by Cole McCade
Joseph’s brows lowered, thunderous and building crags. “Walford, I need you to be very, very clear what you mean right now.”
“I’m being florid, I suppose. No one man can create another.” Oh—oh, hell, his hands shook, and he laced his fingers together to stop them. He couldn’t bear Joseph’s hatred again, he simply couldn’t, but he’d earned it time and time again. “But I encouraged him to go down this path. He’s…I don’t know what to call him. A lost soul. A vigilante. He only ever wanted to right what the world set wrong, and I…encouraged him, without thinking. I never thought it would lead to this end…or that he would lead Willow to follow in his footsteps.”
Silence—shattered by the crash of Joseph’s fist against the desk, the rattle of his chair rocking back as he surged to his feet.
“Where is he?” he roared. “Where is she?”
Wally flinched back, averting his eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know where he is, or where he would go. More than anyone I’ve ever known, Vincent is good at vanishing and remaining gone.” He curled into himself, wrapping his arms around himself. “Nothing I could tell you would help us find Willow. And if she is with him, I doubt she wants to be found.”
A firm, cruel hand clamped around his wrist, and Wally cried out as Joseph dragged him to his feet, yanking him off-balance and pulling him face to face with Joseph’s furious snarl, his wide, desperate, grief-maddened eyes that gleamed with a rage that did nothing to mask the terrible, twisted ridges of pain gouged into him.
“You tell me, damn it—you tell me!”
Wally didn’t fight. He didn’t have any fight left in him. Even though Joseph’s grip hurt, even if those crushing fingers practically crushed his heart…he only leaned into him, searching his eyes. “There’s nothing to tell.” He cupped his palm to Joseph’s cheek. “Joseph—Joseph, my dearest heart. It’s time to let go.”
Joseph’s face drew up in lines as harsh as a building scream—but when he broke, it wasn’t in a scream but in a sob. A horrid, racking sound coughed up his throat, his lips twisting and trembling, his eyes squeezing shut as if that could stop the gleam that built from a fine-beaded line against his lashes into a wet torrent pouring in lines down his cheeks. His grip went lax and he curled forward, letting out hoarse, rasping coughs, barely words.
“I can’t—you wouldn’t understand, she’s not your daughter—”
“And yet I love her as if she is.” Heartbreak had a flavor, bitter as old copper. Wally reached for Joseph and Joseph let him, slumping against him as Wally gathered him close. He wrapped his arms around Joseph as if he’d hold them both together if he…if he gripped hard enough, grappled with these crumbling pieces of them and refused to let go, and his eyes stung as he pressed his lips into Joseph’s hair and stroked his back. “Even if you would not see me, we raised her together, you and I. Her two fathers. My pain is no less deep than yours.”
Joseph’s weight was heavy against him as his beloved went boneless against him, leaning hard. Then those strong, thick arms came around him, and for one selfish moment Wally thanked anything that would listen that Joseph was turning to him, instead of away—when Joseph had every right to pry his fingers into the crack in Wally’s heart and rip it into a gaping, bleeding, mortal wound.
Then he forgot all about himself as Joseph’s fingers dug into his back and, face buried into Wally’s shoulder, he wept in great, heaving sobs that sounded as if each one tore Joseph into smaller and smaller paper fragments of a man. Wally held him as tight as he could, held him and kept his own pain quiet and close because right now, Joseph needed him. Joseph needed him to be steady and stable, and didn’t deserve to carry the burden of Wally’s guilt in the chain of events that had taken his beloved’s daughter away.
Long minutes passed before Joseph’s breaths calmed, before the heaving of his shoulders settled to a quiet trembling. His grip on Wally’s back relaxed, and the wet heat of his tear-streaked cheeks pressed against Wally’s throat as Joseph turned his head and tucked into him.
“Are you all right?” Wally whispered.
“No,” Joseph answered in a miserable mumble. “How can you be so calm?”
“Long years of practice.” Wally kissed Joseph’s hair. “Some people are quiet in their pain, yet it is no less real.”
Joseph made a frustrated sound, gripping harder at Wally again. “Damn it…damn it, Wally…”
“I’m sorry. I try to shield you so often, and yet only end up hurting you more in my cowardice.” Wally rubbed his cheek to Joseph’s, stubble scratching his skin and catching on his collar. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I was just…I just…I’m trying to let go…”
“I know. Oh, love…I know.”
