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“I don’t know…”
It could be a ruse, another one of the games they’d played with each other, a ploy to get him back, but what if it wasn’t? What if selling the Victorian was an ultimatum? Alek didn’t like the odds. Ian’s threats were never idle. The fact that Alek was alive and at Alder House was proof of that.
He tore the letter that accompanied the ad back off the desk.
Alek,
The listing is real. Check the MLS. If the Victorian is mine, then I don’t want it.
Ian
PS I won’t sell it to you or any shady overseas LLC, so don’t get any ideas.
Alek stood, pushing the chair back from the desk. “Briar, out. I need to think.”
Briar eyed the chocolates. Alek nodded once. With a dimpled smile, she snatched a handful and left the room.
In the hall, she said, “I’m here when you want to talk. It’s not an empty platitude.” She popped another chocolate in her mouth. “I find your love life riveting.”
“Haha,” Alek deadpanned, closing the door.
He returned to his desk, and the letters. He would simply work backward, skimming only the most recent letters for clues, reading clinically, from a purely investigative standpoint. He wouldn’t let Ian’s words weaken his resolve. That’s why he hadn’t read the letters in the first place.
A half dozen letters down, Alek spotted ‘the Victorian’ and read:
Alek,
I don’t know if you’re getting these, or if you’re even still at Alder House, but I moved out of the Victorian and I want you to know it’s not because I’ve stopped waiting. It’s because I can’t be in the Victorian without you there with me. I’m still waiting… just in a fifteen-year-old twin bed in my childhood bedroom.
Ian
Alek gathered the rest of Ian’s letters and climbed onto his bed. He started at the beginning, with the oldest letter first. As he read, his mind filled with Ian’s voice rumbling apologies and vows of love, insistence that he’d wait, desperate pleas that Alek talk to him, and the occasional update on how he was getting on.
He kept reading letter after letter, long after the excuse of investigating Ian’s real estate motives could apply. In one letter Ian had detailed the night they first met, the moment he fell in love, how he felt when Alek fell and he thought he lost him forever.
A series of several letters outlined the progress of the library, complete with pictures, and complaining of how he’d agonized over this decision or that without Alek there to weigh in.
There were assurances that the wisteria was still alive and well, whole essays on what he loved about Alek, what he planned for their future, why he knew they could make it work, the research he’d done to prepare for any future depressive episodes should they arise.
One letter was written entirely in Bulgarian—not very good Bulgarian, but Bulgarian nonetheless. In the letter Ian confessed, the tone rather guilty, to learning Bulgarian in secret.
Bless him. Ian might have hidden the staged suicide from him, but that was only because he was literally psychotic at the time. Alek knew all about the Bulgarian. He’d stumbled upon Ian’s flash cards during the first month they’d been home. He’d even made the effort to hide them for him better.
By the time Alek finished the last unread letter, Ian’s voice echoed endlessly against the inside of his head, and if he closed his eyes he could see Ian’s squared, neat handwriting and smell the ink that bled into the page.
Alek walked to the front desk and requested to use the phone, then dragged it down the counter as far as the cord would allow. Turning away and resting his back against the counter, he dialed Ian’s number and waited.
The phone rang once…
Twice…
When Ian answered, he sounded the same as he always did, a little bit gruff, his voice clear, confident.
“This is Ian,” he said and each of those three uttered words unleashed a torrent of butterflies that coalesced until Alek felt like he was flying.
He closed his eyes and let his mind fill in the details, the ghost of Ian’s scent—cedar and pine—the way his dark brownhair stuck up at the back when he woke up in the morning, the scrape of his beard against Alek’s neck, the warmth of his body wrapped around him…
“Alek?” Ian asked with a dash of hope bleeding through.
