Back in the Saddle

Staring at the Moon

Nick's POV:

The more Karl ignores my texts, the more worried about him I become. I feel horrible for siding with Alex and not defending him, but right now the more pressing issue is if he's okay or not. Clay and George have been dodging my messages, and frankly I'm terrified to try Wilbur, which means I'm stuck in the dark. And I'm so worried about him. Not just if anything happened to him physically, but what he might be feeling and thinking because of what happened.

"Any word from him?" Alex says, walking in the room with two bottles of soda in hand.

"No," I sigh, powering my phone off.

I ended up staying over at his house last night after Clay ditched me, not that I blame him. When our friends all left, we kicked everyone out, then I basically had to put him to bed after taking his phone while he was trying to text Karl because he was so drunk, and he slept through most of the morning. Since he's been awake, he's been irritable with a hangover, but he's tried to be nice since I cleaned pretty much the whole house for him.

"He must be pretty mad, huh?" Alex responds. "Not that I can blame him. What I did was pretty shitty."

"You think so?" I say, semi-accusingly. "I wasn't much better, though. At least at the end."

"It was nothing compared to how I acted. The only thing you did was tell him he needed to choose, whereas I was way out of line. I can't believe I forced him to kiss me, what is wrong with me? The last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt him, and I went and did just that."

"Yeah, you shouldn't have done that," I say, feeling my anger from the previous night returning at remembering what Alex did. "But, you did, and now all that's left to do is try and make up for it. That is, if Karl would text us back and at least let us know that he's alright."

"What, you think something happened to him?" he asks worriedly, sitting beside me on the bed.

"No, not really. At least I hope not. He was with Wilbur, so he most likely got home just fine. I would head over there later, but I want to avoid Wil at all costs, so I'm going to try and catch him tomorrow at work and hopefully apologize."

"I think I'll do the same. But I think we're overlooking the hardest part of all of it: even if he chooses to forgive us, there's still the touchy subject of our revealed feelings. Look at any love triangle trope in any movie or story on the planet: it never ends well and one friend always ends up getting hurt. And I think we all know who that one friend will be."

"Do you actually like him like that? I mean I was a little jealous of you two at first, but the more I saw you together the more I thought that you acted more like brothers. Obviously this is based entirely off of observations, but I never thought you were gay. Like, come on, you love women."

"You're right, I do. And I don't really know what I am, to be honest. I don't know if I like Karl like that: all I know is that I love being around him and he makes me happy."

"You know those are traits friends can have, right? You don't have to like someone just because you're close to them."

"Yeah, I guess that's true. The pressure might be something I've let get to me a little bit. Like, the pressure to have someone to care about and be something that I'm not. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I've let my friendship with Karl feel like something more just because I'm lonely and I'm grasping for a relationship that might fix that. I wanted to fill that void so badly that I forced myself to feel things that weren't there. I mean, when I kissed Karl, I didn't really feel anything. It was just a kiss."

"I'm glad I could help you come to this realization, because I know for a fact that I like Karl. That kiss was probably the best moment of my entire life, and ever since he's been here, I've been the happiest I've ever been in my life."