Samuel gave him a soft smile. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
Chris forced a smile, but it felt wrong, so he quickly let it go and decided to tell Samuel the truth instead of playing it off like he would have done with nearly anyone else. “The attack felt as if it physically damaged us all, if that makes sense. It’s hard to think about, to remember, and many places in the city still close each year on September eleventh. But it is important not to ever forget what was done to us. I’ll take you there—I’m not saying I won’t—but I’m not saying I want to go out for ice cream and cotton candy afterward either and pretend being there doesn’t affect me deeply. It’ll be a hot chocolate kind of thing. I ordered the cab to be here in half an hour so if you want to go, get ready.”
He headed off and got a shower as quickly as he could. Even if Samuel decided he didn’t want to go to the memorial, Chris still wanted to feel clean. He came out of the bathroom with a towel tucked in loosely around his waist. Not really having any sort of hips to speak of and only his ass to hold his pants up, the towel started to slip a few times before he managed to get himself into his bedroom.
“Are we going or not?” Chris called through the closed bedroom door. A few seconds later, he heard the shower start up.
“Yes, please!” Samuel’s muffled voice answered.
Chris dressed warmly in jeans, a thick sweater, and boots. He placed a woolen beanie, scarf, and his windproof jacket on the foyer table just as Samuel emerged from the bathroom in a similar outfit. He was so damn sexy Chris found it hard to drag his eyes away. Instead of a sweater, Samuel wore a thick hooded sports jacket, and knowing what he hid underneath made Chris want to rip it off him to expose the wicked tribal tattoos.
“You look good,” Chris said, grabbing a handful of Samuel’s ass as he walked behind him.
Samuel pulled his butt in a little and laughed. “Hey, don’t abuse the merchandise! Come on. Let’s go.”
Chris stopped in front of the door as soon as he’d opened it and went over to tap Mikey on his shoulder. Finding the kid in the little corner between their apartments wasn’t that unusual since he wasn’t allowed to play on the street by himself, but as much as he sometimes wanted to, Chris couldn’t just leave Mikey there to entertain himself.
He waved to Mikey, got a wave and a smile back, then held up one of his fingers, asking for a second. Mikey nodded, and Chris turned to Samuel. “This is my deaf neighbor. His name’s Mikey. His mom is Miranda. He says he can’t read lips, but I don’t think that’s true. I don’t like leaving him in the hallway, so if you’re okay with it, we can take him with us, if his mom says yes, or he can stay in my apartment and watch movies like he usually does. Which would you prefer?”
Before Samuel could even form an answer, Mikey grabbed Chris’s hand, pulling his attention away from Samuel. Can I watch Zombie Kids Undead Three? He’d written down. That settled things for Chris at least, and he pushed his door open wide enough for Mikey to rush in.
Before they left he sent Mikey a text saying, Lock up when you leave and another to Miranda saying, Mikey is watching some zombie movie on my couch. I won’t be home until later.
“All done,” he told Samuel.
THE CAB ride through midtown and down to the memorial was spent in silence. For Samuel it might have been comfortable, and Chris hoped it was. For him, though, it was anything but. Going back there brought up memories he didn’t choose to visit often, if ever, and it wasn’t a good feeling.
They arrived and Chris let Samuel lead, not wanting to rush him along. He stayed close enough to answer any questions Samuel had, but he didn’t want to hover either. In the concrete plaza, there were thousands of trees, one for every person who had died, and in the midst of those trees were two massive pools of water. He wasn’t one to pray, but he did bow his head when he followed Samuel close to them.
“You look miserable here,” Samuel said, putting an arm around his side. The contact helped shield him from some of the wind and also chased away the cold tightness in his gut.
He nodded and laid his head against Samuel’s chest, coming fully against him and grabbing the front of Samuel’s jacket. As Samuel wrapped his arms around Chris’s shoulders, Chris began to relax.
“I’m just remembering. This day was hard for a lot of people.”
“What was it like for you?”
Chris closed his eyes and focused on Samuel and the feeling of being held as he let himself remember that morning and the hours after it. “There was a lot of panic. That’s what I remember most. Back then Bran had his office only a block from the towers, and at first no one knew anything. We were supposed to meet for breakfast like we always did, and I was walking along to get to this little cafe with the best eggs Benedict I’d had up to that point. I was running late, and I’d texted him, but he hadn’t texted me back yet. Then I started to see people staring up at the sky, and before I could even begin to register what had happened, I heard the sirens.”
He wiped his eyes on Samuel’s jacket, refusing to let go of him to wipe the tears away himself. “I started calling Bran. Misha was deployed, and maybe I should have called my parents, but Bran was the person I called. Only the lines were all busy and I couldn’t get through. So I went to his apartment, and he wasn’t there. He wasn’t at the cafe either, and I couldn’t get to his office because that had all been blocked off. I was panicking as I stood there on the corner, looking at the destruction and listening to people wail and not knowing if he was alive or not.” He was shaking by then. So many people had experienced loss and real terror that day, and he felt like he shouldn’t have still been so affected by the few hours that he could not reach his best friend, but he was.
“When did you find him?”
