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“Why not?”
My mind goes blank as I stare at him. “What?”
“Why shouldn’t you move out there? I can’t run the business unless I move home, and you can’t move to Iowa for me. That doesn’t make any fucking sense. So I don’t know what we’re even pretending is gonna happen.” His voice is calm, but I can see anguish in his eyes.
“You can’t dump me over video chat when I’m 9,000 miles away.”
“You can’t turn down your dream job when we’re just going to break up in a few months anyway.”
“Listen.” I grasp at the trailing threads of the conversation, trying to rein it in. “We’re both tired and we’ve had a very long week. Let’s talk about this later.”
He nods slowly, some unspeakable emotion working its way across his face. “I’m glad you got there safely. Eat some dinner. Talk to you later.” Then he’s gone, a blank screen in my hand. When I try to call him back, he doesn’t answer. I try again thirty minutes later with no success.
I shove my salad around my bowl for a while, my stomach a hard, painful knot. Wandering out to the balcony in the orange glow of sunset, breathing in a strange summer air thick with the smell of flowers and the chirps of unfamiliar birds, I call Victor.
“It’s way too early for whatever this is.”
“I’ve fucked everything up.”
He sighs. “Where are you?”
“Australia.”
“Wait, excuse me? How badly have you fucked this?”
“Pretty badly.”
“Hold on.” His voice turns dangerous. “What have you done with your boy? If you hurt him, I swear to God I’m going to send Ethan to rip your head off. He hates flying, but he’ll go to Australia if I tell him to.”
“Jonah found an incredible job offer for me here and told me I should go check it out.”
There’s a long pause.
“And youwent?”
“Hetoldme to. Then he went back to Iowa and stopped talking to me.”
“God. You’re hopeless.”
“I didn’t need to call you to know that.”
“He did the one thing he thought would make you happy, and that was your chance to say no. Ethan tells me I have the emotional intelligence of a piece of tree bark and even I can figure this shit out. Believe it or not, you melodramatic, self-flagellating fool, you do have a choice in all this.”
“The hell I do. We’re not in some fairy tale about true love conquering all.”
“I don’t know about that. The way you two looked at each other.”
This time, I don’t answer. I can’t. Because my throat’s not working anymore and the warm wind off the sea is burning something wet and hot in my eyes. I’ve walked this road for so many years, made it a part of me and myself a part of it until I’m nothing but this blind trust that someday I’ll turn the corner and see redemption. But there is no end. There will never be an end. Everyone else figured it out a long time ago, and I’m still here, alone and hurting and meaningless.
You’re his home. No one else has ever wanted him like that. You make sure he knows you’re not going anywhere.
“I told you, Gray,” he says finally. “A piece of your soul, under the stove. You can leave it there and move house, or you can rip the damn stove out of the wall and get to him before the cockroaches carry him away.”
“My house would never have cockroaches.”
“Work with me.”
“This was never supposed to happen,” I say helplessly. “Not after everything. I don’t deserve him.”
He’s quiet for a minute. “If we got what we deserved, you and I would be royally fucked.”
And he must have reached his emotional quota for the day, probably for his entire year, because he hangs up on me.
