Bret Ellis and Thom Wright

Bret Ellis and Thom Wright are close friends whose easy companionship conceals Bret’s enduring, unconfessed love for Thom. Their relationship gives Bret a place inside Thom and Susan Reynolds’s couple-centered world, while also exposing the distance between the future he imagines and the one he can openly pursue. Years later, Bret’s recollections of Thom remain bound to that love and to the ache of having never found a comparable partner.

Friendship and Attraction

Thom and Susan had been together since sophomore year and, by the summer before senior year, were among the most popular students at Buckley. Bret describes them as beautiful, wealthy, and so habitually united that they seemed to move as one. He had been infatuated with both, but never admitted to either that his feelings amounted to love. His friendship with Susan began in seventh grade; Thom became part of Bret’s close orbit after he and Susan got together.

Bret’s attraction to Thom had taken shape earlier. After Thom returned from a summer in New York in 1979, Bret noticed that he seemed newly grown-up and attractive. Bret understood that Thom was resolutely heterosexual and repeatedly set aside any expectation that his own feelings would be returned. Thom’s apparent lack of self-consciousness and relaxed manner made him easy to be around, but also left Bret’s desire lodged in private fantasy rather than conversation.

Once the three had cars, the friendship settled into a shared routine: weekends together, movies in Westwood, time at the Jonathan Beach Club, and trips to the Century City Mall. The trio’s ease did not mean their feelings were equal. For Bret, being close to Thom and Susan made his affection part of daily life while keeping its most intimate meaning unspoken.

Friendship Under Strain

In the fall of 1981, Thom and Susan’s long relationship began to break apart. Bret remained close to both, and his attachment to Thom shaped how he experienced the breakup: he wanted to comfort his friend, but his wish for closeness was inseparable from a love Thom did not know about. When Susan ended things, Thom was visibly shaken. At school, Bret watched him struggle to contain his tears, then found him later in his Corvette, worried that he could not manage football practice.

Bret’s response was to suggest that they needed to do something about Robert Mallory, rather than offer the comfort he privately longed to give. The moment captures the limits of their intimacy: Bret could sit beside Thom in distress and act as his friend, yet could not tell him the truth about his feelings or simply promise that he would not leave. The heartbreak belonged to Thom’s breakup with Susan, but it also intensified Bret’s awareness of the life he wanted and could not claim.

Unspoken Feelings and Retrospective Meaning

Bret’s love for Thom remains unspoken even in moments when he nearly tells Thom something important. At one point Bret is about to disclose that Susan and Robert are together, but Debbie Schaffer interrupts before he can continue. Elsewhere, Bret admits that after the breakup he wanted to touch Thom and reassure him, but instead turns the conversation toward Robert. Their friendship thus operates through withheld speech: Bret is present, attentive, and emotionally invested, while his most personal truth stays concealed.

Decades later, Bret’s account gives the relationship a lasting significance beyond their school years. He recalls that his love for Thom began with the attraction he felt after Thom’s return from summer away, and says that he has never met a man he wanted to live with as much. He also recognizes that this longing remained bound to an imagined future and to a youthful version of himself. The friendship endures in memory as both genuine companionship and the setting for a love that was never openly shared.