Chapter 11 #2
“I know. He and Steph are not the same, but that is one thing they have in common. I think living with Jake taught them never to be ambiguous or false. Jake is very literal, so they both just default to saying exactly what they mean or want. Cuts down on the noise for Jake, and once you get used to it, makes things a lot easier in general.”
“So I should go,” Myles said, realizing he was, as Lucky had pointed out, dithering.
“You should.”
Lucky handed him his cane where he’d leaned it against the counter. “Go. Don’t worry so much. You do have this.”
Right. Because not worrying was never hard at all.
Fleetingly, the thought that a drink would make it all easier passed through his brain. He cringed away from it, but it was gone as quickly as it had come.
“Right.” He said it aloud this time as he made his way through the crowded front room. Literally no one paid him any mind, but he still felt like the centre of attention until he made it outside.
Once out in the fresh air, he used the drizzle to keep him rooted until the front door banged shut behind him. As if the house was kicking him out. Not permanently, he knew, but he got the feeling Mildred didn’t have a lot of patience for this sort of pointless hesitating.
Above him, a window opened and Jet called down. “Dude! Seriously. Just go!”
It was enough to spur Myles into motion, at least as far as the sidewalk.
Once there, he waited for a car to pass—though he had more than enough time to cross ahead of it.
By the time he’d mounted the steps to the front porch of the bookshop and raised a hand to knock, his stomach was in knots and his heart thudding so slowly he wasn’t sure it beat at all fast enough to keep him on his feet.
Before his knuckles contacted wood, the door handle turned, and the door popped open. It didn’t swing wide enough to accommodate him, but a crack appeared between door and frame.
“Is that an invitation?” he asked.
Nothing. The door remained an inch open, but no more.
The black spruce in the front yard swayed slightly. A ripple of motion meandered through the trees along the street. Somewhere farther down Main, a crow squawked. The bushes next to the porch shuddered, and then everything went still.
It felt like the entire neighbourhood held its breath.
“Fine. Invitation it is.” He pushed through the door and tried to ignore the sensation of a leafy sigh being let out as the door closed in his wake with a decisive click.
His gaze turned immediately to the front counter as he entered.
“Oh hey.” It was Stephanie who offered him a brilliant smile as he stepped inside.
“Oh.” What had he expected? Steven sitting there waiting for him? If so, why had his heart restarted, setting off a cascade of wilting relief that made his limbs weak?
“I didn’t bring you a coffee,” he said, hefting the basket awkwardly. Because that was the most important takeaway here.
“No worries.” She held up an identical stainless-steel cup to the ones in his basket. “Already been and done that. Steven’s upstairs.”
“I’ll just—” He pointed at the next room with its centre arrangement of furniture where they had been working the night before. “Wait, I guess.”
“Oh no. He said to send you up when you got here.”
“Send me up.” An immediate image of Steven lounging in a king-sized bed invaded his brain. The idea of the tall trees outside the windows peering in did not help him banish it in the least. “Really?”
Her grin just got wider. “I don’t know what you just imagined, but that shade of red is not altogether bad on you.”
“I—shit.”
“Stop. Take a breath. He’s in the sitting room at the top of the stairs.”
“I don’t quite know why I’m…” Pulling in a deep breath, Myles shook himself and offered a less than confident smile. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. We all have that feeling now and then, don’t we?”
He nodded. “I guess so, yeah.” But no, he’d never had it within living memory. In the way back? Before deployments and street living and booze? Maybe. But everything from before was a haze, and this giddy, wibbling stomach and uncertainty wasn’t how he saw himself.
“Go on up. And be gentle with him. And with you. You’re not the only one who’s nervous, yeah?”
“That should be a relief, right?”
She shrugged. “Should it?”
Gazing at the door leading through to the kitchen and the stairs, Myles squared his shoulders, gripped the basket tighter, and eased out a long breath. “No idea.”
“All the way up,” she called after him as he pushed through the door.
The kitchen he found himself in was the same one he’d already been in, but now, on his own there without Steven to distract him, he saw beneath the glamour that Steven had wrapped around the public rooms of the old building.
The space wasn’t dirty. Every surface was wiped clean.
The floor itself was spotless, the rugs at each entrance laying flat and tidy.
Stacks of tea boxes, cereal bags, and spices were neatly arranged along the back of the counter.
However, even if the piles were neat, they were prominent.
The corners of the room had their own mini hoards.
