Chapter 1
Gino couldn’t believe the words on the paper in his shaking hands. He read the first paragraph again, a third time, before looking up at the man across the breakfast table from him.
His husband. His best friend. In the morning light, the tear tracks—old and new—glistened on Bennett’s ruggedly handsome face. A face Gino knew as well as his own after thirty years together. Had never seen in such wretched sorrow before.
Gino gulped, unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth, and forced out words around the lump in his throat. “You want a divorce?”
Bennett flinched. Closed his eyes and lowered his chin, face angled away. Another tear slid over the hard lines of his face and disappeared into his morning scruff. Prickly brown and silver hairs that Gino had felt under his fingertips last night when he’d kissed him goodnight.
“I don’t know.”
Bennett’s voice was as ragged as Gino’s insides felt. His body looked it too, shoulders slumped beneath a threadbare band tee, nothing artful about his messy brown hair, hazel eyes bloodshot when they opened and met his again. “But I do know I’ve never been this fucking tired, G. I feel like fucking roadkill, and we haven’t even started the tour yet.”
“That’s fair,”
Gino said as he tossed the divorce papers onto the table. “Rehearsals have been a bitch and the logistics for this tour are complicated. But how does that translate to divorce?”
He cut his gaze to their kitchen island covered in the arena stipulations their manager had sent over last night. “Because I can’t remember the last time I spent more than a few hours in bed with you.”
Tapped the screen of his phone on the table, bringing up dozens of texts from their bandmates. “Because I’m so tired of taking care of Ellery’s serial broken heart, of the broken hearts Roscoe leaves in his wake, of Miles and Mason’s twin spat of the week, that I can’t take care of you, much less myself.”
He slumped in the chair, eyes slipping shut again as he hung back his head. “Because I barely remember the taste of you, the feel of you beneath my hands. Because I barely remember me.”
“Baby.”
Gino slid from his chair and onto the floor between Bennett’s spread knees, circling his husband’s shoulders and pulling him into an embrace.
Bennett fell the rest of the way off the chair and into his lap, hugging him back with the same desperation Gino felt, his grip like a drowning man’s. It scared the shit out of Gino; so did Bennett’s words. “We made it. You were right five years ago when you wouldn’t let us quit. Our shelves are decorated with awards, our walls with platinum records, but somewhere in the rise, I fell. I lost myself, and I lost you and us too.”
His last words were barely a whisper, swallowed by his quiet, tired sobs. Gino held him tighter, his husband’s hot tears seeping through his own tee, searing into his soul. Into his heart that still—would always—belong to Bennett York. “You’re right here, B. Right here with me. I’ll get us back, I promise.”