Chapter 20 Dean
DEAN
The only other person to ever come close to handing me their secret truths, well, he hadn’t had much left to lose.
Henry had been on his deathbed, and young as I was before I’d had to stumble my way through the grief and recovery of losing him, every confession—open, honest, without pretense—had caught me up short.
Each one had felt like a goodbye, or at least part of one.
Stuff that he wanted to share with me while he still had the time.
That wasn’t to say it wasn’t brave. Some people looked at the ends of their lives and clung to their pride too much to allow them to remove their masks and share what really needed sharing.
I wouldn’t be the person that I’d become without Henry.
But this?
Landon had everything to lose. Given that he was a shifter like me, he could expect a long, relatively healthy life, at least compared to a human.
If I had to dig down into the why of it, I’d guess that the transformation had something to do with how we healed—elasticity of stem cells or something like that.
His family had betrayed him. The man he’d loved had hurt him in the worst way imaginable.
It wouldn’t have been all that surprising if Landon had never been able to trust anyone again. I certainly wouldn’t have blamed him. But there he was, baring everything to me.
The point was, for some reason or another, Landon had looked at me, disaster that I was, and decided: this one’s mine.
He’d let me into his inner world, and hadn’t hesitated to throw that journal across the room like it was nothing to be that vulnerable. He hadn’t tried to keep any part of himself closed off from me.
Did he even fucking realize what a miracle he was?
He even let me take the journal with me Monday morning, when he had to go to work and, for the first time in a while, so did I.
I spent hours pouring over the pages. Every word he wrote was intentional, thoughtful in a way I’d never been able to commit to.
But imagining him putting this all down, the shape of his hand on the pen as thought flowed freely, it was—shit, it’d never been so easy for me to tap into those feelings, or the words I needed to convey them.
By five o’clock, I was ready.
I have something I want to show you, I texted Landon.
Okay! Should I come over? he sent back moments later. Then the ellipses appeared beneath his message.
Or you can come to my place?
I sent back a quick message: Let’s do that. Meet you there.
I liked Landon’s place. All the things that felt sad about it at first had disappeared as he settled into life in San Francisco, and given that we’d spent the rest of the weekend after the concert fucking in his bed, it felt downright homey to me.
More importantly, it was a place we shared, somewhere it wasn’t hard for me to imagine being vulnerable with him without falling apart.
There was something cloistered and rough when I thought about singing in my own apartment for him, like the past was clawing me back when I wanted to look toward the future.
He was already home when I got to his place, guitar case in one arm, his journal in another. I stuck it out to him, yeah, okay, awkwardly.
“You should keep writing,” I said.
His words had fixed my brain, and while that wasn’t his job . . . “You’ve got important things to say,” I continued, “and a really accessible way of saying them. So if you want to, I mean, you could keep going. No pressure. Just . . . you’ll always have a reader in me.”
His cheeks turned pink, and he nodded without saying anything as he let me in. I sat on the couch, and he nodded down at the guitar case, setting the journal on a side table. “Did you finish something?”
I couldn’t hide my grin. “I don’t know. Close, I think. Thanks to you.”
He bit his lip, smiling too. “Let me hear it.”
This was more nerve wracking than I’d expected. Landon didn’t shrink away from his truth, so I owed him better than to hide mine, but I still had to clear my throat against a sudden tightness.
The gift of his full, complete trust was staggering, and the last thing I wanted to do was take it for granted or borrow his words and weave them through mine in a way that was unreal and exploitative.
I wanted to share them, not own them. Not use them.
So even though my heart was hammering and I’d performed on stage for hundreds of people without getting so nervous, even though my voice cracked at first and I had to start over, I sang for him.
To the melody I’d been rolling around for months, I sang of broken hearts and dashed expectations, a pain we’d all experienced. And of the tentative hope that pulled us out of the darkness, the strength it took to grasp that one perfect chance to find something better when you’d been hurt.
Nights alone and grief and longing, and the way it felt to be seen and accepted.
The tiny seed that could sprout into something extraordinary.
I closed my eyes and sang through the whole song, the melody gentle and winding, my voice deep and rough.
And when I was finished, the room was silent.
Nervously, I opened my eyes, and Landon was staring at me, his own eyes glassy with tears. My heart spasmed.
I’d done something wrong, said the wrong thing or upset him or—fuck.
Shit, I didn’t want to disappoint him when he’d let me get a peek at his heart and I was turning the whole thing into a performance.
I wanted him to know that I took this seriously, that I meant to cradle him in my cupped hands and lift him up for the whole world to see how strong he was.
“So?”
Landon swallowed hard, and before he said anything, he nodded.
“I love it,” he whispered finally. “I really love it.”
Next thing I knew, he was on his knees right in front of me, his hand on my face, his lips on mine. He kissed me slow and soft as he craned over my guitar. His lips tasted salty and sweet.
When he sat back on his heels, I set my instrument on the couch beside us and asked a question I already knew the answer to, but the one that would decide where my life went next.
I wanted his input.
Needed to know.
“Do you think I can make something of it?”
Landon grinned. “Yeah. Definitely.”