Ex gay husband - 4. Similarities

It was Friday evening. The last days, Colin and I texted every evening without exception. He had gone to the kitchen and returned with a bowl of oatmeal.

"You eat oatmeal as well?," I asked. "I don't mean ready-made muesli, but freshly homemade. That's why I call it oatmeal and not muesli. To distinguish that."

"Sure, it's delicious. A lot of people call it muesli—but I'm also not one of them."

When the conversation continued, he inquired: "I hope, I don't restrain you from doing something else."

I denied that and asked him, what gave him that idea.

"It's Friday night," he replied.

"Yeah, so?," I reacted a bit confused.

"Well, I have this feeling that I bother people or restrain them from doing something more important or enjoyable."

"With me?"

"No, in general. It's a quirk of mine. You didn't give me that idea if you were thinking that."

"In fact, I know that feeling," I let him know. "I, too, have that all the time. Well, I guess, I shouldn't say 'So do I' to every one of your traits."

"I just sometimes think, I'm annoying."

"Oh, there's no need to worry about that when you're with me," I comforted him.

"Sometimes, I'm honestly annoying," he told me. "Some of my traits can look strange to others."

When I heard the characteristic sound of a new instant message, I realized that we didn't talk to each other for a couple of minutes. He just sent me a YouTube link to a music video by a German musician. I didn't know him at that time, and I didn't like his music when I heard it the first time.

∞

Mark had another special trait. He refused to pronounce my nickname the way everybody else did. Instead of calling me Sammi, he called me Sami. He argued that Samuel also only had one M, and therefore short form could also only have one. I in return argued that my brother was the one who called me Sammi first and, on the other hand, Sami always reminded me of Sami Slimani. But Mark deliberately ignored me, and so I forfeited eventually.

"Hey Sami"

Mark and I skyped. But instead of talking about every day occurrences or the forum as always, Mark got onto a subject that seemed to weight on his mind.

"Well?," he asked.

"Yeah, so?" I didn't have any clue, what he was up to, let alone, why he was so interested in that particular topic. Especially, since nothing interested had happened to me recently.

"You and Colin?"

I still didn't have the foggiest notion, so I tried a shot in the dark: "If we are a couple? No, why?"

"We're working on that," was his answer, that I would hear more often now and which had become one of Mark's catchphrases.

I raised an eyebrow what Mark probably didn't see, because although we had video chat activated, we didn't look too frequently onto the Skype window and did stuff as a sideline.