Chapter 12 #4
“How much longer?” Steven’s eyes narrowed. The question was a dam between Myles and whatever Steven was feeling, but holding back.
If he had hoped for a more enthusiastic response, Myles answered honestly despite the disappointment. “I don’t know exactly.”
“So this is a summer fling, then?” The quirky smile Myles was hoping for didn’t make an appearance.
“I don’t know what to call it. Do we have to label it?”
“Are you staying because of me? Because if you are, then maybe yeah, we should figure out what this is, exactly. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Making out like teenagers isn’t the worst way to spend a summer, but if it’s going to be more—”
“Do you want more? Because—”
Steven held up a hand to stop him. “Did I say that?”
“Well, no. But…” Myles sighed. “I haven’t exactly rushed headlong into bed with you. I hope you know that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with me.”
“I got that, yes.” Steven smiled at him, and his signature crooked expression had an unexpected softness to it.
“And don’t be so quick to say it has nothing to do with me, because it feels to me that we’re on the same page with the physical aspect.
We don’t have to be in a hurry to fuck. We don’t have to fuck at all, ever, if we don’t want to.
I wasn’t talking about sex. I can have sex with anyone.
I can’t have—” he waved back and forth between them “—this with just anyone. But if this is why you want to stay…”
“It’s not only because of you.”
Surprisingly, some of the tension left Steven’s expression. “Why, then?”
“I looked into the classes at the Y you mentioned. They run them in four-week sessions over the summer. Shelly can start next week, which is technically in the middle of a session, but the person I talked to on the phone said it doesn’t really matter.
Kids come and go all summer long, so…” He shrugged.
“Calgary doesn’t have a YMCA?”
“Of course it does.”
“But?” Steven put down his food too, and Myles watched his motion, annoyed with himself for derailing their breakfast.
“I don’t think Calgary is the right place for us right now.”
“Because?”
“Jet’s poor friend choices, for one, which, I’m thrilled to say, even he recognizes. He told me so this morning. Among a bunch of other things.”
“But he can’t avoid those people forever, can he? Once he’s back in school in the fall?”
“If he wants distance and time away from them, I’m happy to help him achieve that. Besides, Shelly wasn’t happy in that house, either. It affected all of us.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“No, not really.” Myles remembered her bombshell of thinking she’d be able to talk to her mother again and sighed. “I’m not so sure she completely understands it all yet.” He sat forward. “But do you know how may times I misplaced her in the mornings?”
“Wait, what? Misplaced?”
“I’d go to her room, and she wouldn’t be there.
It’s terrifying. I never knew where I would find her.
With Jet sometimes, or in her mother’s room, in her bed, or on the floor beside it.
One time, in the bottom of her mom’s closet, because she said it smelled most like her in there.
It took me almost an hour to find her that time.
She was sound asleep, and I was terrified.
Some nights, she even crawled into the dog bed with MJ.
But she left her bed more often than not, and…
” He sighed. “She once told me the house kept crying in her dreams.”
“That’s…”
“It was more disturbing before I knew what I know now, after being here.”
“So you don’t want to go back because you’re afraid of your house?” Though Steven sat back and watched Myles over the tent of his fingers, he didn’t seem to be judging, which was a relief.
“I don’t want to go back yet because here, Shelly sleeps. Every night, she lies down in that bed in the attic of that B and B and wakes up there, happy and rested.”
“That’s good.”
“And Jet has stopped checking his phone every five minutes. He told me this morning he wouldn’t be upset to not go back yet. He would rather not have to deal with the ‘friends’ he left behind. And he’s talking to Ozzy.”
“Your ex? About what?”
Myles shrugged. “He didn’t say exactly. But he doesn’t have to. If there was anything I had to really worry about, Ozzy would tell me. Or help Jet to tell me. I just know that if he’s talking to Ozzy, he’s not brooding over whatever he feels like he has to talk about, and I know I can trust Ozzy.”
“I don’t know if that should bother me more than it does. He is your ex, and the history you told me about is pretty intense.”
