by Beth Bolden
“You couldn’t have known,” Sean said heavily. “Because I didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell anyone. I told myself I was starting over. That I was moving on, the way my therapist wanted me to do, and in a lot of ways, I was.” But now, looking back over the last two years, Sean wasn’t sure that was what he’d been doing at all.
“You told Gabriel, didn’t you?” Shaw guessed.
“I did . . . not long ago,” he admitted. “I thought he should know, before we . . . well, before we got naked together.”
“I knew you guys were up to something,” Shaw said.
“I stupidly thought we were just hooking up. I even told him that was all it was, because well, how could it be anything else? I knew how it felt to fall in love. To love someone so much I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. The way I felt about Gabe? Totally different.”
“But no less intense, right?”
“Well . . .” Sean hesitated. Because Shaw was right. It had gotten intense, right at the end. He could remember this morning, when everything had felt so sunny and right and perfect and it had felt like his heart would beat out of his chest, just so it could follow Gabe. He’d known things were changing. But he hadn’t thought it was love.
Because he knew what that felt like.
“Love doesn’t always feel the same,” Shaw said kindly.
“I don’t know if what I feel for Gabe is even love,” Sean said. “And wouldn’t it be worse if I told him it was, and it turned out that it wasn’t? I couldn’t . . .” His voice broke, remembering the way Gabe had looked tonight. “I couldn’t do that to him.”
Shaw leaned a hip against the edge of the counter. “And doing what you did tonight was better?”
Sean felt suspicion bloom inside of him. “How do you know what I did tonight?”
“Listen,” Shaw said, setting the clean glass down. “It’s not very hard to be a student of human nature when you’re a bartender, especially when it’s for your group. You guys have patterns. For awhile, after you showed up and after the group started coming together, y’all had one pattern. And you kept to it, together and apart, most of the time. But then, a few weeks back, you came in with Gabriel and broke your pattern. You drank something else. It was just the two of you. And you weren’t fighting.”
“We weren’t.” Sean licked his lips, tasting the alcohol on them. He remembered just how much they hadn’t been fighting. That night had been the first glimmer that there might be something more between him and Gabriel.
“And now you’re back, and to be frank, you look pretty fucking miserable, and you’re drinking more than you have in the last six months,” Shaw said, gesturing to the half-full manhattan in front of him. “And even without all that, you’re drinking the same drink you two drank together. Now, I’m not here all the time, though God knows it feels like it sometimes, but you didn’t drink those before, and you haven’t had one since the night you two were here.”
Put together, it was rather damning.
“You’re really too smart for your own good,” Sean said, letting out an unsteady exhale. “You’re right. We had a fight. Or not a fight necessarily.” There hadn’t been yelling. Didn’t there need to be yelling in a fight? “But something. Something . . .”
“Something you’re not happy about.” Shaw finished his sentence even as he pulled two beers.
“I don’t think either of us are happy about it,” Sean said wryly. Maybe he should have gone to Tate. Or Tony. Or Lucas. Or even Ash. But Shaw had been a good listener.
“Then that’s something, isn’t it?” Shaw pointed out. “It was clearly not just the two of you getting naked. Because I promise, the getting naked Ren does has never brought him to my bar, looking like he might cry.”
“We’d all be doing a lot better if we were more like Ren,” Sean muttered.
“Yes and no,” Shaw said. “Honestly? I think he sleeps like a baby, after. But to answer your question, your first question, I think it’s never too late to tell your friends your history. Maybe you didn’t share it before. Maybe they won’t be happy about it. But I think you already know that you should. Even if it’s hard.”
Shaw was right; he already knew what he should do.
“And,” Shaw added, smiling now, “I have it on good authority that Tony and some of the others are out by the fire pits right now.”
“What? Are you psychic now, too?” Sean wondered.
“They came in before you,” Shaw said. “And if I know them at all, they won’t leave until they’ve had a few drinks.”