He caught Joseph’s face in his palms and lifted him up gently to look at him, and kissed the tears from his cheeks—one after the other after the other, chasing those spilling lines of glimmering anguish, the taste of salt on his lips when he finally pressed his mouth to Joseph’s and gently drank the whimpering sound of the man he loved in pain. He could hardly breathe with the agony of it, of tasting Joseph’s grief and taking it into himself as his own, and Wally licked tears from his lips as he broke that kiss and leaned into Joseph.
“Knowing this doesn’t change anything,” Wally said. “But I trust Vincent. If you trust me at all…then trust my faith in him. Trust that if she’s with him, she’s safe.”
Joseph shook his head fiercely, desperately. “He’s a killer, you said it yourself—”
“He’s a soldier. It’s…complicated. Willow is the sort of person who…Vincent would kill someone else to protect her, dearest love, but never would he kill her. Never,” Wally said firmly, with all the faith he could find. “I swear to you. I would trust him with my life, with your life…with hers.”
Yet he didn’t blame Joseph for the doubt in his eyes. Didn’t blame him for his silence, for the way he averted his gaze and bowed his head. All Wally could do was hold him, as Joseph laid his head to his shoulder once more.
And wept in silent shudders, his mourning a bleak, dark wall standing between them.
* * *
JOSEPH DIDN’T KNOW WHO HE wept for most—himself, or his daughter. These tears pushed him where he didn’t want to go, into that terrible stage of grief called acceptance, when he’d been putting off accepting the finality of Willow’s disappearance through one last desperate clutch at the thin, fragile threads of hope. But in them was a certain catharsis, as well—the severing of ancient and rusted chains whose weight had been holding him down for far too long. He’d never thought to hear from Miriam again in his life.
And he’d never thought the day he did, it would be Wally who stood up for them both and spoke the words Joseph had always been too weak to say.
He’d always loved Miriam too much. Even now he couldn’t hate her, not when for a short time they’d been beautiful together—consumptive, wild, obsessive, but beautiful, and from those beautiful days and nights had come Willow. And Willow was gone, but not lost.
Not truly.
As long as he believed that, as long as he trusted Wally that this man—this Vincent Manion—wasn’t a danger…
He could hold on to hope, and try to live.
Still, he let himself cry. It wasn’t a luxury he ever allowed himself, wasn’t a thing anyone allowed him, as if he was supposed to be the strong stoic face of endurance and single parenthood and fucking cheap clichéd inspirational disability when sometimes he wanted to rage and scream at the unfairness of it all just like anyone fucking else.
He felt safe doing that, in Wally’s arms. Even if Wally had kept things from him again…
Still, he felt safe.
When he’d spent his last tear and his eyes had dried to a sore burn, he pulled back, bracing his hands to Wally’s shoulders and taking him in. Wally looked so tired, as if the secrets he’d carried had worn him down day by day, whisper by whisper, lie by lie until he was ground down to practically nothin
g.
“Is there anything else you haven’t told me?” Joseph asked—and Wally winced, turning his face away. Dread wrapped cold, bony fingers around Joseph’s throat. “Wally. Please. I need honesty. I don’t like when people keep secrets as if it’s for my own good. If you really want to be with me, if you really want this to work, you need to stop hiding things. Tell me. Is there anything else?”
Wally curled forward, as though if Joseph let go of his shoulders, he would drop, wilt, this tall dandelion-stalk of a man crumpling and crushed.
“Yes,” Wally whispered thickly.
“What is it?”
“Not here.” Wally plucked at his shirt sleeves, looking left, right, but never at Joseph. “We’ll…we’ll need to go to my shop. My home.”
Joseph stared at Wally, silently pleading with Wally to look at him. Pleading with him to tell him, to tell him this wasn’t the last straw that would break this budding trust and destroy something he didn’t realize he’d wanted so desperately until he stood on the cusp of crushing it with one truth too many.
But Wally wouldn’t look. Wouldn’t speak. So Joseph let him go, stepped back, turned away, turned his back.
“Okay,” he said, and told himself he wasn’t…wasn’t afraid. “Okay. Fine. Let’s get this over with.”
