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“No one is stopping you,” he murmured. But, in a way, he was. Her love for him gave her second thoughts with every decision she made, and she’d never lived with limitations like that before. She was the woman who had never stayed in one place more than a year. The woman who took strangers to bed, falling in love for moments instead of months. Instead of years.
And she didn’t resent Raphael for changing those things about her, but in the same way his mother’s love had suffocated him, his own was weighing Chiara down.
He knew that was why he woke up to find her gone, a note on her pillow that saidsee you soon—but read like a goodbye. He was shaking when he took the note downstairs to the salon where Anders was getting everything ready for the day, and Raphael saw the look in his eyes.
“She won’t be back.” His tone was final, and it was cemented in the way Anders shook his head and sighed. “How many like me has she dropped on your doorstep?”
At that, Anders laughed. He was an older man even then, his black hair going grey, his fingers bending more than was natural at his knuckles. He towered over Raphael, and cupped his cheeks, and smiled as he looked straight into his eyes.
“None like you,sötnos.” He kissed him on either cheek. “Never like you. Stay a while, yes?”
And he did. Raphael’s options were to stay at the salon and keep learning the art of massage at Anders’s clever hands or flee back into his mother’s arms. And if he did that, he didn’t think she’d ever let him go again.
A while in Örebro turned into a year, and then five. He slipped quietly into his late twenties and watched himself age, just a little, in the mirror—new lines around his eyes and mouth, new stiffness to his legs. He was growing restless again, and he found himself glancing out the window as if maybe Chiara would appear like the forest nymph she had to have been in her former life. Every day he waited, and he worked, and every day he went to bed emptier than before.
Salvation came at the hands of a tall American with soft brown hair and an accent to his German that made Raphael smile. His name was Cody, and Raphael loved saying it, just like he loved the way Cody said his own name in that rough, back of the tongue way Americans spoke.
Cody was good at begging, at giving, at going pliant under Raphael’s hands as he pushed into him and fucked him into the mattress. Cody had a thousand questions about his body the same way Chiara had, only he was safer. He didn’t wander. He had sowed his oats and was just taking a little vacation before returning home, and it was almost a given when he begged Raphael to go back with him.
“I know it’s America, and everyone hates Americans, but I don’t want to lose you.”
It was easy to say yes, even when Raphael could see the cracks forming long before they set foot on American soil. But Raphael had never been afraid of change, and he’d never been afraid of being alone.
It wasn’t a surprise when Cody walked away after finding Raphael in the throes of his third seizure in a week. Like Chiara, he didn’t laugh when Raphael pissed his pants, but unlike her, he was shaken. He knew a Raphael who was stronger on the outside.
The Raphael who didn’t need help and had soft words and a gentle tongue.
He was unprepared for the moods the seizures caused and the way words fell from his lips that he didn’t mean, fueled by the wires in his brain getting crossed. He promised he understood, he promised it was okay, but Raphael could hear the lie in every breath.
Cody managed to form a pathetic, ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ before offering Raphael the number to a man opening a salon a few hours away from Atlanta in Savannah, and then he stared at Raphael’s suitcase, like maybe it would start packing itself. It was easy enough to put one crutch in front of the other, to kneel beside the long stretch of dresser that never felt like his.
Each item packed away felt like a promise to himself that the next time this happened—if he ever let anyone close like this again, it would be different. The person would be worthy. They would mean something more to him than just an escape. And he couldn’t help but feel cursed, like falling in love with him fundamentally shifted a person deep inside. It twisted them until they could no longer bring themselves to stay, and maybe it was the universe telling him he could have strength, and he could have security, but it came with a price.
Maybe it was the best part, or maybe it was the worst, but the day he got into his car and watched Cody’s house disappear in his rearview mirror, he realized it was a price he was willing to pay.
* * *
“You’re staring at me.”Raphael didn’t need to look up to know that Jayden’s eyes were on him, and he also knew why. He brushed his thumb along the sore mark just under the left side of his jaw. “I think Savannah has a vampire problem. Maybe they followed me from Berlin.”
“All vampires come from France and Italy, you and I both know this,” Jayden answered. “And they leave bite marks, not hickeys.”
He was on his saddle seat with rolling wheels, and he skid across the slick floors until he collided with Raphael’s desk. The salon was empty, as it always was on Tuesdays, but as tourism began to pick up with summer getting closer, the walk-ins were more frequent. A few weeks from now, Jayden would have to hire temps. A few weeks from now, Jayden would be cursing ever opening a salon, and Raphael would start booking private massage and facial appointments because Jayden couldn’t handle everything on his own.
But for now, he had his peace.
“Tell me about him.” Jayden drummed his polished nails on the metal edge of the file cabinet and grinned. “How sharparehis teeth?”
Raphael set his pen down and gave Jayden a flat look. It was a love bite, though he preferred the crasser American term of hickey because there was no love involved in what he and Diego had been doing the night before. It was pure, rich, and carnal. It had him sobbing without tears, and it was exactly what he needed from the only man in Savannah who could give it to him without wanting more.
Raphael needed someone who wouldn’t fall in love with him, because loving him always came with the consequence of leaving him, and he wasn’t ready for that yet. Luca had wormed his way into Raphael’s heart a little too close for comfort, and loving him back was the biggest risk Raphael had taken in years.
But he liked to think that Luca would be spared the grand departing of others from his past if it was platonic. And it was. He loved Luca with a singular desperation of soulmate, except there was no romance there. Luca’s arms held nothing but kindness and comfort, a way of keeping him steady and grounded. And they risked nothing else, because Luca was in love with Wilder and needed him the way the tides needed the moon.
With Diego, it was another world. They met properly for the first time two years before at the Tavern. Raphael was having a drink to himself, content to sit in the corner of the room and watch quietly from his barstool. His crutches sat to his left, the beer at his right hand, the room full of laughter. There had been a photoshoot with the fire department, and the men there were still slick with grease and covered in makeup.
Raphael knew the Chief, Fitz, and he knew a couple of the new recruits who had come in for shaves after learning the department didn’t allow beards. But he’d caught the eye of the man whose shirt read CCFD at the breast, and he couldn’t look away.
“I’m Diego,” he said when he was brave enough to cross the room and sit. “But a lot of people call me Dingo.”