Shaw was right about that. Sean had a feeling that Shaw was right about a lot of things.
“I guess if they’ve had a few drinks, maybe they’ll be less pissed,” Sean said, fumbling with his wallet as he pulled a twenty out of it and slid it across the bar.
“It’s on the house,” Shaw said with a quicksilver smile and a shake of his head. “Just do me a favor.”
“Go tell them?”
Shaw nodded decisively. “They’re good guys. They care about you. I promise.”
Sean didn’t even need Shaw’s promise to believe it. He already knew it, which is why it had been so dumb to omit this detail about his life. Why, after so much time had gone by without him telling them, he wasn’t sure how to remedy the situation.
He slid off the stool and picking up his drink and his twenty, walked towards the outside patio. Pushing open the door, he immediately spotted Tony and Lucas and Tate and Chase, all clustered around one of the smaller fire pits.
“Hey,” Tony said, when he glanced up and saw Sean approaching. “I don’t think Gabriel’s here. I didn’t see him after we closed up.”
It occurred to Sean that Gabriel wasn’t the only one who’d assumed there was more going on in their relationship than just getting naked. Maybe everyone else had seen what Gabe had. Maybe the only one blind here was Sean.
But he had to be sure, and how could he possibly be sure?
“I’m not . . . we’re not together,” Sean said awkwardly. He sat down next to Tony, hating that somehow he’d begun to feel like his friends were strangers, all because he hadn’t been as honest as he should have been. “I think he’s actually kind of mad at me right now, actually.”
“Why?” Tony asked.
He’d been so determined when he’d marched out here, after Shaw had given him the push he needed. But now, with Tony and Lucas and Tate and Chase looking on eagerly, his words dried up.
“I . . . I . . .”
Tate shot him a sympathetic look and then squeezed his boyfriend’s hand. “Chase and I have actually got plans, so we’d better take off.”
It was clear from Chase’s confused expression that they didn’t have plans, but Tate was giving him an out, in case he didn’t want to share his confession with quite so many people.
“We’ll see you guys tomorrow,” Lucas said.
After Tate and Chase had disappeared out the side door, Tony leaned in. “So, why is Gabe mad at you?”
“I think a better question is why isn’t he mad at me,” Sean said wryly. “But before we get into all that, there’s something you should know first. I was married, before, when I lived in Portland. Milo died two years before I came here, and that’s actually one of the big reasons I moved to LA.”
Sean knew lots of people judged Tony. They thought of him as stupid and callous and good for a laugh but nothing else. But his expression went solemn and he reached over and squeezed Sean’s hand. “God, man, I am so sorry. I had no idea.”
“That must have been so hard,” Lucas said.
“It was,” Sean agreed. “But it’s better. So much better. Coming here, it was the best decision I ever made. I met you guys, I wasn’t so alone anymore, I found a new calling. It was great for me.”
“And you met Gabe,” Tony said.
Sean wanted to take back everything nice he’d ever thought about Tony. But, he reminded himself, this is why you came out here, so you could talk to him. To figure out
how to fix this fucking mess.
“I did.” Sean took a deep breath. “I told him, at the beginning, that we should only hook up, because I knew what love felt like and I thought what I was feeling wasn’t romantic.”
“Ouch,” Lucas said. “No wonder he was all worked up about it.”
“Yeah.” Sean regretted so much of what he’d done, knowing now that Gabriel had had feelings for him this whole time.
“But you meant to be kind about it,” Tony said, reaching out and squeezing his hand again. “You were trying to do the right thing. Trying to make sure that his expectations didn’t exceed your own.”
“Yeah, well, I think they did, whether he meant them to or not, and then I made a total hash of it.”
“How?” Lucas wanted to know.
“It was just supposed to be a hookup, but I guess, looking back, it never really was. I mean, we did hook up, but we did lots of other stuff too. We hung out, and did things together and he slept over, and well, I can see why he thought things were changing. Why my feelings were changing.”