Wally still said nothing. He only moved past him, a silent and pale ghost.
The ghost of something that was already gone, and didn’t have the sense to lie down and die.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LUNCH FORGOTTEN, THEY WALKED THROUGH the blocks between Joseph’s house and Wally’s shop—a half-hour walk that felt like days, when they didn’t say a single word to each other. Joseph wanted to reach for Wally, to hold his hand, to tell him it would be okay even though he wasn’t so sure it would, to ask him if it would be okay when he didn’t know if Wally would tell him the truth.
What did that say about this thing between them, if already Joseph expected Wally to lie and deflect more than he trusted him to tell the truth?
Had these days been nothing more than the two of them fooling themselves, believing they could build something whole from the ruins of their lives?
When he looked at Wally sidelong, Wally wouldn’t return his gaze. Walford walked as far over on the sidewalk as possible without stepping into the gutter, his head turned away, his hands in his pockets. There was something…closed about him, something Joseph had never seen before, when Wally was normally an open book with his every emotion playing across his face in a festival of lights across a smooth white screen. Even if he’d always known that brightness was a mask, a shield, there had ever and always been an open invitation to look beyond the curtain, if one dared.
That invitation, it seemed, had now been withdrawn.
And so Joseph turned away as well, and only counted the blocks and the quiet hiss-spring-thud of the one crutch he’d brought with him, and wondered if by the time this was over he’d be shaking too much to walk back home alone at all.
At the shop, Wally let them in through the front entrance; the silver bell over the door jingled, flashing in the afternoon sunlight, before stilling as Wally locked the shop door and led Joseph through the ocean of frothing dresses to the door leading upstairs. Into that explosion of gaudy warmth that made up Wally’s home; into the scents of baking and candles and butter-soft leather and old lace that permeated the room. Joseph wondered how it might be, if he stayed here often enough that his own scents infused with the others; how it might be if Wally stayed with him often enough to leave traces of this brightly colored pastiche like smears of paint on the raw wood of Joseph’s life. Already his bed smelled like Wally, key lime and sweetness and a certain sharp, heady something only definable as the scent they built between them when they kissed.
Stop it, he told himself as his throat tried to close. Stop trying to get emotional over nothing.
In the kitchen, Wally gestured toward the table, then offered a wan smile.
“I’ll be right back. Wait here.”
Joseph sank into one of the fluffy padded chairs, slid his crutch across the seat of another, and laced his hands together on the table. Wally was only gone for a minute—a minute in which there came a sharp, agitated rattling from down the hall, followed by more cursewords than he thought Wally had ever said in his life, and Joseph couldn’t help smiling. It was better than fidgeting, though he tensed as Wally returned.
He carried a thick manila envelope closed with a loop of waxed string, the brown paper faded to pastel yellow in spots, the edges crumpled and creased. Standing in the doorway with the envelope clutched in both hands, Wally looked somehow smaller, as though he’d shrunk into himself and would simply curl into nothing. He fretted the envelope between his fingers, made a false start forward, stopped, started again—then nearly lunged, crossing the room quickly and dropping the envelope on the table before Joseph. It landed with a heavy flapping plop.
“Here.” Wally skittered back as if he’d been burned, and curled both hands in the front of his shirt, staring at Joseph with too-wide eyes. “This is it. This is the last thing I’ve kept from you.”
Joseph turned the envelope over. The faded letters were addressed to Wally, in Miriam’s familiar hand. He didn’t recognize the sender name, but Kinder, Norrington & Samson was the name of a law firm if he ever saw one. He stared.
“What is this?”
“Open it,” Wally rasped roughly.
Joseph frowned, unlooped the string, flipped the envelope open, and pulled out a stack of papers with curling edges. The bolded, all-caps text at the top jumped out at him, flung like shards of gravel.
PETITION FOR DIVORCE
His lungs sucked in and never let back out. He couldn’t move. There was his name, Miriam’s, a fuckton of legal jargon that didn’t mean anything but that she’d—she’d—and the date on it, Christ, Willow hadn’t even been four years old and he remembered now, Miriam had only recently come back from God knows where with her pale skin tanned and freckled and a new look in her eyes and expensive things on her wrists, and she’d looked at Joseph and smiled her feline smile and said nothing. Only kissed his cheek and flitted away, and in days she’d been gone again.