Chris loved that there was no judgment in Samuel’s voice, only quiet understanding, like he’d been through that kind of panic before and knew how bad it could be. “A few hours later, he found me on the sidewalk. I was still dialing him, trying desperately to get a call to go through, and he walked up to me and held my hand, and I’m pretty sure I cried then too.”
He pulled away but didn’t go far, keeping one hand wrapped in Samuel’s shirt as he pulled his phone out of his pants pocket with the other. Bran answered on the first ring, and Chris smiled, glad to hear his voice.
“Hey. We’re at the memorial. You remember that morning?”
“Of course. I’ve only ever been that scared when Richard beat the shit out of you. When are you coming back to New Zealand?”
Chris pressed himself back against Samuel. He was glad to have them both, even if he was mad at Bran still. But that anger was beginning to wane as well. “Next week.”
“Good. We should go out. All of us. We’ll do something fun. It won’t be anything like last time.”
Chris could have said something mean, but he didn’t have it in him right then. “Okay. See you later.”
“You need to go?” The disappointment was clear in Bran’s voice.
Some days Chris might have reconsidered, but he was still too raw from the botched intervention they’d all tried to do, and his guilt and shame were far too raw on top of that, for him to be able to carry on a normal conversation with his best friend right then.
“Yeah. Later.” He hated hanging up on Bran like that, when they’d always been so close, but he couldn’t pretend everything was fine. Not when talking to Bran brought up such anger and so much resentment within him.
He put his phone back into his pocket and looked up at Samuel to find him watching him.
“I’m glad you called Bran.”
“Me too. I wish I wasn’t so angry at him, though. We’ll work that out in New Zealand.”
Samuel nodded. “When I hear and see tragedies such as these, they make me forgive much easier, because I wouldn’t have wanted to lose those people in these moments, no matter how angry I was with them.” He took Chris’s hand and began leading him toward the front of the museum, where a long line of people
already stood, waiting for their chance to see what was left of that terrible day.
Chapter Twenty
SAMUEL STARED at the memorial grounds around him and shook his head at how clean and tidy it appeared, compared to the devastation of the terrorist attack. He remembered getting home from the milking shed and switching on the television after getting a text from Kaden and Trent. About to go make his dinner, he watched in shock as the events unfolded and sat there until the early hours of the next morning. Dinner never happened because his appetite disappeared and sleep never came that night.
“We should go back to New Zealand earlier than next week,” Chris spoke up from beside him. “Would you mind?”
Samuel turned and wrapped his arms around Chris’s waist and looked him in the eyes. His cheeks were red from the cold air, and wispy bits of his fringe twitched where they poked out from beneath his beanie.
“I don’t mind at all. I miss my friends when I’m far away, but you’re a good distraction from that. If you really want to go, we can go. It means I can get back to work sooner than I thought, but it’s completely up to you.”
Chris groaned. “No. Not so that you can get back to work. So that we can do something, all of us together, like Bran suggested. Now that His Majesty has decided I can be let back into his country after all.” He gave Samuel a wink.
Samuel had to grin at Bran’s new nickname. “Well, if you put it like that. Maybe we can go fishing. For that, I’d take off another week if I could.”
“And I can always bring you back here and show you more sights when it isn’t fucking freezing.” Chris shivered and burrowed in against Samuel as if there was no getting warm for him.
“Deal.” Samuel rubbed Chris’s back through his thick clothing. “Let’s get out of here, then.”
“I’d love to.”
As Samuel watched him, Chris took out his phone, and minutes later a cab arrived for them.
“Thanks for being okay with killing your trip early. I do like hanging out with you, but the cold is getting to me, and being here isn’t fantastic. I felt better in New Zealand.”
“The reason I’m here at all stands right in front of me, so if you’re no longer here, I don’t want to be either.” Samuel did something he rarely ever did, but now might be a good start, because he kissed Chris full on the lips. A quick one but nice nonetheless.
“You’re crazy for coming across the planet for someone you’d barely spoken to recently. Sorry about that too. I wanted to be at my best, even had a plan of showing up on your doorstep, all perfect and not cutting at all, and we’d be okay somehow.” Chris shrugged and looked away from him as the cab driver took them back to Chris’s apartment.
Samuel tapped him on his thigh. “Hey. Let’s forget about that for now. I want you to stop apologizing for surviving the best way you knew how, okay? You are already much better even though you don’t see it yet. I see it.”
“I think a few months in New Zealand and I might be ready to come back here and have my own firm,” Chris softly said as the driver pulled up to the apartment building.
Samuel frowned. “Really? You going to come home with me and we’re going to explore what we have here and then you’re going to just pack up and leave again? Almost everyone you care about lives there now.”
They got out of the cab, and Samuel followed Chris back up to his apartment. “Yeah, but I don’t. I figured I’d visit for a few months, come back here, then you could see me here and I’d see you and we’d switch off. That wasn’t your plan too?”
Samuel tried hard to rein in his annoyance at Chris’s flippant attitude toward their relationship. The challenges they had to face up to that point tested the strength of their young relationship, but adding a fucking long distance to it would most probably sink the ship completely.
