Lost.
So fucking lost.
Guilt washed over him, followed quickly by anger. He should’ve wanted the same things Melissa had wanted. His ex-wife. He should’ve wanted the life sheoffered him, and yet… he didn’t. No matter how many times he tried to convince himself otherwise, and how much easier his life might’ve been if he had.
Or worse, his mind whispered.
“My ex and I separated a while ago,” John explained. “It was best for both of us. We recognized we couldn’t give each other what we wanted. She’s now happily remarried, adopting her second kid.”
John felt a wave of shame as he thought about how much Melissa had accomplished once she had finally left him.
Maybe if he slowed down with work? Maybe if he listened…?
He shook his head, refusing to get sucked back into that spiral.
What was done was done. He couldn’t go back and fix their marriage. And if he were honest with himself, he didn’t want to.
He had been so focused on meeting his family's expectations: college, relationship, career, family, that one day he woke up, five years married and drifting through his relationship with his wife and with himself. He’d lost touch with what he wanted, and then Melissa began to push for a baby and everything in his world came crashing down.
Love was not what he thought it was.
Love eventually led to something he couldn’t give.
So, he ran to the only place that felt familiar.
His job.
And he worked a lot. He was the type of doctor who valued staying up to date with the latest medical journals and research papers. He thrived on knowledge and learning, which made him a better leader and a better attendant to his residents-in-training. The problem was that the politics of the hospital environment were becoming more convoluted under the constant pressure from higher-ups and insurance companies, who seemed to be more in charge of his job than he was half the time.
His job was hard enough without the constant red tape, making it difficult to find it a refuge from his mind lately.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Miles asked curiously, patiently coaxing John to peel back the layers of his life.
John’s throat closed, his stiff shoulder inching closer to his ear, and he rolled it, attempting to make it settle.
Do I really want this?
To purge myself on someone’s couch?
Is this really going to help me?
John opened his mouth to reply when his phone dinged.
“Excuse me,” he murmured, pulling it out from his back pocket. He was about to turn it off when he glimpsed the number and quickly opened it.
We still on?
A flutter of excitement rushed over him. Feeling the unexpected tremble in his hands, John texted back quickly.
Yes.
He clicked off his phone and leaned back. Relief swirled at the base of his spine, all the way up to his shitty headache, which surprised him. All because Ben had texted him.
The young man had been sucking his dick for the past couple of months, and he, in return, had gotten to do the same. And it had been exhilarating, if not fundamentally life altering. Not for Ben himself, but for the sex. It had been fucking bliss, and exactly what he’d been missing in his forty-plus years of life on this spinning globe in the vast universe.
John’s awakening to his sexuality had been painfully slow.
It wasn’t until Melissa had left him and he had crawled long enough out of his pain that he began to recognize certain things about others… specifically men. He noticed he looked a little longer at attractive men, far more often than he did at attractive women. It was merely a suspicion at first that seemed to grow louder every day, making it impossible for him to continue to ignore. He explored gay porn first, in the privacy and comfort of his home, and watched it only a handful of times. He was unable to look away at certain men in those videos—the handsome, virile, and strong young men, who were so confident, so claiming of their desires that it left him breathless and harder than a damn sledgehammer.
