ONE WAVE SHORT OF A SHIPWRECK
Annie was different from any other girl at school and she had always been, even at the private school she went to before moving to McKinley first and then to college. She was a girly girl enough to wear frilly clothes and like to go shopping or to the hair salon but she'd rather talk about video games than fashion, and she acted toward sex like a guy would, having no problem at all saying how horny she was or how badly she needed to get laid. Other girls found her threatening because she was usually more beautiful than anyone of them, and weird because she wouldn't gossip much and if they all liked a guy, she would rather go to him and ask him out than stay in a corner giggling. She was too straightforward for the uptight cheerleaders and too perfect for the nerdy ones. That was why she was more at ease with boys than girls.
Unluckily, her two male best friends somehow managed to be worse than girls sometimes, and she had to bear with them and their petty problems. And now that they were together – God knew if she could believe they had finally came to that after years of unresolved sexual tension and beating around the bush – they were more of a mess they had ever been.
Of course, Leo was the worse of the two. He had always been selfish and self-centered, very emotional and prone to make a tragedy about everything, and now he was even more so. The end of his story with Blaine had left him scarred, hurt and more clingy than he was before. When he came back from Dublin on the verge of a breakdown, Adam was able to save him from it only being with him as a boyfriend but he clearly wasn't fit for the task.
He loved Leo – always had – but Leo was used to be taken care of and adored. He had been pampered for years by a man much older than him who liked to do exactly that, and Adam wasn't like that at all, of course. He cuddled Leo, but as a guy his age would – in a much healthier way – and, as dedicated as he was, he couldn't read Leo's needs as Blaine had, which was way before even Leo himself had known to have them.
Leo was too messed up to understand that there was nothing missing or wrong in that, that Adam was just different and needed to be understood as well. So, he had the habit of complaining with her every time Adam didn't get him – which was more often than not because Adam never got anything, unless he was told very clearly.
And as if all the emotional crap wasn't enough, sex between them was another problem – and she knew more about that than she cared to admit. That too was Leo's fault, of course. Leo's sexual drive would be too much for anyone, let alone for Adam whose behavior toward sex almost bordered on indifference. He liked to have it, of course, but it wasn't his reason to live. On the contrary, Leo seemed to function on that alone. He could spend entire week ends in bed.
That again was Blaine's doing. Leo had been literally educated to have sex every waking hour and the fact that Adam couldn't keep up with that frequency was frustrating for both of them. But because of Adam's manly inability to admit of not being enough in bed, it was Leo the only one who burst into Annie's house, screaming hysterically that he wasn't getting any. It didn't even cross his mind that his
any was around the three times a day – being it either the real thing or just messing around – and not everybody was up to that.
She was so used to this routine that when she opened the door, after the last angry text message from Leo, she was really surprised to see Adam's blond hair instead Leo's black mane. “Adam?” She asked, frowning in disbelief. He had the darkest eyes Annie had seen in ages and he looked really tired. “Is something wrong?”
“Please, let me in,” he said with a sigh. “I need a place to stay and someone who stops me from going back there and kill him.”
She moved aside to let him pass. “What happened?”
Adam walked in and let himself go on the couch without permission. They had spent so much time in Annie's house that it felt like home. “What
didn't happen, you mean.”
Annie joined him on the couch, sitting on her own bended leg. So it was another allegedly sex deprivation problem again. She should have known after Leo had complained that despite having the most gorgeous guy on campus, he was forced to watch porn. “Do you want to talk about it?” That was a routine question, of course.
“He is unbearable and annoying,” Adam began “Sex is all he can think about.”
Annie sighed. “Sex is all he can think about, if he didn't have enough of it. You know that's how he works. He becomes restless and, when he is, nothing can distract him.”
“And that I could understand if his enough wasn't a crazy amount of it,” Adam protested. “He literally spends most of his time having orgasms or wanting them. He's always all over me.”
Annie couldn't help but laugh. “I'm sorry,” she apologized, waving a hand in front of him. “It's just that most people wouldn't complain about having too much sex.”
“Most people don't have Leo as a boyfriend,” was Adam's grumpy reply.
“Right,” Annie agreed, tiredly. They always told her the same things over and over. Leo would complain that Adam never wanted to have sex, Adam complained that he was giving all the sex he could, Leo would insist that Adam just didn't care enough about it and that wasn't normal, then Adam would state that Leo's pathological need to be fucked was sick, so Leo would get mad at him and pouted. All of this, of course, would happen at Annie's in different moments, so that the two of them never talked to each other and she was doomed to hear them both. After that, they would eventually go back home and fuck, which made Annie mad because after all they were going to her to complain about their sex life when she had none. But nobody cared about that. “Did you talk about this with him?”
“Of course I did,” Adam said. “But do you think he listens to me? Of course he doesn't. He can't accept the fact that I don't want to have sex with him all the time. He takes it personally and he gets mad. And you know what? Even when I do want to have sex, he's not happy either because once is never enough with him. And then he has this habit that... I really don't get it!”
Annie frowned. “What habit?”
“He can't just have sex,” Adam explained. Annie didn't know if he was expecting the question or he didn't even need it. “He has to do all this... stuff that he does. Like, why can't you just have normal sex like everybody else?”
