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“Tell me more about Liam.” Now that he’d gotten Sol started on the subject, Butch didn’t want to distract him from it.
“I fell for him, hard and fast. Even took him to meet my folks, and they fell under his spell too. They hadn’t much liked the idea of me with an older guy, and Liam was about six years younger than me. We got a house together, and I thought, this is it, I’ve found my happy place.” Sol’s Adam’s apple bobbed sharply. “And wewerehappy, right up till June 2017.”
Butch’s throat seized. “You don’t have to tell me the next part if you don’t want to.” Hearing Toby’s cut-down version had been bad enough.
Hearing about it from Sol’s lips had the potential to break him.
“Yes, I do, and we both know it.” Sol rested his head against the seat cushion and closed his eyes. “Liam was into music in a big way. I was kinda old school—”
“Yeah, I noticed that about you,” Butch quipped.
Sol opened his eyes and gave him a mock glare. “I meant, I preferred classical, while he loved pop, country… So anyway, he asked if I’d go with him to a concert at the Cheyenne Civic Center. Layla Roberts and her band were playing there, and he’d bought two tickets. I swear, he had every one of her albums. Of course it wasn’t my thing, so I said I didn’t want to go.”
Butch’s skin prickled. The Cheyenne Civic Center. The Layla Roberts concert. It had been on the news for about three days, casting a pall over the whole ranch.
Liam was one of the nine.
He shivered.
“Liam must’ve asked me four or five times, and I kept saying no, so eventually he asked a coworker if they wanted my ticket, and they said yes. The night of the concert, he kissed me, said he’d be back around midnight, and off they went.” His eyes glistened. “Last time I saw him, he was wearing a tee he’d had made for the occasion, with a photo of Layla surrounded by red hearts.”
Butch’s chest tightened. He remembered the news footage, the usual tweets abouts thoughts and prayers for the families of the nine dead concert-goers, the others who’d been injured, the stuff they’d turned up about Driscoll Gavin Delaney, the forty-seven-year-old man who’d apparently taken it into his head to buy an AR-15-style rifle, smuggle it into the arena, then fire into the crowd before a security guard took him down with a couple of body shots, including one to the leg.
Bastard had died from his injuries, and no one listened to his family who proclaimed him to be a good man. The shit the police found on his laptop made everything they said a goddamn lie.
He laid a hand on Sol’s arm. “It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me any more. I remember.”
Tears streaked Sol’s cheeks. “I’d already heard the sirens when I got the call from the police. It was all over the news. I just couldn’t believe Liam was one of the victims. I kept on thinking that until they asked me to identify his body. His coworker survived his injuries. And when I told my parents…” He shuddered out a sigh. “They loved him too, but they blamed me for his death.”
“What the fuck?”
He nodded. “I know, right? They said if I’d gone with him, Liam would still be alive.”
“They can’t know that,” Butch protested. “That’s totally illogical. If you’d been there, Liam still might have died. You both might have lived… In the end, it’s all guesswork. You could’ve done everything or nothing, and adding a whole heap of guilt to any of those scenarios wouldn’t change a thing.”
“I know!” Sol’s voice rose, and Butch squeezed his arm. “That was when I decided I couldn’t stay in Wyoming anymore. So I packed up everything, gave all Liam’s stuff to Goodwill, except for a couple of things, and I moved to San Francisco.” His eyes held such pain that Butch flinched. They glistened as his tears flowed once more, and Butch didn’t hesitate. He held Sol close, not giving a damn for his soaked shirt, his own tears wetting Sol’s cheeks.
Sol needed to be held.
At last, Sol’s tears ebbed but Butch didn’t move.
“Thank you for trusting me,” he whispered. They sat in silence, Butch listening as Sol’s breathing slowed to its usual speed, content to hold him, to comfort him. “I said I’d be here for you.”
“And you were.” Sol tilted his head, and their lips met in a sweet kiss. Sol laid his head upon Butch’s shoulder. “Sorry it took me so long to tell you all this. And you were right. I needed to share this with you.” Then he sat up and looked Butch in the eye. “There was something else I needed to ask you as well.”
Butch’s heart raced. “Yeah?”
“I imagined a life with you once, and I ran from it. But I’m not running anymore. I want to make this work—if you still want that too.”
There was a drumming in Butch’s chest, a rush of adrenaline, a grin he couldn’t contain. “Yeah, I still want it. And we’ll figure out a way to make it work. You visit here whenever you can. I don’t mind waiting, as long as I know you’ll be here.”
Sol’s eyes sparkled. “But that’s what I came here to tell you. You won’t have to wait. I got a new job, in Montana.”
A wave of euphoria crashed over him. “Really? That’s great. Where?”
“There’s this ranch that just started something new, a place for guys into BDSM…” Sol didn’t break eye contact.
No. Fucking.Way.