“Ozzy and I are never, ever getting back together. Even if he wasn’t so clearly devoted to his new guy, I’m not who I was when I was with him.”
“Maybe that’s all the more reason you and he would be better together now.”
Myles shook his head. “If anything, he and I are even less compatible.” He scooted forward so he could reach Steven, and took his hands. “Trust me, I could not let Ozzy be as… I couldn’t let him be with me the way I can let you… be.”
It was a terrible explanation, he knew. But he didn’t have the words, or rather, wasn’t quite ready to say the words out loud that would properly describe how he felt when Steven kissed him into a stupor.
“So you trust him with Jet’s mental health, but not with yours.”
“Not exactly. I mean, yes, I trust him to be professional and careful with Jet. He’s trained for that. But I don’t want—I can’t—be as free with him as I am with you.”
“Because I’m new? He already has such a big piece of your past. Of who you are.”
“Who I was. And who he was. I don’t think he’s the same anymore, either. Our past will obviously always be between us, but that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? It’ll come between us. It’ll take a long time to sort out.”
“And I’m new, so I’m safe?”
Myles laughed, a short, sharp bark. “Hardly.”
“What?” Steven pulled out of his grip.
“No, I mean…” Myles clapped a hand over Steven’s knee, willing him not to pull out of reach.
“I mean that with Ozzy, as damaging as it was, I always knew what to expect. I knew how he could hurt me, so in a way, he couldn’t.
Not in any way that mattered anymore. At least, not at the time.
In that way, he was safe. With you, it is new.
It’s an adventure, and one like I’ve never been on before.
It’s so different from, well, anything. Maybe it turns out to be the worst thing I’ve ever done, but maybe it turns out to be the best.”
“I don’t want to be bad for you.”
“But like you said when you mentioned that you know I don’t live here, and you knew that going in, I know this could end up hurting, but I finally have some hope that it might not. And that’s not something I want to miss out on.”
Steven placed a hand over Myles’s, and it was the same as his searing, mind-melting kisses. Myles was helpless. “And here I thought you were just bringing me scones and coffee.”
“And fruit.”
Steven pulled Myles close by the collar of his T-shirt. “And fruit,” he whispered against Myles’s lips.
Myles would forever swear that the bookstore changed that day.
When he blinked up at Steven, who had crawled across the space between their chairs to sit in his lap, it took him a long moment to realize the pounding he was hearing wasn’t the blood in his ears, but someone knocking on the front door.
“Shit!” Steven scrambled to his feet. “Coming!” He scurried across the room, adjusting his jeans as he went, to open the door and admit an elderly couple who kindly asked if he was open, and said they could come back.
“No, of course, come in. I’m sorry. I must have forgotten to unlock the door.”
Myles took the moment before they came into the main room to straighten his clothing and get his brain back online. As Steven showed the couple to a shelving stack filled with cozy mysteries, he tidied up their breakfast—which they hadn’t finished, and he wasn’t even sorry about it.
For the rest of the morning, as customers came and went, Myles inventoried the books Steven had unpacked and wiped down for him, and stole as many kisses and touches as he could reasonably get away with.
Around them, the house vibrated with light, the soft chimes of the bells over the front door, and the strains of an eclectic mix of music, always in the background but never silent.
At one point, Steven hung over the back of the couch where Myles had the tablet in his lap and a stack of books he was cataloguing beside him.
He wrapped both arms around Myles and clasped his hands against his chest. “Do you know those speakers haven’t worked since—” He gulped and laid his head alongside Myles’s, just breathing for a long minute. “Since Mom and Dad died.”
Not sure what to say to that, Myles just held Steven’s hands until a customer poked their head around a door lintel from a back room where Steven kept reference books and asked about his collection of musical biographies.
“Duty calls,” Steven whispered.
Myles patted his hands. “I’ll be here.”
Right up until Jet pinged his phone to remind him their cooking lesson would be starting in less than ten minutes.