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“I've always loved you, you know.”
Roy looked up from the bottle of whiskey nestled between his folded legs and gazed at Maes, who favored him with a grin and an apologetic shrug. He supposed he should have been more taken aback by the sudden and seemingly random admission, wholly out of place as the two of them sat on the floor of his living room, basking in the darkness of a moonless night. But he wasn't shocked, not one bit. The surreality of the moment had effectively robbed him of any ability to express something of a more appropriate reaction to the nonchalant confirmation of a longtime suspicion.
He was talking to a dead man, after all.
“Why didn't you ever tell me?” Roy asked, taking a generous swig of the drink.
Maes pushed up his glasses and took the offered bottle, upending it and drinking deeply. When he was finished, he wiped his mouth and handed the bottle back to Roy. “It wasn't something you were ready to hear,” he confided, wincing at the aftertaste. “I don't think you ever would have been ready, to be honest.”
Roy nodded slowly. The man was right; he had never been one to hold such a proclamation in high regard, at least when uttered from the mouths of women with whom he had no intention of becoming serious.
But if it had been Maes, then... well, who knows what might have come of it?
“So why are you telling me now?”
“Because you're dreaming,” Maes replied. He regarded Roy with a sad, wry smile. “You're going to wake up and forget all about it.”
“I will not,” Roy insisted, his brow creasing in a stubborn frown. “How could I forget something like that?”
Maes could only chuckle in the face of Roy's uncharacteristically adorable petulance, a cross between a scowl and a pout, even now, reserved for his eyes only, as were so many of the man's kinder, gentler traits. “Come on,” he said softly, scooting beside him and giving him a firm swat on the back. “It's almost morning. Drink up.”
And with that, the two friends spent their remaining time together swapping both the bottle and tales of old as they had done time and time again throughout the course of their years, fiercely debating and laughing merrily over shared memories, limbs gradually becoming intertwined while respectively embracing the rare gift of closure afforded by their seemingly insignificant exchanges, sparing neither thought nor care to the waking world or hereafter. Later, Roy awoke for the first time, in a long time, shrouded in a sense of peace and calm and anticipation of the new day, the ever-present weight on his conscience just a tad bit lighter than it had been the night before.
All because of a dream that he would never remember.