But it’s easier to invoke the past with people who don’t and will never know me very well. The pain of losing Liam has softened to the point that I don’t drop to my knees every time I think about what happened.
In the rare moods I feel like it, I smile. I can laugh about old memories without falling apart. I can picture him now, staring at me from across the room, silently judging me for the way I let myself go, and I no longer feel like I want to crawl out of my own skin to escape the grief.
But I hate talking about it.
I’d rather carve my tongue out and stick it in a jar on my desk. Which is macabre as fuck, I know, and maybe I should go be a horror writer instead of trying to conjure images of a romance I’ll never have again.
And maybe never did.
“See you later, Mr. Baylin,” I say and hurry back inside.
The moment the door shuts, my stomach gives an obnoxious growl, and I fight back a sigh. I’m not the best at taking care of my basic needs. I usually remember a daily shower, but if I could get away with only needing to eat once a week, I’d be the happiest man on the planet.
Shuffling into the kitchen, I pull open the pantry door and stare at the bare shelves. There are a couple of bags of chips that are clipped shut, but I know for a fact that they’ve reached the chewy part of being stale.
Besides that, there’s a sack of potatoes whose eyes have grown arms and should probably be planted at this point. There’s bread, but the bag is coated in green, and I’ll have tothrow that away as quickly as possible, and on the floor is a tub of cooking oil I haven’t touched in god only knows how long.
I would probably be mortified if anyone were around here to see it, but there isn’t, so I turn to the fridge and decide it’s time to take out something Easton has left me in the freezer.
I open it and blink.
Nothing but an empty ice bin.
“This is a problem,” I mutter to myself.
Not even my internal, disembodied voice answers me back. That’s how pathetic I am. Walking to the counter, I stare into my fishtank holding five guppies and watch as they lazily swim back and forth.
They’re well-fed, at least.
“I should do something about my life, right?” I ask them.
They don’t answer me either.
I make it halfway to the store before I realize Easton has my damn bank card, so I’m turning left instead of right. My thighs are burning, along with my hip, which tells me I really need to start walking more, and I come to a stop in front of the station.
The sun is almost set, so most of the guys are inside, but I catch a glimpse of someone digging around in their car. I can tell immediately by the skinny body and the way he lifts up one leg to balance on the other that it’s Teddy.
I feel a tiny ping of embarrassment creeping up my spine for the way we first met. It was a sports bar that was too loud for him to hear me, and I was the widowed, grieving man who was still struggling with aphasia and halfway through the dinner forgot where I was and who I was with.
That was four years ago, and I’m still angry about it, but it’s not Teddy’s fault my brother tried to blindside the both of us with a blind date neither of us knew we were on.
Easton is a good person—he sees the best in everyone, and all he wants is for the people he loves to be happy. But he can be a bit of a dipshit about it and didn’t consider that his grieving brother and a guy dealing with a career change and massive hearing loss might not want to dive into a relationship.
Teddy had looked as horrified as I felt when I started panicking about who he was, and he ran off without explaining, only to show up at my door two days later with a written note and a grimace on his face.
At the time, he was six weeks post-cochlear implant surgery—two weeks after activation, so he was still training his brain how to hear again after his sudden and total hearing loss. The note explained he couldn’t understand me, had no idea how to get me to calm down, and he panicked.
He felt bad about leaving me there, and I felt bad about falling apart. We had coffee and became friends and took some ASL together at the local community center run by a pharmacist CODA with too much time on his hands living in a town as small as Harmony fucking Creek, Massachusetts.
“Teddy!” I call out, but he doesn’t turn, which means he’s probably digging around for his CI batteries.
It takes me half a minute to cross the parking lot, and I feel bad when I bang on the side of the car and he jumps, smacking his head on the roof.
Rubbing his temple, he turns with a grimace, but it quickly melts into a small grin. “Hey!” He always talks a little too loudly when he can’t hear. “Give me a second. Hearing’s dead.”
‘Go for it,’ I sign.
I see him relax a fraction. Most of the people around here don’t sign, except a handful of work ASL—as Teddy calls it. It’senough to get by on important shit when he’s on calls and his CIs can’t filter out the chaos post-fire.