Mops and brooms in the one behind the door, overflowing laundry baskets near the table, and tied plastic bags that looked like they were filled with pop cans in another.
Nothing was even messy, really, but there was an air of neglect around the edges of the room, like Steven had stopped seeing the parts of it he didn’t actively use.
Natalie’s kitchen had begun to look like this when she’d grown too sick to maintain it the way she liked.
It had taken Myles days to clean out her corners.
This looked like it might take a bit longer.
Forcing himself to look away from what was not really his business, he turned to the stairs and started up.
Each stair had another miniature pile along the edge. Neatly folded towels, shoes lined up along the wall, stacks of books, even a few ragged pairs of bunny slippers no longer fit to wear. Carefully, Myles navigated the clear path up the middle.
As Stephanie had predicted, Myles found Steven sitting on a sofa tucked under an eave on the top floor.
Around him, once more, the room carried an air of neglect and clutter dropped and forgotten.
“Hey there,” Myles said as he took the last step, forcing himself to look at Steven and ignore the rest.
Steven pulled the blanket over his knees a little higher as he turned his head. “Hi.” Were his cheeks more pale than normal?
“How are you?” Myles held up the basket. “I brought coffee. And treats.”
“That’s great.”
“What’s wrong?” Hurrying across the room, Myles sank onto the other end of the couch, dropping the basket onto the floor at his feet and resting a hand on Steven’s shin. “What can I do?”
“Why would you think anything is wrong?” Steven shifted his foot so Myles’s hand hovered in the air for the split second before he let it fall.
“I—” Myles focused his attention on the basket. “Sorry. Nothing. Here.” He pulled out one of the mugs and handed it over. “This one’s for you. And there are cookies—”
“Myles.”
“Yes?” He stopped, halfway to handing Steven his mug.
Steven sat up so he could reach it, but he let his hand linger over top of Myles’s. “That wasn’t a rhetorical question.”
“You just looked…” He ran a thumb over Steven’s knuckles. “Maybe I was projecting. You looked a bit like I felt there for a second.”
“And how’s that?”
“Uncomfortably nervous, if I’m honest.”
“I hope you would be honest with me.”
“You should know I’m an alcoholic,” Myles blurted, then stared, horrified, because where the fuck had that come from?
Steven blinked at him. “I’m sorry. What?”
“Shit.” Myles leaned back against the arm of the couch, the desire to run making his heart hurt with its frantic beating. “Sorry. That…” He flopped a hand in the air, then let it fall. “Not how I meant to share that little tidbit.”
“Drink your coffee,” Steven said, mild as anything. “And you said there were cookies?”
Myles handed him the container without comment. For a time, they ate cookies and sipped coffee while they watched the street below. No one said anything.
Finally, Steven nudged him with a toe. “I assume, when you say ‘alcoholic,’ you mean recovering.”
Myles nodded.
More silence.
“Well.” Steven tucked his toes under the shin Myles had pulled up in front of him. “I’m a not-exactly-recovering agoraphobe.”
“That’s different.”
“Only slightly.”
“Your issue doesn’t hurt anyone else.”
Steven leaned forward. “Doesn’t it? You think Steph doesn’t worry?
You think I don’t know there will come a time when you’re as sick of these four walls as you are of the B and B?
As you were of your place in Calgary? And when you go back there…
what then? If we keep doing this, what happens when you go home and I can’t come visit? How long do you think we last then?”
He sighed and slumped back, resuming his previous staring out the window. “And don’t think I don’t realise how much pressure I just put on one little kiss.”
Myles set his mug on the floor by his foot so he could crawl across the couch to reach Steven, who lowered a knee to let him in close. When he cupped a hand around the back of Steven’s neck, he met with no resistance.
Steven gasped in a small breath and turned to face him, blue eyes wide. “What?”
For answer, Myles kissed him, a deep, lingering kiss that Steven opened for, sighed into, and whimpered when it was over.
“Two kisses now,” Myles whispered.
“So you don’t think this”—Steven waved a hand between them—“is a bad idea?”
“I think this is the first good idea I’ve had since I ran away from Calgary.” With a last peck, Myles settled back to his end of the couch.
“Why did you run?” Steven asked.
“Whoa. Lucky was right.”
“Lucky? About what?”
“You’re direct.”
Steven tilted his head. “You started it.”
Myles snickered. “The ‘I’m an alcoholic’ truth vomit. Right. That was me.” He picked up his coffee and spent some time savouring the warmth and distraction of it.
“So?” Steven said eventually. “Why?”