“I’m serious. He’s your employer. Doesn’t matter if it’s a short-term job. Doesn’t matter if you knew him before you took the job. Did he force you?”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Answer the question.”
“No.” I wipe the beer off the table and glare at Sully, throwing the wet napkins at him. “Jesus Christ, no. I’m with him—with them—because I want to be.”
Sully puts his hands up, but he looks relieved.
“Did you really think that… that he… that I?—?”
“I didn’t know what the fuck to think, dude,” he says. “You’ve never once even hinted that you might be into men. What was I supposed to think?”
“I knew that was it, you actually have a problem?—”
“Let me stop you right there,” he says, leaning forward, enunciating each word slowly. “I do not have a problem with you dating men. Or women. Or both, or at the same time. I’m bisexual.”
That takes a minute. Sully just waits.
“Excuse me?” I say brilliantly.
“I am bisexual,” he says, using the same measured tone. “I am attracted to both men and women.”
Smartass. “Since when?”
“High school,” he says. “Maybe before that. As long as I can remember, pretty much.”
My mouth falls open. Sully shrugs, looking away.
“You and Callie had other things to deal with at the time,” he says, more gently now. “I wasn’t going to bring my drama while you were going through all that.”
“Hang on. Does Callie know?”
He swallows his drink. “She does. I told her after she started dating Lee and West.”
Well, that stings. Juvenile to think of it that way now, but I was always closer to Sully than my sister. Something dawns on me.
“Weren’t you and West pretty tight in high school, too?”
Sully closes his eyes.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“Keep your voice down,” he says, eyes still shut. “It wasn’t a thing. We weren’t together.”
“But you did?—”
Sully opens his eyes to glare at me.
“Fuck’s sake,” I say. I huff out a laugh. “I can’t believe you all got mad at me for keeping secrets. Jesus.”
Sully laughs too, the tension in his broad shoulders finally easing some.
We order food and stick to small talk until it arrives, processing our heavy shit. I’m still pissed and weirded the fuck out. Turns out I’m the only Hale who hasn’t fucked around with Weston. And that thought gets shoved out of my brain, never to be reexamined again.
Gross.
“You really don’t want to come back to work at Hale House?” he asks.