by E M Lindsey
“You look like you’re trying to solve quantum theory,” Sage murmured, looking up from his sketch sheet. “You want to talk about it?”
James snorted. “I want to send something to Rowan, but what the fuck do you send a guy that says, ‘Sorry your momma is dyin,’ that doesn’t make you look like an asshole?”
Sage glanced over at Derek who was blinking in surprise, then he shrugged. “Muffins?”
“You’re a dick,” Derek grumbled. He pushed his wheelie chair into the middle of the aisle and stopped at the entrance to James’ stall. “Give him you.”
James froze for a second, then laughed. “Cute.”
“I’m not trying to be cute,” Derek said. He leaned over his thighs, bracing his elbows on the top of them as he met James’ gaze. “None of us are idiots, man. We’ve never seen you hung up on anyone in the entire time you’ve been here. And fuck me if I thought it would be a guy like Rowan, but any idiot can see he feels the same way.”
“Yeah, he wants me so bad he high-tailed it outta here like his ass was on fire,” James muttered a little hotly.
Derek sighed. “Sage and I are the fucking kings of self-sabotage, and somehow we found our way to the people we were meant to be with.”
“He’s not wrong,” Sage said.
James’ eyes flickered between the twins, hating how right they were, and hating how it wouldn’t really matter. “I can’t show up and impose myself on him. And besides, I’m sort of datin’ someone right now. Harry’s a nice guy. I like him.”
“He is,” Sage said slowly. He slid his sketchbook to the top of his table, then rose, leaning over the partition that separated their stalls. “If Rowan didn’t exist, I’d say you and Harry make a great couple, but…”
“Don’t,” James said. His frustration was rising, and he pushed himself to his feet. “Y’all don’t understand what this is like. It was push and pull with you and Will,” he said to Sage, “and you and Baz had issues comin’ out the ears, but they were here. They weren’t…they didn’t run.”
“I ran,” Sage said quietly. “Maybe not for long, but I ran, and I almost fucked it all up. It took nearly losing him completely for me to see reason, and I don’t want that to happen to you. Or Rowan. I like him.”
James dragged a hand down his face. “Y’all,” he groaned, “this is the worst time. I have a date in like fifteen minutes. Shit.”
“I think you need to seriously consider what you want,” Derek told him. “No one is going to wait around forever, and Rowan seems like he might need a firmer hand than you’re used to giving.”
James opened his mouth, but the door to the shop opened and Harry walked in, looking as prim and sweet as he ever did in his jeans and t-shirt. He had his coat hanging over one arm, and a bag of take-out on the other. Fuck, James groaned in his head. Fucking fuck.
“Hey, you,” Harry said, smiling brightly. “I’m a little early.”
“He doesn’t mind,” Derek said, looking pointedly at James. “We’re pretty dead today. He can take off now.”
“I hate you,” James muttered, but he didn’t mean it. He loved his little family beyond all reason, even when their truth was vicious and painful. He offered Harry a smile, but it felt wrong—mostly because he was pretty sure what was coming next. He might need to think, to really consider, but whenever he closed his eyes and thought about himself old and crotchety, it was Rowan by his side.
There was no denying that.
“I’ll get the heat going in the car, then,” Harry said with a wink. “You want to follow me, or share? I could always drop you off in the morning.”
Sage made a kissy noise, and James flipped him off as he reached for his jacket and keys. “I’ll follow. Be out in a minute.”
Harry nodded, said a quick goodbye to the twins, then was out the door. When it shut, Sage and Derek both turned to him, looking even more freakishly identical than they usually did. James flipped them off again, but neither of them seemed bothered.
“You already know what you’re going to do, don’t you?” Derek asked.
Just then, James’ phone buzzed in his hand, and when he looked at the text he saw the address he’d asked Rowan for hours ago. And shit. Yeah, he knew. “One of y’all want to get me a plane ticket to Portland, Oregon?”
