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“Yeah, I know. Just, you get me, you know?”
The corners of Ambrose’s mouth curled up. “Harry, you’re my best mate and I love you, but you have always been a mystery wrapped inside an enigma wrapped inside an iron curtain or whatever.”
“Isn’t it a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma? And isn’t it Russia?”
“Not the point.” Ambrose waved his hand. “I tried to kiss you once, remember? And you laughed.”
“That was because you were joking!”
Ambrose’s face did that complicated thing again.
“Oh.” Harry blinked at him. “You weren’t joking?”
“I wasn’t joking.” Ambrose snorted, his eyes twinkling. “So I’m just going to take this awkward moment here”—he pinched at the air—“and hide it away with all the things we’re never going to talk about again.” He tucked his fingers under the edge of the rug briefly. “I’ll call it Ambrose’s Hurt Ego Depository. There aren’t a lot of things in there, but ouch!” He grabbed his heart and gave a theatrical swoon. “The pain!”
Harry huffed out a laugh. “Idiot.”
“Guilty.” Ambrose’s grin faded, and he nudged Harry with his knee. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“He said I was nobody,” Harry said, and shoved more ice cream in his mouth. Spiders always sounded like a better idea in theory than they were in practice. In practice they were sort of gross. It seemed safer to concentrate on that right now than the sudden heat in his eyes that warned him tears were building. “On the phone to his mum, he said I was nobody.”
“He what?” Ambrose’s voice was dangerously low.
Harry felt a thrill at Ambrose’s anger. It felt validating. The thrill didn’t last though—it was quickly overtaken by logic. “Well, it sounds worse than it is.”
Ambrose arched an eyebrow.
Harry sighed and scraped his spoon around in the glass for a moment. “You remember the Bad Boyfriend date I had at Liam’s restaurant? Where I did the tablecloth trick, and it worked?”
Ambrose laughed. “Yeah, and it threw you so much that you tipped a glass of water into the dad’s lap!”
“That’s Jack’s dad,” Harry said. “I was on a date with Jack’s sister, Mia, and she’s getting married now and everything, which is great, but also it means that Jack can’t tell his parents we’re actually dating for real, and he can’t tell them all the Bad Boyfriend stuff with Mia was fake because, well, they’re probably not going to be happy she tricked them like that.”
“Oh, shit,” Ambrose said, which summed things up pretty well. He rubbed a hand over his forehead. “Okay, yeah. So that’s not as bad as I originally thought. I mean, on the surface it still sounds really shitty, but it’s actually a proper reason, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Harry swallowed around the lump in his throat. “It still felt bad though. Even if it’s a reason.” He turned his phone over and over in his hand. “I just need some time to get over myself, I guess.”
“Well, we’ve got plenty of creaming soda and ice cream,” Ambrose said. “And those Tim Tams. That should help.” He reached over and plucked Harry’s phone out of his grasp. “And I’ll take that.”
Harry blinked at the space where his phone had been. “But what if Jack calls?”
“Are you ready to talk to Jack right now?”
And that right there was the million-dollar question. Harry considered it, and decided that it wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to Jack, more that he didn’t know if he could, not without falling apart and saying things he’d regret. Fuck, this was a mess. “No,” he muttered.
“Exactly.” Ambrose said. “So give me the phone. If he calls, it’ll go to message bank and you can call him back when you’re ready. That way you won’t say something you’ll regret. Trust me on this. Now finish your spider.”
Harry forced a smile while Ambrose took his phone and put it on top of the fridge, and wondered if Jack had figured out yet what had only taken Ambrose a few weeks—that Harry in crisis mode was a Harry who needed sugar. If he hadn’t, did that mean that Ambrose would have made a better boyfriend? No, he realised suddenly. It was because until now, nothing about Jack had rated on the Harry Sugar Scale of Emergencies. Even the stuff about sex, about figuring out who he was—he hadn’t needed sugar to get through it, because he’d had Jack. Jack was his sugar.
It felt like a revelation, but he didn’t share it with Ambrose because he was sure there was a sex and sugar joke in there somewhere, and he didn’t want Ambrose to say it. It occurred to him that just like sugar, Jack was also addictive—and he was well and truly hooked.
That was what made it sting worse. He was hooked and Jack was… Jack had said he was nobody. Harry wouldn’t be able to lie like that, and a small part of him wished that Jack hadn’t been able to either.
“I know I’m not nobody,” he said, and Tobermory yowled. “And I know he doesn’t really think I’m nobody. It just hurt, that’s all.”
“Oh, man,” Ambrose said. He knocked their shoulders together. “When I was in year six, Mason Green told me that wearing my socks folded down made me look like a dick. I cried, not about the socks, but because I thought he’d been strutting his way across the playground to tell me he liked me.”
Harry snorted. “Yeah, except I’m not in grade six, am I?”
