you weren’t due home until tonight.”

I don’t understand why he’s acting like he’s seen a ghost in his inbox instead of his boyfriend bearing hot chocolate.

Maybe he’s still not feeling well?

“I got the deal done yesterday. I wanted to get home early to surprise you.”

Before Drew can respond, Xander bursts into the office.

“Drew! Or should I say, Andrew—” Xander starts, then spots me. “Oh! Justin.”

“Hey, Xander.” I direct my attention back to Drew, who looks like he’s about to be sick. The hot chocolate suddenly feels heavy in my hand, but I keep talking, hoping that if I drown him in details, he’ll stop looking like he’s about to bolt from his desk chair.

“I actually left first thing this morning. The trains were absolute chaos. Some signal failure at Preston meant we had to go via Manchester.”

“Why didn’t you just take your boyfriend’s private jet?” Xander chortles.

The words take a moment to process, like when you have to reread something because your brain refused to make sense of it the first time.

“My boyfriend’s private jet?”

Drew’s face has gone completely white, and there’s a roaring sound in my ears that almost drowns out Xander’s next words.

“What the hell, Andrew? It’s one thing not to tell your colleagues about who you really are. But your boyfriend doesn’t know either?” Xander says.

The room seems to tilt sideways, like someone’s adjusted reality’s settings without warning me first.

Andrew.

Who the hell is Andrew?

Drew’s face has my whole attention. Drew’s face makes me grip the cup of hot chocolate so tightly I’m worried my fingers will leave permanent indents in the cardboard.

His usual warm brown eyes are huge behind his glasses, filled with the kind of devastation I’ve only seen in the shelter animals who’ve been abandoned multiple times.

“What do you mean, I don’t know who he is?” I ask.

“I don’t know why you’re looking so worried,” Xander says to Drew. “I’m sure most guys will be stoked to find out their boyfriend is a multi-millionaire tech genius.”

I feel like I’ve stumbled into some alternative reality.

“My boyfriend is a multi-millionaire tech genius?” I repeat.

“His real name is Andrew Yates. Look him up. According to Google…” Xander continues to talk about net worth and stock options and something called Series A funding, which apparently is worth more than the GDP of a small country.

But I’m not listening anymore.

Andrew Yates.

The name snags in my mind. It echoes inside me.

Because I remember Andrew Yates. He’s the main person in all those high school memories I’ve tried for so long to repress.

I remember Andrew Yates by his voice— soft, careful, like someone who’d learned to take up as little space as possible. I remember how that voice would crack when we cornered him in the computer lab, how it would waver when trying to answer questions in class after we’d spent the previous period making his life hell.

I remember his glasses, thick black frames that Connor once snapped in half “accidentally” during gym class.

I remember his faded Star Trek T-shirts. How they hung loose on his skinny frame. The one with the Enterprise on it that got ruined when we “accidentally” spilled Gatorade all over him in the cafeteria.

I remember the crude gestures that accompanied every chorus of “Handy Andy” when he walked down the halls while I leaned against my locker and forced out laughter that tasted bitter in my mouth.

I remember his locker—the third one from the end in the science wing, plastered with coding competition certificates that Tad used to rip down while I watched. I remember the Pride sticker he put up our freshman year that lasted exactly two days before someone defaced it with a permanent marker.

I remember how he always sat in the back corner of the computer lab during lunch, shoulders hunched like he was trying to fold himself smaller.

I remember everything except his face.

I take a step back. “You’re Andrew Yates?”

Drew looks up at me. His features have frozen like someone’s hit pause on every emotion except panic.

The realization hits me like Bobby Ray’s fist used to—sudden, devastating, leaving me struggling to breathe.

That person who reduced Drew’s self-esteem, who made him think he wasn’t worthy of love.

That was me .

Those same hands that I watched Connor slam in a locker door have been touching me so gently these past months. That same voice that used to shake with fear recently told me, “I love you.”

“Did you know?” My voice emerges like I’m choking on broken glass, each word cutting deeper than the last.

It’s the most redundant question in the world because, of course, he knew. The expression plastered on his face right now tells me he knew exactly who I was.

“Yes.” Drew’s voice comes out barely above a whisper. He clears his throat and then raises his gaze to mine.

“I saw you in a pub in Oxford Circus a few months before I came to work here. I recognized you immediately, but you didn’t recognize me.”

Xander’s staring at us like he’s watching the season finale of his favorite reality show, torn between horror and fascination at the plot twist that he doesn’t quite understand but gets the feeling is juicy.

The hot chocolate slips from my fingers, hitting the floor with a splash.

The room suddenly feels too small to contain all the versions of us that exist now—Drew and Justin, Andrew Yates and the high school bully, the man I love and the boy I tormented.

I need to get out of here before I shatter as completely as that paper cup, before the weight of every cruel word I said to Andrew crushes what’s left of my composure.

“I have to…” I gesture vaguely at the door, already backing away, my feet moving before my brain can catch up.