Sage laughed, then made grabby hands for James’ phone who tucked it back into his pocket before he could snoop.
“One way?” he asked.
James blew out a puff of air, then nodded firmly. “Yeah. One way. I need to go take care of this, so give me some time.”
“We’ve got your back, man,” Sage told him honestly.
“And good luck,” Derek added as James headed for the exit.
He paused in the doorway, taking a breath, then nodded. Yeah. He was doing this.
Chapter Eighteen
In the hours that followed his mother’s body being removed from the house and all the medical equipment being packed into the van and driven away, Rowan understood actual silence. Not the absence of noise, but the absence of presence. She was gone. Nothing lingered except memories and echoes, and it was a profound sort of grief he hadn’t been prepared for.
Rob was still waiting on word from the mysterious woman who claimed to be her daughter, but he was understanding enough to know that Rowan was going to need some time.
The worst part of the grief was how sneaky it was. In movies—and maybe real life, Rowan didn’t exactly have anything to compare it to—the grief was intense and visceral. People cried, they sank to their knees and sobbed. They fell into a stupor and were unable to be roused.
For Rowan, he just felt lost. His routine over the last several months was suddenly gone, and he felt this overwhelming sense of fear that he no longer had purpose. It was illogical, of course. He was the same man he’d before he stepped back into his childhood home to care for his mother’s last few months of life, but he felt like he was floating.
He drifted upstairs to shower, scrubbing away the last vestiges of anesthetic and sterile equipment and death, then put on a pair of lounge pants and a t-shirt. He realized with a laugh, it had been so long since he’d put on one of his suits. He hadn’t really considered what he was wearing over the past few weeks apart from his own comfort for long days sitting at his mom’s bedside.
He took a look at himself in the mirror, and it was strange to see himself looking so normal. He expected something haggard and worn, something that showed every ounce of feeling he had suffered since he got the news that she wasn’t going to make it, but he looked the same as he always had.
Maybe a little more tired, the bags a little more pronounced. She’d taken a turn for the worse right after he’d spoken to James, and he’d kept vigil by her beside as she took her last, rattling breath. She died as peacefully as she was able to in her condition, sometime after three in the morning. The night nurse had documented it all as Rowan simply stared at her still body and tried to remember what he was supposed to do next.
Eventually he got his head in the game. She was taken to the funeral home and would be cremated. All the arrangements had been made months and months ago, and all Rowan had to do was sign on the dotted line, make a few phone calls, and then show up to the service. Easy as anything he’d ever done.
If only it didn’t feel like he was walking through wet concrete.
He made his way to the kitchen and flicked on the electric kettle. It was new, and looked strangely out of place in the small area he’d recognized from when he was barely half his size. He could remember standing at his mom’s hip, peering over a ceramic baking dish as she prepped a chicken, or talked about their old family recipes that had been hidden and hoarded when the Romany side of their family had escaped Germany for the US.
“We settled in Florida for a while,” she told him. “This isn’t something your momma would have told you even if she’d…” Marie would never finish that sentence, no matter how often she said it, and Rowan liked to think about what thos
e last words would have been. Even if she’d been a better mom. Even if she hadn’t been on drugs. Even if she gave a shit he was her son and needed him. “Our family doesn’t like to talk about it. Fear, I think. Fear that it might happen again.” She would cup his cheek and talk about how important his last name was, and how he should carry it proudly.
But a boy like him without a sense of home and stability found it difficult to hold on to anything except the clothes on his back and the vague hope he’d find a better place to rest his head. When he finally did drag himself out of the hole he’d been put in, his name stopped being important, and helping other people took the place of that.
He splayed his hands on the counter and wished he’d had the chance to ask her more. Maybe she wrote stuff down. It would take him another year, if not more, to go through all the boxes she had packed away. She hadn’t been a hoarder, not really, but she’d clung to things he never found value in.
Until now.