“What do you mean like everybody else?” She asked. “Last time I checked he wasn't into weird stuff.”
Adam was not even listening to her anymore. Apparently, he just needed to talk, since he probably didn't do that with Leo. “He is always touching me, like...” Adam hesitated, looking everywhere but at her.
“Jerking you off?” She offered.
“Yeah,” he nodded, blushing furiously. “And not only that. He always does things to me, either he bites me or kisses me in places that are not my mouth – what's wrong with normal kisses on the mouth anyway? – and he can't stand still. I swear, Annie. He moves a lot, like, whenever I'm, you know, at it and I'm holding him, he's fucking everywhere. Can't he just let me do it? No! Because he gets bored, he says. And he has all these weird positions he always tries to make me do, like.... how am I supposed to do it like that? I don't, I mean, can't we just do it the old way?”
That was their problem, right there. Annie had always known that but it wasn't her place to tell him. Adam loved Leo and in some way he was probably even attracted to him – Leo was beautiful and Adam was an artist after all – but he wasn't gay, not in the slightest. So a great amount of affection and a little dose of attraction would bring Adam to have sex with him; but one thing was having sex – the act itself, which had more to do with an urge to satisfy than anything else – and another was being willing to touch another male body or be touched by it. According to Annie, Adam's love for Leo came from their co-dependance and was easily mistaken for something else. That kind of attachment between two people never took gender into consideration and that was okay until those two people got physically involved with each other, and one of them wasn't gay. Leo clearly found Adam attractive – who wouldn't? – so he not only needed that kind of intimacy with his boyfriend in general but wanted it. Adam just followed the lead of his body when he finally needed something and trusted his affection for Leo that he wanted that from him, but experimenting or touching him unconsciously felt weird to him.
Basically, they had brought to the next level a relationship that was already giving them all it could and even something else that it couldn't. They were supportive and touchy and very close already, they weren't supposed to be lovers too. Leo had always had that special place in Adam's life, it was simply not fair that he should be his boyfriend too.
Sometimes Annie wondered if she thought that just because she was jealous. Being part of their little trio had always been hard for her because when she had arrived, Adam and Leo had already been friends for fourteen years and they were basically glued together. She had to work her way into the perfect world they were together and find a place for herself in it. Leo was easy to conquer because he had been very similar to her and he looked at things the same way she did. Despite being a very jealous and possessive person, Leo had never felt her like a threat because Adam adored him. Since kindergarten Adam had never let anything or anyone between them and Leo had no reason to believe he would start with her.
And he was right. That was what hurt the most.
Adam had accepted her and he considered her his best female friend – that was true – he even went so far as to think she was some kind of little fragile thing that he had to protect – and that was cute – but Leo had always came first before and he obviously did even more now. There was literally nothing Adam wouldn't stop doing to run to Leo's call. Annie had lost count of the times Adam stood her up because Leo had needed him for whatever reason. Even now they were using her to hate at each other and none of them had time to ask her how she was doing.
She had always bore with them because she loved them both too much and knew they couldn't help it, but it was harder since her feelings for Adam had become stronger. Her crush on him had started in high school. Adam was the only boy she couldn't ask out because they were friends and she was afraid to ruin that, and because what she felt was different and warmer than simple desire. She had spent five years hoping he would notice her but he never had. She was a friend, therefore no girlfriend material for him. Or for anybody else, actually, since he had this stupid tendency to dislike whoever tried to hook up with her.
She had been strong and went on. She couldn't stop loving him, but she could live her life. Eventually, she was going to get over him. At least, that was what she hoped for. Then, Leo came back from Dublin and Adam stepped up and become his boyfriend, and all her determination was lost.
The fact that Adam was going out with every girl in the damn world but not her, she could bear with it. But she couldn't fully accept that Adam was willing to take that step with Leo too. She simply couldn't. Just being a girl she should have had more chances than Leo, but she didn't and that was infuriating and frustrating and made her want to scream and tell them both to fuck off and get out of her life.
But she didn't. She would open the door and listen to them talking about their life together – a life that they had long before her and that they had gone back to have now, cutting her out – giving suggestions and calming them both down. And that was because there was nothing else she could do except stop being her friend, and she didn't want that.
“Thanks for listening,” Adam told her with a sigh, after complaining about Leo some more. “It really means a lot to me, you know.”
Annie nodded, only then noticing she had just spent the past few minutes nervously braiding and undoing her long red hair over and over. Her hands were shaking and she quickly hid them under her legs. “No problem,” she stammered and then cleared her throat. “Do you wanna stay for dinner?”
Adam smiled but shook his head. “Nope, thanks. I better go back home and stop him from having one of his really whiny mood. I'd rather stop this now than bear with him like this for three more days.”
“Okay.”
He stood up, not even noticing her eyes were watery. “Thanks again,” he said, kissing Annie on her forehead. He smelled like his cologne and paint and unfortunately a little like Leo too. “You're the best.”
He knew the way and he was quickly gone, without asking her to walk him to the door.
Luckily so, because she was already crying by the time he got there.
