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The guys all laughed, slapping Dan on the back. “Good times,” Dan said with chagrin, rubbing his cheek as if the sting of injury had lingered all this time.
Together, the guys and I had made a pretty great team. We certainly won more games than we lost. I knew Dan had caught a football scholarship to college, like I had, but he’d never gone pro. Now he was an accountant, John was a manager at a bank, and Andy sold used cars. We weren’t the same people we used to be.
I’d have liked to think I’d grown…
I scanned the room again, looking for Jasper. He wouldn’t look the same, so I was trying to paint his eyes on an older face. Would he have contacts instead of glasses? Maybe he’d grown his hair out, but I doubted it, because he’d always hated how it curled around his ears and the nape of his neck. Maybe a beard or a goatee? As painful as it was, I forced myself to examine the couples. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew the chances of Jasper being married were high. He was a total catch, even back then. I was such a moron not to claim him when I had the chance. And now I was probably too late. That was probably why I hadn’t found a Dr. Jasper Mayle online. He’d probably changed his name. At least married was a better option than the alternative—that he was dead.
Nope. I wasn’t going there. He was alive somewhere on this earth. I just hadn’t found him yet.
But even if he wasn’t harboring the same deep longing I was, I at least had a few things I needed to tell him. Thank you, for starters. If it hadn’t been for Jasper, I would’ve failed my final exams for sure. His sweet kisses had been the perfect motivation to keep focused. I wouldn’t be where I was without him.
But I also wanted to apologize.
Jasper… well, he was a nerd. He got straight A’s, was on the debate team and the chess club. He spent the lunch hour with his friends playing Dungeons and Dragons. He hid his bluer-than-blue eyes behind thick glasses, and once he got braces, it was rare to see him smile in the hallways at school. He smiled for me, though… but only in private.
I was ashamed to admit that I’d kept him a secret from my friends. I was too worried about what they would think if I told them I had a crush on the brainiac. I had a certain reputation to maintain, after all. It would’ve been social suicide.
Fuck, what a total moron I was.
“Hey, Van Leer, you want another drink?” Andy held out a fresh can of beer.
I really, really didn’t want it, but if I passed, I wouldn’t have an excuse to stay. I’d end up going upstairs to my room and crashing before midnight. And maybe Jasper’s surgery would’ve ended in time for him to catch the last hour or two of the reunion. Or maybe he was flying in from where he lived in California or something, and his flight was delayed. “Yeah, thanks,” I said, forcing myself to reach out and take the can. At least this one was cold.
“Speaking of a fine piece of ass…” John said with a lascivious groan, “would you check that omega out?”
We weren’t speaking of ass—finally. I had to bite down on my frustrated sigh. Just when I thought we were making some progress with conversation, he brought it right back around to objectifying omegas.
“Holy shit, dude. I’d tap that,” Dan agreed. If the man was as hot as they claimed, none of these guys had a chance with him.
And then Andy added his two cents. “I’d love to strip that suit off him and lay him out on the table and make a meal out of him.”
I shook my head, sick of this scene. I put my unopened beer on the table next to my last abandoned drink. “Hey, guys, I think I’m gonna call it a night.”
They were barely able to peel their attention off the omega in question long enough to say goodbye to me.Seriously, how hot can this guy be?I wondered. And so, against my better judgment, I turned and looked.
My whole world spun on its axis, the ground unsteady under my feet. “Jasper?” I gasped out, my voice barely more than a breathy whisper as the wind was knocked straight out of me, my chest too tight.
“You know him?” John asked. “Did we go to school with him?”
Because of course they didn’t recognize him. They’d only bullied him for four years. I would know him anywhere, though. How could I have been worried that he would’ve changed? I knew those lips in intimate detail, those hands and how they felt tangled in my hair. I knew he had a birthmark on his left hip, and I knew the sounds he made when he came. Just as I knew by the crease between his brows that he was unhappy.
I was moving without conscious thought, walking toward him in slow motion. I vaguely heard my old friends calling out to me, but they didn’t matter right now. Only Jasper mattered.
3
Jasper
Inevershould’vecome.
I’d thought I wanted to reconnect with a few of my old friends, but it quickly became clear that they were more interested in bragging about their own successes than hearing about mine. And the second they started asking me about what I’d been up to the last ten years, I found myself holding back. I wasn’t ashamed of my life—in fact, I was downright proud of my son. He was by far my greatest achievement, but everyone had these expectations of where I would be by now, that I couldn’t seem to bring myself to admit how wrong they were. I lost count of the number of times I’d heard someone ask where I was practicing medicine, and every time, I answered vaguely, “Nowhere yet.”Yet. What a joke. Like I would ever get the opportunity to finish my degree.
I was starting to feel the pressure building behind my right eye, a precursor of a migraine. I’d spent the past 20 minutes hiding in the corner by the staff entrance at the back.
Clutching a glass of pop in my hand, I closed my eyes, trying to trace the path that had led me to this exact point in time. It all started with Eric Van Leer. With his dimple and his charming words, I had truly bought into what he was selling. What an idiot I was. Book smarts was one thing, but it seemed it didn’t excuse me from blind naivety. I let him use me, and while the bitterness still lingered, I couldn’t hate him entirely, because he gave me Cameron. Yes, it threw my life off its intended track, but who was to say this wasn’t how it was always supposed to be?
If you believed in that fate bullshit. Which I totally didn’t.
It was like the devil himself had been summoned, merely by thinking about him. I opened my eyes, and it was like the memory of Eric from my brain had been imprinted straight onto my eyeballs. Because there he was. A little older, a lot broader. Same dimple, same green eyes that I saw on my son’s face every day. And he was looking straight at me.