“Divorce papers,” Wally whispered. “She asked me to do it.”
“She didn’t even have the fucking sack to bring them to me herself.” Joseph tried to swallow, but couldn’t. Something had lodged in his throat, something that wouldn’t let air in and tried to keep words from coming out. He flipped through the pages, skimming; he didn’t understand half of it, but he grasped enough. Relinquishing custody of Willow. Terminating rights to any assets. A no-contact clause. She’d wanted away from him that fucking bad, trash left in her dust. “Of course. Of course she had you do it. She just…yeah.” He buried his face into his palm. “Yeah.”
Wally took a tentative step closer. “…once again, you don’t seem particularly surprised.”
“She’s married again.” Joseph dropped the pages on the table and slumped back in the chair, sinking down and letting his head fall back against the chair’s spine. That thing in his throat came up, hard—a laugh, sharp and barking and hurting his throat and pressing fiercely against his ribs until he thought they would crack. “You don’t think I already knew she handled a divorce, with or without me?”
Wally practically whimpered. “It’s…funny? I don’t understand…”
“I didn’t know what you were going to show me. I thought…” He laughed again. He didn’t know if he wanted to sob or shout or keep laughing and laughing and laughing, because that was all he could do when this situation was so fucking ridiculous but could’ve been so very, very much worse. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. I’m glad it wasn’t anything I didn’t already know. I’m glad it wasn’t something that would…”
“Something that would…?”
“Something that would break us,” Joseph admitted, his laughter fading into a sigh. He tilted his head back, looking up at Wally, into
those black eyes that held infinite universes of sorrow and hope and stories waiting to be told. “I just…this seems like it could really be something, Wally. But every time something like this comes up, I feel like it’s going to break us before we have a chance to be us.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Seems like it would’ve been a perfect opportunity. Break her hold for good, and clear the way.”
“Because it was never about that,” Wally whispered, shaking his head desperately, pleadingly. “Because I don’t work that way. I simply didn’t want to hurt you, my dearest boy. I never want to hurt you, and…Willow asked.”
Joseph smiled ruefully. “And you’d have done anything for Willow.”
“More even than for Miriam.”
“It feels like too much of my life has been shaped by the women in it either toying with me, or trying too damned hard to protect me.” He snorted. “But who the fuck am I, that I laid down and let them?”
“A tired man.” Wally stepped closer still—that closed sense that had haunted him easing to leave a quiet, vulnerable openness, every step asking Joseph if he was even allowed. Allowed to come close; allowed to offer the hand that reached for him. “No one can fight all the time. Not even you.”
Joseph reached for that outstretched hand without hesitation, and pulled Wally down into his arms, into his lap. He still didn’t know quite what to think or feel, but he knew he didn’t feel right without Wally close. And something inside him settled into place, as with a low sound Wally curled into him, tucking his head under Joseph’s chin and wrapping his arms around his neck. Joseph bowed his head, breathed him in, took the scent of Wally into his lungs like incense, and let it soothe.
“I don’t even know what I’ve been fighting against,” Joseph murmured. “Not really. I had this picture in my head of what my life would be. Married, with a happy family. Maybe a little brother or sister for Willow. The MS shouldn’t have changed that. It’s not a death sentence, and if you catch it and treat it early enough…you can learn to live with it. Learn to live, period, even if it’s always sucked balls and always will. What changed wasn’t the MS, but how Miriam treated me with the MS. Or that’s what I told myself.” He rested his chin to the top of Wally’s head, letting his gaze drift over the kitchen, every tchotchke and glinting pretty thing. “I think she was looking for an excuse to leave long before the disease set in. But I wanted something to blame. Something that let me avoid seeing that I’d given everything to someone who’d only loved me on a passing whim.” He held Wally tighter; Wally was here, now, offering a love so much more permanent and real if Joseph would just accept it. “So I blamed the MS. I let it become my demon. In the back of my mind I convinced myself that instead of a shitty thing that just happened because shitty things just happen, the MS was somehow my punishment for being happy, so I shouldn’t try to be happy. And then I got stuck in this limbo between learning to live with MS…and not living at all, because I still couldn’t move forward past what Miriam had done.”