“No, that wasn’t exactly my plan.” His good mood seemed to have been left at the memorial site, and for what the place represented, that was pretty screwed up.
Chris let them into his apartment without saying a word and walked over to the little boy sitting on the couch. As Samuel watched him, Chris typed something on his phone, the kid nodded, and a minute later he was closing the door behind himself and they were alone again.
“Then what did you expect? That I was going to move to another country? Completely ditch my life here?”
Samuel toned down his temper. “No, but I at least expected you to try. You know as well as I do that long-distance relationships in one country struggle to survive, not to mention those stretching over continents and oceans.”
“What would make you happy here, then? Because three months is a pretty big fucking effort for me,” Chris snapped.
Samuel glared at him. “No, it’s temporary before you come running back to a place where you never belonged and probably never will. Where people treated you like shit, but maybe that’s what you like. Relationships take work, and doing it over thousands of miles would waste my time as well as yours.”
“What I’d like, asshole, is for you to get the hell out of my apartment. Now.” Chris turned around and stormed into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.
“Fine, Your Majesty number two! Don’t ever fucking ask me to come back here. I’m done with this selfish, petty shit. You need to grow up and realize that life is not a perfect little fairy tale!” Samuel stormed into the room where Chris lay sulking on the bed, grabbed his duffle bag, and started shoving his belongings into it without folding them. The zipper almost didn’t close, but with a final shove, he managed.
“That nickname doesn’t even make sense,” Chris snapped at him, sounding like a child.
“Figure it out. See ya!” Samuel turned around and left the room, pulling the door shut behind him with all the force he could manage. Satisfaction made him walk tall when he heard the doorframe crack. In the foyer he unzipped the front of his bag and threw the little box containing the present he had bought Chris in Bangkok on the table. The apartment door’s weight made a large boom as he repeated his earlier action. The adrenaline rushing through his veins made it impossible to wait for the elevator, so he took the stairs to the ground floor.
When he flung the glass doors of the building open, a taxi pulled up and someone got out before Samuel got in. “JFK, please.”
“Yes, sir,” the cab driver answered him as they took off and moved into traffic.
Samuel’s chest heaved with his upset, and he took control of it and forced himself to breathe deep and calm himself down. At this point he wondered if Chris was even worth his hurt, because up till now Chris had only cared about Chris, getting laid, his asshole of a father, Bran, and Misha. Samuel was not enough for the man to consider making some changes. Why he was surprised, he honestly didn’t know. He had never told Chris about his last serious partner, Ian, who, after moving away, had thought it would be fine to just hook up on occasion. In no uncertain terms, Samuel had told him to go fly a kite. Now Chris almost required him to do the same things. Have a catch up every few months, fuck like bunnies to make up for lost time, and then live separate lives again for another few months. There was no way he would settle for a half relationship like that.
Thankfully the driver remained silent the whole way to the airport. At the international terminal, Samuel thanked the guy and handed him the payment before getting out. He made his way to the airline desk and spent the next few minutes shifting his flight forward, and despite the shitty night he’d had, he must have had some remaining luck stored up somewhere. The assistant informed him of a cancellation on a flight leaving in three hours, and he happily took the seat instead and went to check in.
With his car in storage at Auckland airport, he rang the parking company to inform them of his early return so they could collect him upon his arrival. With that sorted, he looked around at the shops and cafes. To keep his mind off the events of the night, and Chris for that matter, he bought himself the latest Stephen King novel and started reading it with a steaming cup of coffee as com
pany.
As he had planned, the book hooked him by the end of chapter one, and when they called his flight, he frowned in annoyance at the interruption. This time his luck outdid itself when he sat toward the back of the plane with two empty seats beside him. A welcome bonus. In his present state of mind, he wasn’t up to chatting with strangers.
He managed to finish his book by the time he landed in Auckland. Somewhere between Bangkok and home, he had lost his fight against sleep and managed to get some much needed rest. By the time he parked his car in front of the garage at home, his mood hadn’t improved significantly, so he showered and got into bed. Tomorrow he would get back to work and let his friends know he was back. For now he wanted to be left alone, which was why he never switched his phone on after shutting it down at JFK.
The only reason he woke up at four in the morning was to empty his bladder, but he managed to get back to sleep after doing so. Unused to sleeping past sunup, he stirred as the weak morning rays filtered through small cracks in his curtains. He moaned and turned his back in that direction to snooze a bit more, but twenty minutes later his muscles complained from lying down too long.
A hot shower and his first cup of strong coffee helped shake off the fuzziness from the flights and the change from summer to winter and back again in such a short time. While waiting for his second cappuccino, he swallowed down some vitamin C to help his body cope with the stress of it all, because he couldn’t afford to get sick and be off work even more.
His stomach revolted at the thought of food, so he guessed all the meals on the planes must’ve been enough to carry him through another few hours. When he sat down with his precious hot drink, he switched on his phone. A few seconds later, it sounded repeatedly as several texts and one missed call from Misha came through. Dialing voice mail, he sat back to listen to what Misha had to say and prepared to be pissed off all over again.
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