“Is it impossible to believe they might have been?” Tony asked. His tone was kind, but Sean still shied away from the thought. He couldn’t have been wrong. Not about this. Love was something he knew something about. He was familiar with the first flush of it, and the comforting everyday middle of it, and also the end of it, when it felt like your world was going to fall apart because you’d lost it.
Also, though he’d tried to avoid this thought during the entire thing with Gabriel, he couldn’t avoid it any longer. Falling for Gabe, for anyone else, felt like an intrinsic betrayal of everything Sean had felt for Milo.
It wasn’t like he actually believed that Milo wouldn’t want him to move on. He’d been twenty-five when Milo died. Nobody should spend the rest of their life alone, and Milo would’ve been the first person to say that.
But that rationalization was hard to accept now.
It had only been four years. Surely that wasn’t enough time to mourn someone he’d loved as much as he loved Milo.
“Not impossible,” Sean said. “But . . . difficult to accept.”
“I believe it.” Lucas’ voice was kind and warm, full of empathy. “It’d be a hard thing, to move on.” He glanced over at Tony, and Sean could see the love in his eyes that he was intimately familiar with. “I don’t think I could do what you did.”
There’d been a time when Sean hadn’t thought he could do it either. But in the end, he hadn’t had a choice.
“Like I said, some unexpectedly good things came out of it. I moved here. I started my food truck, which was something I’d always wanted to do, but I couldn’t, not until I’d gotten the money from Milo’s life insurance. And I met you guys. Honestly, I’m happy again. Or,” Sean added with a wry twist of his mouth, “I was happy again, before I fucked this thing up with Gabriel.”
“How exactly did it get fucked up?” Tony wondered.
Sean thought he could talk about how and why and whose fault it was for a hundred years. But really, maybe it was simpler than that. “He told me he loved me, and I said I didn’t know how I felt.”
“Ouch,” Tony said.
“Hey,” Lucas said, nudging his boyfriend’s side with an elbow, “he was trying to do the right thing.”
“By breaking his heart?” Tony wondered. “I can’t imagine . . . well, I can’t imagine what it would feel like if I said I loved you, and you didn’t say it back.”
“Um,” Lucas said. “That is what happened.”
“Oh.” Tony laughed. “Well, obviously we aren’t good role models.”
“I think you are, actually,” Sean said. “Maybe you didn’t get it right at first, but you got there. Things aren’t always perfect.”
“You mean, like you and Gabriel?” Tony asked pointedly.
“Yeah,” Sean said. “I . . . I really don’t know how I feel. I can’t lie to him. Not about this.”
“No, you were right not to,” Lucas said reassuringly. “It wouldn’t have been right to lie.”
“But then what do I do?” Sean didn’t want to sound so upset, but he was so upset. He’d hurt Gabriel, who he knew he cared about at the very least as a friend. He’d broken them apart, just when things had felt so damn good.
“Are you scheduled to be part of the festival next week?” Lucas asked.
The festival? For a second Sean wasn’t even sure what he was talking about. Then it hit him. The City of Food Festival, that they were closing for. That he’d forgotten to even register for, even though he’d fully intended to.
Gabriel had obviously distracted him more than he’d even realized.
“Uh, no, actually,” Sean said, feeling embarrassed because they’d all talked about it at the staff meeting, but instead of registering he had . . . well, he had gone home and obsessed over whether he should invite Gabriel over to fuck. “I totally forgot.”
Lucas shot him a sympathetic look. “Well, then it’s an easy decision. Close for a week. The lot’s closed anyway. Go somewhere. Think about Gabe. It’s hard to do when he’s right here, you know? But maybe some space will help you figure out what you do feel for him.”
“What if I don’t love him?” Sean asked, because it was his worst fear.
Worse even than telling him that he did, and realizing later that it was just lust.
Worse than the guilt he’d feel moving on from Milo.
