“Yeah. Childhood sweethearts or something. And then the war happened, and, well…Gramps won’t talk about it. Mom told me, because Gram told her.”
“Shit,” Luke says, sitting back in his chair. His mind spins, and he can see silvery threads connecting the disjointed intel he’s been given, can start to form patterns, lay these out in his head in tidy notecard form.
“I’m thinking he’s just a miserable person, you know?”
“Uh-huh,” he says, but that isn’t what he’s thinking at all.
We have that in common. I think maybe that means something.
And just what the hell, Luke wants to know, does Will Maddox think he knows about Luke’s life?
~*~
“You’re really skipping school?” he asks Tara.
She rolls her eyes. “Today. Yeah. It’s just some history class.”
“Oh. Just history.”
She frowns at him. “God, you’re annoying.”
“One of my more charming qualities, actually.”
Her eyes narrow, between the dark rings of her eyeliner, and her expression grows speculative. “If you don’t like this job, why don’t you just leave?”
“What? Like you?”
“Why not?”
He ducks down into his jacket collar – the wind nips hard at his ears and nose, and if he didn’t have company, he would have long since given up on smoking and gone inside – and tries to keep his face neutral.
He doesn’t succeed, because Tara says, “What?”
“Hal got me this job. I didn’t ask him to, but, yeah…” He feels his face heating from the inside out, and averts his eyes. “I can’t just skip out. Not after he went to the trouble.”
She takes a long drag and says, “Does he know you’re in love with him?”
In some ways, Luke’s been waiting for that question for a long time, now. Really, it’s shocking no one in his life has ever asked it, but, then again, he doesn’t see Mom much anymore, and Sadie is…and, well, there’s Linda. And he hasn’t seen Hal in three years. And friends are…friends are problematic for a depressed writer who smokes in the twenty-first century and keeps weird hours.
And because he’s been waiting, he’s planned a dozen reactions: the shocked gasp, the appalled stare, the good old choking-on-air routine.
But that isn’t what happens. Instead, a prickling cold numbness moves over him, through him, freezing him; he swears his blood slows to frozen sludge in his veins. He’s felt it, thought it, flirted away from the boldness of the statement in his mind. But when he hears it, in a near-stranger’s voice like that, he knows all over again how irrevocably true it is – and has always been: he’s in love with Hal. Blindly, crazily, relentlessly in love with him. Since that first moment, when they were twelve, when he realized he didn’t just love him as his best friend, but always wanted to run his tongue up the length of his throat for reasons he hadn’t understood. And he also knows, here on the cold sidewalk, that Hal has never, and will never feel that way about him. The Incident was a moment of pity, and kindness, but not of love, nor passion.
And it just…it closes over him like ice. Facing it all head-on. He wants to die a little bit.
“Whoa.” Tara drops her cig to the wrought iron tabletop and sits forward. “Are you having a seizure or something?”
He manages to shake his head. “No, I…no.”
“Shit.” Her smile breaks in a humorless, sympathetic way. “You really are, aren’t you?”
His tongue feels like lead in his mouth when he says, “Yes. Forever.”
“Jeez. That’s rough.”
He swallows and it hurts. “Yeah.”
She sits back. “He doesn’t know, does he?”
