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And the emotions he’d been desperately trying to keep at bay crashed through the gates the second Victor wrapped his arms around Oliver’s middle and whispered into his neck, barely audible and probably not meant to be heard, “My love.”
He tried to clap a hand over his mouth, but he failed. It was too quiet to hide the noise he made, and he felt Victor scrambling to move away from him, to turn him onto his side. He felt hot tears sliding down his face and searched desperately for any excuse to explain away why he was fucking crying, but they were all lies, and they burned into ash on the tip of his tongue.
“What did I do? Oliver, please. Please. I’m so sorry. What did I do?” Victor begged.
Oliver wasn’t in hysterics. He was just overwhelmed, and it took a torturous eternity to find his voice. He reached for Victor, tangling their legs together, not giving a shit about the mess smearing between them as he kissed Victor all over his face.
“It’s not you,” he murmured. “It’s not you.” A lie, but a truth enough because what he was really saying was that Victor hadn’t caused him pain. Not in the way he was thinking.
His stormy emotions settled after a beat, and their breathing began to mirror as Oliver’s head tipped back. He could still see the sky, and as he blinked, four stars shot across his vision.
“Talk to me,” Victor whispered against his skin.
Oliver pushed fingers into his dark, coarse hair, scratching along his scalp. “I like you.”
Victor made a soft noise. “I like you. So much. This is—”
“I know.” Oliver couldn’t let him finish his sentence. It would hurt too much. What he wanted—what Victor wanted—there was no way forward. Oliver used to hear people all the time saying love wasn’t always enough, and he thought that was bullshit.
Until right in that moment.
He had fallen. Foolishly, helplessly, he was head over heels in just a manner of days, and there was nothing he could have done to stop it. Victor felt like his other half, and he’d never even believed in that sort of thing before.
And now he was going to have to let him go. He could count the hours until it would be over, and he felt like someone was ripping his heart out and feeding it to him, bit by bit.
“Just hold me,” Oliver said after a long while.
Victor’s arms tightened around him. He said nothing else, made no promises, though Oliver could feel the words he wanted to say. But he was grateful Victor was either too kind or too cowardly to voice them.
He closed his eyes when Victor smudged a kiss across his temple, and then he opened them and stared at the endless sky, watching all of those wishes fly away in streaks of fire.
Chapter17
Oliver was a coward.It was nothing new. He’d never been great at confrontation, and he was even worse at goodbyes. Thanks to therapy, he knew it was deep, deep abandonment issues that had fused to the very atoms that made up who he was, and nothing would change that.
Ever.
And while his therapist had given him some amazing coping mechanisms that probably would have worked if he’d put in the effort, Oliver found it was just easier to abandon ship the moment the water got rough. Which was exactly why he was tiptoeing through the living room at 9:00 a.m., heading for the front door.
They’d been awake for a few hours, and Oliver had waited for Victor to slip out onto the back terrace to take a call, and then he made his move. He grabbed his bag and set it by the front stoop, just outside the door, then hovered near the sofa and counted to five hundred.
When there was no sign of Victor, he left.
Or, he tried to.
He came to a screeching halt when he realized his bag was gone, and before he could panic about having been robbed in such a nice neighborhood, he saw Victor leaning against the hood of his car.
Oliver’s face immediately went bright red and hotter than the sun.
He almost never got caught, so this was definitely a new experience.
“Um…”
“I’m not going to ask you to explain yourself,” Victor said. “But I want a goodbye, so I’m taking matters into my own hands.”
Oliver swallowed against a hot, heavy throat. “How did you know?”
At that, Victor let out a huffing laugh through his nose and shook his head. “You have tells.”