“Then you don’t,” Tony said. “But I think I speak for Gabe here when I tell you that he’d want you to figure out for sure, before you talk to him.” He nudged his boyfriend. “And Lucas is right. It’s hard to know, when Gabe is right there. He’s a big guy, you know? Takes up space.”
Sean knew exactly what Tony meant. Gabriel was louder-than-life, full of passion and noise and excitement. It was hard, even when they were parked on opposite sides of the lot, for him to not think about Gabriel.
At least, to think about him in any kind of objective way.
“Is there someplace you could go, for the week?” Lucas asked.
Sean had thought, initially, that if he was going to be closed for the week, he’d just take a nice long staycation. Not set any alarms and sleep in. Work on some of his new menu ideas. Maybe even go to the beach for a day.
But then it occurred to him that maybe he did need to get away. Like really get away. And the thought of the beach tugged at a thread inside him.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, there’s a place I can go.”
Maybe he couldn’t ask Milo for his advice, because Milo was long gone, but maybe going to the place where he’d scattered his ashes would bring him some kind of clarity.
“Great,” Tony said, clapping him on the back. “I think you should. And don’t wait til the weekend, when we’re officially closing.”
“You’re sure?” Sean was surprised; Tony was very adamant about the fact that they needed to be open on all the days that they had agreed to be. It didn’t look good for customers when they showed up to visit the lot and noticed half the trucks were closed.
“I’m sure,” Tony said. “I want you to get your shit straight, okay? Gabriel is a friend. You’re a friend. I don’t want to see either of you suffer.”
It occurred to Sean, much later, after he’d returned home to a cold dark townhouse, that Tony was willing to take this gamble because he was sure, as sure as Gabriel had been, that Sean loved him.
That everything would turn out as beautifully as it had turned out between Tony and Lucas. Between Tate and Chase. But that wasn’t how life worked. Sean had discovered that the hard way.
And he was afraid he was about to discover it all over again.
Chapter Fourteen
Gabriel showed up the next morning, determined that he was going to make things right.
Only to walk over to Sean’s truck and discover that it was closed up tight, with a handwritten sign, posted in the window that stated they wouldn’t be open for the next ten days.
“What’s this?”
Gabriel said as Tony walked by. Looking casual, but if Gabe knew Tony at all, knowing it wasn’t. “Did you have something to do with this?”
“All I know is Sean decided to go away for awhile, take a trip,” Tony said. “He said he needed to think about something.”
Gabriel felt like crying. Sean had said that they needed some space, but it had never occurred to him that he would mean they needed this much space.
He’d thought a couple of days, at worst, and then Sean would come waltzing in, with a huge grin on his face and a love confession tumbling out of his mouth.
Because one thing that Gabriel was more sure of than ever was that Sean loved him. He couldn’t feel all of this for someone who didn’t feel it back; it just didn’t feel possible.
“So he left,” Gabriel finally said. He wanted to pour out the whole horrible story, but from the sympathetic expression on Tony’s face, he had a feeling he’d already heard most of it.
“He left,” Tony said. He reached out and gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “But he’s gonna be back, okay? And I think maybe it’ll be good for both of you that he went.”
“Good from a you’ll have some time to get over each other point of view or good from a he’ll have something to say that you want to hear point of view?” Gabriel asked.
But Tony didn’t give anything away; just looked regretful. Sorry. And that was definitely way fucking worse.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I think the only person who can answer that question isn’t here right now.”
“Ugh, you’re fucking useless,” Gabriel moaned.
“But hey,” Tony said encouragingly, “you know what Sean being away for a week means?”
“That I’m going to be miserable and drunk the whole week?”
“That you have time to figure out what you want to do with your truck,” Tony said.
“What? I mean, I have the new name,” Gabriel said. “I already picked it out. I have the logo done and everything.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Tony said. “But I just thought maybe it’s time for you to do more than just re-name yourself, you know? Maybe think about a total rebrand.”