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Chapter 25
He was a coward. There was no way around it. Settling into the core of him, right down to his very bones, was a type of cowardice he hadn’t even known was possible for him to inhabit.
He’d mulled over his actions a thousand times. Trying to come to some kind of conclusion that didn’t leave him believing wholeheartedly that he was an awful person. He never got there though. No justification was enough to quell his self-loathing. How could it? He’d run out on both his Gram and Aja without so much as a real explanation why.
He’d left Aja’s in a daze, his head hurting as much as his heart as he pushed his truck hard to get to Gram’s faster. When he’d gotten there, she’d been sitting in her spot on the couch, the table lamp on beside her. She hadn’t been watching the television or reading the paper; she’d been staring straight ahead. She didn’t even look up when he came in. Made no move to stop him when he thundered up the stairs to his room.
He had his bags packed in five minutes. He had laundry waiting to come out of the dryer, but he made no move to retrieve it. He’d just count it as another loss. One in a long line of losses he was experiencing.
He stopped by the couch when he made it back downstairs, bags in hand. His jaw tight. He didn’t know what to say. Especially knowing that he was about to hurt her. He tried to lessen the blow by reminding himself that she’d been through this exact scenario once before. Hell, the first time she’d had even longer to prepare. What did it say about him that his own grandmother was so used to him leaving that he doubted this would even be a blip on her radar?
He’d told her that he loved her on the way out. Told her that he was sorry, so, so sorry, but he wasn’t ready to see Benny yet. Wasn’t ready for whatever life-changing thing was going to roll into Greenbelt along with his father.
She’d said that she understood, but the weariness in her voice was obvious. Shame folded over him, thick like a blanket, but it wasn’t enough to make him stay.
He got to Charleston in the wee hours of the morning. The relief he felt upon seeing the city skyline from the highway was nearly enough to make him cry. He made it back to his silent apartment, threw his bags down by the door, and passed out on the couch within minutes.
It wasn’t until the next afternoon that the relief of being home found itself confronted with the pain of what he’d left in Greenbelt.
Being back in a place where he could walk down the street and know that the shadow of his past wasn’t visible to everyone else felt incredible. So did not being paranoid when he heard people around him laugh or chuckle. Those feelings were invaluable, and he’d missed them.
He was also thankful to be back in his apartment, where the walls were thicker, and in his bed, with a mattress that didn’t have his back hurting when he woke up. He also got to be truly alone for the first time in almost two full months. That might have been the best part: the silence, the freedom to walk around his house with his dick out without worrying about anyone else.
He’d missed his friends, the easy camaraderie that he hadn’t always realized was so important to him. He’d even missed his office—though he planned on talking to his editor about transitioning to remote work once he got settled in a little more. He had enjoyed the freedom of it and had even been more productive working from Gram’s house than at his actual desk.
There was also the tepid relief that came with not having to deal with the state of his relationship with his father. He wasn’t completely delusional; it would have to come sometime. It loomed over him, shadowing everything he did.
He had more than one shadow too. One seemed to exist for every good thing he’d walked out on. He missed his Gram in a way he hadn’t let himself miss her in years. He missed the smell of her perfume and hearing her whistle as she moved about the house in the morning. Missed the way she threaded her fingers through his hair and made him feel like a coddled child again.
He’d left with the promise that he would reach out to her more, and that when he did, their conversations would be better than they’d been in the past. He’d promised that he’d keep opening up to her and allow her to do the same.
And there was Aja.
Thinking about her made his chest ache. He knew he should try to get his mind off her, but he couldn’t bring himself to. She invaded every single one of his thoughts. He didn’t have her physical presence with him, couldn’t touch her or talk to her—hell, he hadn’t even had the forethought to take a picture of her before he fled. When left with nothing but memories, his mind refused to wipe her out.
She was there when he woke up, while he worked, before he went to sleep. He jerked off to the thought of her damned near every day. It was nothing for him to experience something interesting or funny and immediately get punched in the gut with the need to tell her about it. He always forgot that he couldn’t. Then when he remembered, he was almost knocked off his feet by the reality of it.
He hadn’t planned to end things that way. He hadn’t been entirely sure how he and Aja were going to bring about the end of their arrangement, but he knew that they hadn’t planned on this. Not him leaving in the middle of the night, right after the best sex of his life, without so much as an earnest good-bye. God, he was an asshole. Every way he turned it, he was at fault, and that made him feel like the most worthless piece of shit in the world.
He had her number in his phone, still sitting right up near the top of his recent calls list. His thumb had hovered over the call button a dozen times since he’d been back in Charleston, but he never pressed it. He didn’t know what to say or how to say it. There was no explanation he could give her that would make his actions any less awful. She was probably better off without him. Maybe a clean break was what she needed to forget him completely—though the same could never be said for him.
So he wallowed. Alone in his rumpled bed. He spent the time that he didn’t spend working thinking about her. About the countless different ways that things could have turned out for them.
Maybe the mature thing would have been to try out a friendship. Maybe that would have meant they were extra evolved, that their relationship went past the need for a romantic entanglement. But Walker didn’t want to be her friend. He’d already tried that, and he’d failed so spectacularly that he had gone and fallen in love with her like a fool.
He resigned himself to spending his days without her, constantly wondering, forever longing. He moved through his life as he would have before. Now, though, everything felt sluggish, devoid of vitality. He tried to hide this, tried to make himself look as normal as he possibly could. But he knew people could smell the misery on him. At some point, it became so obvious that he stopped trying to hide it.
Eventually it got so bad that, at another awkward dinner party sometime in mid-August, three weeks after he’d returned, he found himself cornered.
“OK, so, we didn’t exactly know how to stage an intervention, but Adya said they were pretty much like dinner parties without the hors d’oeuvres, so we just… kept the hors d’oeuvres,” Corey said. He was holding hands with his girlfriend on the couch across from Walker, their dark, imploring eyes peering over at him.
Jamie sat next to him, the only other white dude in their small circle, looking just as pale and uncomfortable as Walker felt. Andre and Nate hadn’t been able to make it tonight. But neither were great at emoting verbally, so he wondered if they’d balked at the idea of having to talk to Walker about his feelings.
He’d been looking forward to eating some of the spinach dip Jamie always brought. Now he felt nothing but envy for the two men who got to be anywhere other than Corey and Adya’s apartment.
“What in the hell are you talkin’ about, Corey? An intervention? I barely like smokin’ that awful pot you like bringin’ around, I’m not a damned addict.”
“This isn’t that kind of intervention.” Adya ran a hand through her dark hair. “It’s an emotional intervention.”