He wondered, with some sense of irony, if that hadn’t been the point. The noise of the kettle clicking off startled him, and he jumped, his shaking hand reaching for a mug. She only kept one kind of tea—black and heavily caffeinated, but he didn’t think he was going to sleep anyway. He watched the bag float to the surface with the rising water, then sink as it began to soak. Brown tendrils swirled from the white paper, and he lost himself in it.
Rowan jumped again, nearly spilling the hot tea on his hand when the bell rang, and his brow furrowed. Marie didn’t have visitors. Not really. A few of the neighborhood ladies had come by a few times to see how she was doing, but she was more like him than he wanted to admit—a willing loner, afraid to love.
He swiped his palms on his lounge pants, then moved to the front door. He belatedly realized he should have looked before opening the door, but that ceased to matter when his gaze fell on the one person he’d desperately wanted to see— and the one person he didn’t think he’d ever be able to.
James was there, looking a little sheepish and uncertain. He had a bag over his shoulder, one hand rubbing the back of his neck. His hair had grown out a little, had been trimmed and styled, and it was a good look on him.
Then again, he could have been standing there in a burlap sack and Rowan would have thought he was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. “What?” he managed.
James flushed under the yellow porch light. “I should have called. I…I know I should have called. Just…it was a snap decision. I was going to fly out three days ago, but then you said your mom was getting worse, so I waited. I got your text last night and I didn’t…I couldn’t stand the thought of you bein’ alone. I hope this is okay.”
Rowan opened his mouth to tell him that of course it was, that it always would be, except the only noise he was capable of right then was a strangled sob. James’ face crumpled, and before Rowan could blink, he was drawn into James’ embrace. He sobbed again, then curled his arms around James’ waist and buried himself against the one person he wanted to be with more than anyone in the world.
James backed him up into the house as Rowan felt something crack and flood out of him. He felt almost outside his body in a way, like he was standing apart from the two embracing men, one making quiet shushing noises, the other choking on his tears.
Rowan felt James reach behind him to close the door, and as the quiet of his little house enveloped him, he started to calm. The break was cathartic in a way he hadn’t been expecting, and though he figured he should feel somewhat humiliated for totally losing it, he saw no judgement on James’ face when he pulled back.
“Shit. Sorry,” he said, swiping at his cheeks.
James caught his wrists, pulling his hands down before replacing them with his own. He mopped up Rowan’s tears with the calloused pads of his fingers, and Rowan leaned into the slightly rough touch. “Please don’t apologize.”
Rowan laughed. “I think it’s just a compulsion. My mom just died, I’m not actually sorry for crying.”
James smiled at him, his hands falling to the crook of Rowan’s neck and settling there, the weight comforting and warm. “Is she…still here, or…?”
“No,” Rowan said, and swiped his hand under his nose before giving in to his desire to push his body against James’. He was immediately accepted into the embrace, though he felt more steady on his feet this time. “They took her this morning.”
“What else needs to be done?” James asked.
Rowan breathed in deep, basking in the faint, woodsy scent of the other man, smiling at the faint, lingering tinge of motor oil. “Nothing tonight. I was…I was making tea, and then I thought I should try to get some sleep. It’s been a few days.”
When he pulled back, James gave him a calculating look. “I can tell. Have you eaten?”
Rowan frowned and tried to remember the last time he’d managed anything. “Um.”
“I’m going to take that as a no,” James chided. “Why don’t you go on and show me where I can drop my bag, then I’ll get something going.”
Rowan frowned. “You don’t need to do that.”
“Yeah, I know,” James said with a faint smile. He took Rowan’s hand in his, pressing a soft kiss to his knuckles, and Rowan’s heart thudded in his chest. More than anything, he wanted to pull James in, to kiss him like he’d been dreaming about for months now. He wanted to strip them both down and let James sink into him—fucking him slow with deep nudges against his prostate until he came.
