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He’d gotten several texts from Dylan’s older brothers about that family grill-out in a few weeks, but Dylan hadn’t mentioned a word about it. That was weird too. Why was everything so weird? He had never known that the three hockey giants Jake played with were named Gallagher. That must have been how Jake met Dylan in the first place.
On the New Year’s Eve before Jake’s accident those three Gallaghers and their wives had been at Jake’s house for a few hours before they left to go to a family thing. Olive had already gotten pulled away due to some drama with her ex.
And this left Jake and Derek on the couch alone.
Derek had been a little drunk.
Jake had been sober for over a year at that point, but Derek didn’t know it then. As the fire died, they commiserated about the sad state of the local online gay dating scene. To illustrate his point, Jake opened an app on his phone to scroll through the parade of douchebag dudes that he matched with until something on the screen made Jake freeze.
“Well shit.” Jake slumped. “I guess there’s my answer.”
“Huh?” Derek looked over his shoulder.
“Nothing.” He pulled the phone away.
“What?” Derek leaned closer. “One of those obviously catfishing stock photos? Show me. I live for that crap. Lemme see.” Derek had (drunkenly) grabbed Jake’s phone and scrolled through the profile of a Dylan G.
Jake shrugged off Derek’s concern with a forced laugh. “Meh. Couldn’t blame the guy for calling me a piece of shit and kicking me to the curb. Always been garbage at making it work with the good ones.”
At this point in the evening, Derek’s vision had blurred, but he’d blinked away the beer haze to look at the profile. Once then twice. Then one more time. “C’mon, this guy’s a piece of shit. Not you.”
“It’s not a big deal. Just didn’t expect him to come up on there.” Jake tried to grab the phone back.
Derek shifted away and scrolled through Dylan G’s profile enough to have the memory burned into him. Long enough to see all the times on the profile it mentioned serious relationship or looking for long-term partner, making Dylan G’s goals very clear. “You’re way out of his league. It just says he works in tech. Sounds made up. Like The Bachelor or on House Hunters when someone’s a professional scrapbooker or some shit like that. He probably just owns a computer.”
“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about with The Bachelor or whatever the other show was.”
“That’s because Carrie Bradshaw was never on either show.” In the rest of the profile photos, Dylan looked a few years younger, but Derek couldn’t deny that the guy was… something. Still, if he had called Jake a piece of shit, the dude was dead to him.
Jake took his phone back. “I’m not sure your niche movie taste allows you to disrespect my addiction to HBO’s finest prestige programming.” After one last scan of the screen, he locked it.
Derek had never seen Jake be less than confident and self-assured about anything but especially about dating.
What the hell had Dylan G done to make Jake look like he’d been kicked in the nuts? Derek had seen a change in Jake over the year before that New Year’s, but mostly Jake had seemed happier and healthier.
“Seriously, you okay, dude?” Derek asked. “You really liked this guy? Dylan G?”
“Nah. Of course not. Dylan G’s just another asshole. Plenty more assholes in the sea.” Mask of unconcern back in place, Jake had tossed the phone on the coffee table.
“Not sure that’s the saying.” Derek’s laugh turned into a dorky hiccup.
Despite the gallon of alcohol his liver had to process that night, Derek chickened out from telling Jake how he felt. Again.
A little over eleven months later, Jake had his accident.
So when the actual Dylan G moved into the ground-floor apartment above him with the neighbors calling him the deadbeat nephew, Derek hated him on instinct. It still felt like Jake had just died. Derek couldn’t fix him being dead. He couldn’t even process it. But he could hate someone who hurt Jake.
The hospital room door squeaked open.
Derek opened his eyes long enough to see a flash of familiar ginger hair before he flopped back onto his stretcher. “Found me?”
The stretcher next to his squinched, and Joni’s laughter filled the room. “I was hoping this was nap time. Group nap, kindergarten style.”
“All discharged?”
“Yep.” She nestled down, facing him. “No one in triage right now.”
“Weird. It was so busy this morning.”