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Chris can’t take it anymore. “How could it possibly work out?”
“You know what your problem is, Christian?” Silas snaps.
Chris lifts his brows in a challenge like, this is gonna be good.
“You can’t understand what it’s like to want someone to actually know you. That’s why you ghost everyone you date after a month. As soon as they want more, you’re out. It’s selfish.”
Chris barely twitches, but I see it. Silas and I both see it. It’s a brutal critique and, while I’d always thought of Chris as repressed, Silas’s assessment could be accurate.
“And your problem, Drew?—”
I hold up a hand to stop him. “No one asked?—”
He keeps going like I never spoke, “Is you can’t see a good thing when it’s right in front of you.”
“That’s how you see it?” I ask him. “Really?”
“That and you could probably use some lithium.”
“Are you trying to burn two bridges here?” I ask, hoping I keep my temper long enough not to set one on fire myself.
Silas softens slightly, letting some of the pain I know he carries on his shoulders everywhere he goes show for a moment. “I just want to give myself a chance to be happy.”
That is probably the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. It makes my heart hurt.
Silas gathers his keys from the end table, stands and pats his back pockets to ensure he’s got his phone and wallet. “I’m gonna take off. I might not be around much. If I can help with March rent, I’ll try, but I have some stuff I need to pay for—movers and whatever,” he mumbles.
It’s the ultimate sucker punch. I’m sitting on his couch. I sleep on his bed half the time. Without him and his stuff, Chris and I won’t have shit, including rent.
“Why come back? Just have the senator send his people,” Chris bites out, not quite over the shit Silas said to him, I’m guessing.
I’m not sure I can even remember the last time Chris was mean, much less lost his cool. He’s a reader and a poet and a little self-obsessed, maybe, but so even-tempered, it makes me think he’s got control issues. I’ve never seen him drink a drop of alcohol or use any mind-altering substance. He’s not “neurotypical” is what I’m saying, but neither am I. And while I wear my emotions on my sleeve, he usually keeps his tucked away.
He and I wait for Silas to leave before we turn to look at each other.
Chris is in a pale sweater and ripped jeans. His blond hair is sticking out at weird angles from running his hands through it during this whole, horrible conversation. This was why he’d been blowing up my phone trying to get me to come home. Well, that, and he heard what happened with Jericho through mutual friends.
“Well. Guess that’s that,” he says.
It’s a bleak statement, and there’s no arguing with it. “You don’t think we can talk him out of it?”
Chris gets off the stool he’s been perched on and plops down next to me on the couch. “I think we have to be practical. We knew it was coming. We’d have limped along for March, maybe April, but we’re gonna have to figure it out on our own from here.”
I frown at him. “You moving out, too?”
“I have an option,” he says. “When Eric bailed, I asked my boss for a raise. He was sympathetic, but it was a no-go on the raise. However, he offered me one of the old basement apartments until I find something else.”
“Do you mean the building super or Gibson?”
“Gibson.”
I don’t think of Gibson as my “boss,” but he technically owns the building I work for, too. Gibson Hayes and Christian’s father are old high school friends, even if they wound up following two very different paths in life. Christian’s dad is an officer in the military, so he’s not exactly rolling in dough. But I guess he’s passionate about his country or whatever.
“You just thought you’d hang onto that information?” I ask him.
“I checked out the place. It’s shitty, but it’s big. And it’s in the city.”
I’m just—stunned. I can’t believe this is all coming to a head right now. A planner by nature, I’m not a huge fan of scrambling to find a solution at the last second, especially when the consequences are so fucking dire.
