“Jamie, please, don’t—”
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
Dakota turned and left without another word.
“He fucking yelled at me!” Dakota cried, slamming his fist into the wall. “All I wanted to do was help you and Ian!”
“You can’t blame him for yelling at you,” Steve said, reaching forward to set a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t touch me!”
“Ok! Ok!” Steve cried, lifting both hands in the air. “God, Dakota. It’s all right.”
“No it isn’t! I was scared out of my fucking mind and he yelled at me!”
“You scared the hell out of him. You scared all of us, Dakota. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.”
“Oh, so now you’re on his side?”
“No. I’m not.” Steve took a breath. He waited for Dakota to say something further, but nodded when he didn’t. “See? There. Take a breath, calm yourself down.”
“I am calm,” Dakota snapped.
“You’re anything but calm, bud. You look like a nuclear warhead that’s just about to explode.”
Sobbing, Dakota sat on his bed and tried as hard as he could to keep the tears from coming, but couldn’t restrain them. Between the realization that his best friend could have died and the harsh way that Jamie had spoken to him, he was surprised he wasn’t crying worse.
“It’s ok,” Steve said, wrapping his arms around Dakota.
“It’s not ok,” Dakota bawled, burying his face in Steve’s chest. “I fucked up, Steve! I fucked up!”
“Ok. So maybe you did. Let’s say you did, but that doesn’t change the fact that we all do it sometimes. You can’t beat yourself up over it.”
“I can’t help it!”
“Yes you can.” Steve pushed Dakota away from him. “Look at me, Koda. Look at me and tell me that you can’t stop crying.”
He couldn’t. Such a response stopped Dakota’s tears instantly.
“See?” Steve continued. “Me and Ian are fine.”
“I fucked up,” Dakota said, shaking his head. “Jamie’s mad at me.”
“He’ll get over it,” Steve said.
At that moment, Dakota felt guiltier than he had in his entire life.
Jamie barely looked at him at dinner. Between eating, addressing Kirn and Wills and just generally keeping to himself, his head hardly even turned in Dakota’s general direction throughout the meal. The few times their eyes happened to meet, Jamie averted his gaze almost instantly. Not only did it strike a dull pain in Dakota’s heart, it also kept him from seeing the true look in his eyes.
In his room, long after they had eaten and were preparing to go to bed, a knock came at the door.
“Come in,” Steve said. Erik opened the door. “Hey, Erik.”
“Hey,” Erik said, his eyes instantly seeking Dakota out on the opposite side of the room. “Dakota.”
“Hi,” Dakota said.
“You need to go talk to him.”
“Who?”
“Jamie.”
“He’s the one that yelled at me.”
“He was fucking scared out of his mind!” Erik cried, shutting the door behind him. “He thought something was going to happen to you.”
“That gave him no excuse to yell at me.”
“He loves you, Dakota. He fuckin’ loves you so much that he’s been bawling for the last two hours.”
“He…he loves me?” Dakota asked.
“Of course he does! What do you think?”
“I don’t…I didn’t know.”
“Fuck that. You can’t tell me you don’t know he loves you.”
“We’ve only known each other for a few days. How am I supposed to know?”
“It doesn’t take a fuckin’ genius to know when someone cares about you.”
“The guy’s right,” Ian said.
“I guess he told you then,” Dakota sighed.
“I don’t give a fuckin’ shit,” Erik said, leaning against the wall. “I’ve known Jamie was gay since he was fifteen. All I care about is whether or not he’s happy and right now, he’s scared out of his mind that he’s hurt you.”
“He did,” Dakota said. “I didn’t realize he was so upset.”
“Jamie doesn’t yell at people, Dakota. He rarely acts like that. Kirn was an exception—he was being a dumbass. He only yells at people when he’s upset with them.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go talk to him. Please.”
Dakota nodded, pushed his way past Erik and made his way out the door.
“Jamie,” Dakota said, knocking on the door. “It’s me. Can I come in?”
The door opened. Sniffling, Jamie looked at him for one moment before stepping aside to allow him in.
“I’m sorry,” Dakota said, turning when he heard the door close behind him. “Jamie, I didn’t know you were so upset.”
“Of course I’m upset,” Jamie said, swiping tears from his eyes. “It’s pretty fucking bad when you think your boyfriend’s gonna die.”
“Your boyfriend?” Dakota asked.
“Yeah. My boyfriend, Dakota. You know, the guy who sleeps with you, the guy you kiss, the guy you care about more than anything else in the fucking world.”
“We’ve only been doing this for three days, Jamie. I’m not sure if you—”
“If I what? Feel the way I do about you?”
“I…I don’t…” Dakota stammered.
“Throw all that fundamentalist thinking out of the water, babe, because it’s the fuckin’ end of the world. Screw whatever anyone said about not being able to know if you’re in love in the first few days of knowing someone.”
“I’m new to this,” Dakota said. “You can’t expect me to know everything.”
“I don’t.” Jamie stepped forward. He wrapped his arms around Dakota’s shoulders and leaned into his body, bowing his face into his hair. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Tell me you love me, Dakota.”
“I do.”
“You do what?”
“Love you,” Dakota said. “I love you, Jamie.”
He reached up and brought the man’s face to his.
As they kissed, he shed a tear.
“Things go well?” Erik asked, adjusting his coat around his shoulders. “I assume everything did, since you didn’t come back last night.”
“You were waiting in the room?”
“I was.”
“To answer your question,” Dakota said, stepping forward to view the rainy scenery before them, “everything went well. We made up. Everything’s cool.”
“Anything else happen last night?”
“Uh…not really.”
“What’d you tell him after he told you he loved you?”
“That I loved him back,” Dakota said. He bowed his head and shrugged his hands into his pockets, content with the words he’d just spoken.
“You have to understand something, Dakota. Things are different now. I’m sure you already know that, but things like this, like with you and Jamie, they’re not going to play out like you’d expect them to.”
“I already figured that.”
“Back in World War II, people would meet over a weekend and be married the week after. You know why? Because everyone was so desperate to find love in a hopeless situation that they’d latch onto anything they could. To say it was rushed is an understatement.”
“Are you saying that’s what it is with us?”
“No,” Erik said, raising a hand to cut Dakota off before he could finish. “I’m not saying that what you and Jamie are going through is just a ‘latching onto anything you can’ thing. I know Jamie has feelings for you because I can tell he has feelings for you. A man doesn’t cry over a simple crush—I can tell you that much right now.”