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“Forget it, you don—”
“That’s Dean.” Austin’s jaw twitched. “He was… well, he was my fiancé. That picture was taken a week before he proposed to me. We never got to get married. He died before we could have the Malibu wedding he was always talking about.”
“Oh, Austin, I didn’t know…”
“It’s been four months without him. It doesn’t get easier, but it does get numb. Every day, I feel the pain a little less. Still there, though, like someone has my heart in their hands and they just squeeze every now and then. It’s why I had to leave the city. Every single street reminded me of him, every park, every bodega, everything.”
That left me speechless. It was like a flash grenade had been lobbed through the window and exploded in the center of the living room. “How did he pass?”
“A hit-and-run. He was on his way to get some last-minute ingredients for our date night. Just crossing the street over to a bodega we always went to. He died before I could get downstairs.”
“Austin, my God. I’m so sorry. Fuck.”
“I’ve made as much peace with it as I can. Some days are easier than others, but being back in Blue Creek seems to be helping.” He looked to me, a smile growing—slowly—on his face. My insides felt raw, speaking about Dean’s death, but it also felt therapeutic. I wanted to talk about Dean, and I wanted Charlie to know about him. “I thought I’d be avoiding the shit out of you, but thankfully it seems like life had different plans for me.”
“Can I ask you… why Blue Creek? Why come back home?”
“I felt like I needed it. Besides, everything lined up so perfectly. Zane—he’s the guy who opened the original Stonewall—he told us his plans about expanding and how he wanted to reach smaller communities that could use our help. I figured if it was too much, then I’d just move again.”
“Has it been? Too much?”
“Not at all,” Austin said, his smile only growing. I could recognize the heartbreak in his gaze now, an echo of the pain that thrummed through him on a daily basis. His smile, though, that showed me the hope he still held, and it drew me in like a semi-drunken moth to a bright-as-fuck flame.
“Where would you move to?” I asked. “If it weren’t Blue Creek, where would you go?”
Austin crossed his arms and looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “Probably somewhere overseas. My parents moved back to Spain, so that would be up there on the list. London, possibly?”
“Ah right, all places that really resemble Blue Creek.”
Austin laughed loud at that. “You’re right, very similar.” He shrugged, putting his feet back on the table. “I don’t know what it is about this town. Something just pulls me back to it.”
“Yeah,” I said, leaning back and melting into the couch, “I wonder what that could be.”
“I wonder,” Austin parroted me.
The conversation shifted into smoother waters as we talked about Spain, particularly about Granada, which was the city his parents were from. He showed me pictures of the medieval castles that crowned tree-covered hilltops which you could see from his parents’ yard, and he told me stories of being a kid and visiting his grandparents, getting lost with his cousins through the streets of the historic city.
It felt like an entire night passed us by, but when I checked the clock, it had only been a couple of hours, marked by only one refill of my whiskey.
Austin got up to put a new record on. My eyes made a quick round trip up and down his body, admiring the hunk of a man who walked back to the couch, his jeans bunching around the crotch so that it made the perfect pillow for my head.
Yeah, this is good whiskey.
I set the glass down on the coffee table as Austin sat back down, moving closer to me on the couch than he had been last time. The alcohol was knocking down every single one of my walls, relaxing my muscles and flooding my veins with a delicious, hazy warmth. My focus was drawn to the growing heat between my thighs, pulsing and spreading, making my thoughts a jumbled mess of “holy shit I want to jump on him right fucking now and feel his body all against mine” and “no, this is wrong, it’s too fast, I shouldn’t.”
Then again, what was considered “too fast” when we’d known each other for years?
When I’d had his body against mine, his lips against mine—I just couldn’t remember.
The thoughts careened against each other in my skull.
I tuned it all out and let the whiskey river carry me down.
I put a hand on Austin’s leg, testing the waters. Austin didn’t move away or stand up or tell me to leave.
He did the opposite. He opened his legs wider. He looked at me, the same smolder I felt in my chest reflected back in his gaze. Austin licked his lips and put his big hand over mine, bringing my hand up higher on his thigh, inviting me in.