But James was in a relationship with someone else. They had agreed to be just friends, and whatever else Rowan wanted, he owed it to James to respect that. Clearing his throat, he smiled when James let their hands fall apart, and he nodded his head. “Uh…so my mom was mostly down here. They cleared all her shit out, but I don’t…it would be too weird to sleep there. The place is small,” he said as they reached his room and pushed the door open. “You can take my room and I can take the couch.”
James froze in the doorway, his bag dropping to his feet as he frowned at Rowan. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I’m not making you take the couch,” Rowan said.
James shook his head and took a tentative step forward. “I mean, why would you sleep anywhere I wasn’t?” He reached a hand out, slow and deliberate, and laid it against Rowan’s cheek.
In spite of himself, in spite of how hard it was to keep his resolve, Rowan nuzzled into it. “You’re dating someone. I can’t…I wouldn’t do that to him.”
James let out a tiny laugh. “Yeah, I should’ve led with that. Harry and I aren’t gonna work.”
Rowan startled a bit, pulling away from James’ touch. “What? Why? Did he do something?”
“Nothing, apart from bein’ a damn sweet man who deserves to find love. But it ain’t with me.” James cleared his throat, then shrugged. “He wasn’t too broken up about it. Said he could tell from our first date that my heart wasn’t in it. That I…that I was in love with someone else.” When Rowan’s eyes closed and he took in a sharp breath, James groaned. “I wasn’t gonna tell you. Not when…not after all this. That wasn’t fair of me, and I’m sorry. But I don’t want to sleep without you unless that’s what you want.”
Rowan finally forced himself to look up at the other man, and he could feel his pulse beating in his throat. “James,” he said. His voice was faint, too far off, and he felt weak. “I haven’t stopped wanting you, but I’m a fucking mess. I don’t know if I can be any good for you.”
“I’m not lookin’ for anything more’n you already are,” James insisted. He stepped even closer, and with the new revelation, Rowan wasn’t about to stop him. They touched, chest to groin, and Rowan didn’t know what it said about him that his mom was dead less than twenty-four hours, and he was here in her house with a half-chub, desperate to get his hands on the man in front of him.
“Today has been a lot, but that doesn’t change the fact that I want you. And if you’re willing to take me like this— without any idea when I’ll feel settled ag
ain…”
“I already let you go once,” James said. He leaned in so when he spoke again, their lips brushed in a mimic of a kiss, “I’m not about to do it again.”
Rowan reached up and framed James’ face with both hands before pulling him in the rest of the way. Their lips met, a sloppy, wet kiss that felt so perfect he ached inside. It didn’t erase the pain of the last few months, but it offered a comfort he hadn’t realized he was allowed to have after all this. Tears leaked from his eyes, and he knew he was in no position to go further, but having James here was enough.
“I want you to lie down, and I’m gonna get some food,” James told him, taking a deliberate step back. “My boys got the shop goin’ on without me, and my clients are covered for ink for as long as you need me here.”
“That’s…I can’t ask that of you,” Rowan said weakly.
James reached up, brushing his thumb over Rowan’s bottom lip. “Well, you didn’t. Someone opened my eyes to the fact that a stubborn man like you might need a little push in the right direction. I think people forget that, for my lack of experience, I’m hard-headed as they come. I’ll back off the moment you ask but…” He breathed out, taking another step closer, pulling Rowan’s hands up to his chest to rest there. “Please don’t ask.”
Rowan bowed his head, his eyes falling closed, and eventually he nodded. “Okay, I won’t.”
He felt James’ lips press a kiss to the crown of his head, and then he gently drew back. “Good. Now get in the bed, and I’ll be back soon.”
Rowan watched him go, then glanced over at his empty bed and realized that he no longer had to do this alone. It was an overwhelming thought, but it was time to let himself have this. Selfish or not, he was done letting go.
Chapter Nineteen
Only when he was certain that Rowan was fast asleep did James sneak out of the bed. It was trickier than at home, being that he hadn’t carted his wheelchair with him, which meant any time he wanted to get around, he’d be in his legs. He was sore from the flight, but it had been worth it.