Epilogue
Two years later
Hanging out of the apartment window, I scowled. “Dylan, quit fuckin’ around and get your ass movin’! I ain’t payin’ ya to get laid!”
My brother’s head swiveled up toward me and away from the delivery girl he was talking with. “Ya aren’t paying me, anyway!”
“I’m payin’ to get that rash on your asshole looked at,” I said, smirking when he flushed and the girl laughed, shaking her head as she walked off.
“You’re a fucker, ya know that?” he barked up at me and I flashed him the middle finger.
“Get movin’! There’s more boxes at the storage unit to grab,” I told him because he was going to get a nice meal and several drinks out of helping us move into the new apartment, so I wasn’t going to tolerate him standing around, trying to get his dick wet. “Honestly, he should’ve grown up by now.”
“Some people are perpetually horny,” came Isaac’s wry voice. “Ask your best friend.”
“Hey, leave me out of this. I didn’t do anything except fight with this fucking bed frame,” Clay’s irritated voice called from the back room. “You’re lucky I love you, Big Guy, because this thing was handcrafted by Satan himself, I’m telling you.”
“My little drama queen,” Isaac said with a chuckle, setting a box down on top of the stack of others.
He looked me over and smiled before retreating toward the back of the apartment where his boyfriend was muttering under his breath about things I know Clay would only dare to mutter because my parents hadn’t flown out to Tucson with us like Dylan had.
My brother was a pain in the ass and a horn dog, but he was my brother, and I was grateful he helped us move.
Moving all my things from one end of the country, and Walker’s from another end, was a pain in the ass. But…as much as I wanted to be around my family, I thought maybe it was time I finally lived on my own. Well, I wasn’t alone; Walker was here with me, and that was a lot better than being alone.
I dug through boxes to find stuff we would need for the first few days. I heard how people always forgot something when they were moving, and I was doing my best to make sure we had at least some clothes, silverware and dishes, cups, our bathroom stuff and—
“Ah, shower curtain!” I said, digging into another box. “Never again!”
“Never again?” Clay asked as he appeared in the living room, looking irritated.
“Got booted out ’cause ya don’t know how to control your temper, huh?
” I asked him, laughing when he gave me a dirty look.
“And yeah, there was a time when my team rented this little house on leave, just for a couple of months. Had to bunk up, but that was fine. But when we moved in, we forgot the curtain and liner. Turns out usin’ a blanket ain’t the same. ”
Clay squinted at me. “Does being in the Army require you to leave your brain at home?”
“Sometimes,” I said, tossing the curtain and liner with the rest of the stuff.
“Do I hear…Spanish?” Clay asked, squinting toward the open apartment door.
“It’s Tucson, of course you hear Spanish,” Isaac called, and then. “Huh, is that Walker?”
“How can you…” Clay began, glancing back at the bedroom before shaking his head. “Nevermind, I know better than to ask. What’s he doing?”
“Making nice with the neighbors,” I said with a snort.
Our neighbor across the way was a tiny old lady and, what I guessed, were her grandchildren.
She had come out of her apartment while I had been carrying stuff in, and I thought she was going to use her cane to beat me when she saw me.
Apparently she hadn’t been expecting a six-and-a-half-foot man to suddenly appear, filling the hallway, muttering curses about how unnecessary and annoying things were when you had to carry them up flights of stairs.
“I kinda scared her earlier, and he’s smoothing things over. ”
“I didn’t know he spoke Spanish…fluently?”
“Yeah, he also knows Farsi, and…Korean?”
“Huh, the things you learn about people. Babe, did you know that?”
“I knew he knew Korean; he pronounced last night’s takeout order too well,” Isaac said with a chuckle. “And I caught the Spanish because he hits his Rs kind of funny sometimes, and once he forgot how Js are pronounced.”
“And he wondered, with insight like that, why Reggie and Marc wanted him to be a Guide,” he said with a shake of his head. “Half the year, anyway.”
“That was my choice, not theirs,” Isaac said with a snort.
“So that means we’ll be your neighbors half the year, but I’ll be your neighbor all year,” Clay said with a grin.
“Ya live on the other side of town,” I told him as I pulled a box out and began going through it.
“Hey, careful with that!” Walker barked as he entered the room. “Raymond said I would probably still need all that.”
“Oh,” I said, looking it over and sure enough, it was mostly stuff from the court proceedings. “God, can we stuff this somewhere I don’t have to look at it?”
“He’s a little traumatized,” Walker said to Clay with a snort, putting the lid on the box and leaning over to kiss me. “Aren’t you?”
“No,” I lied.
Okay, the court had been awful. Even with Raymond assuring us everything was going exactly the way he expected, I had spent months in a constant state of worry.
If I’d been on my own, I probably would have lost my mind completely, but thankfully, we had bailed Walker out, though it had cost a pretty penny.
We had to live off the jobs we could scrounge, with him making money off safe, non-political writing and delivery jobs.
Those months had been hell, but they had been…
well, they had been wonderful in their own way.
It wasn’t ideal, but we’d had each other the whole time, and that was the only reason we were able to get through it in one piece.
The other was that Raymond was worth every penny we paid, and probably every penny he normally charged.
Although I was sure he had been confident, he was also patient and meticulous.
But I’d seen him in court as well; he was like a snake, calm and not paying attention, but the minute he sensed an opportunity, he struck.
He spent weeks painting the FBI as foolish, impulsive, and convinced to act by a standing agent with an axe to grind against Walker specifically.
By the time he was done, the agents ended up looking like kids playing cops and robbers, and the arrest had looked sloppy and unnecessarily rough, and not just because I had laid into them.
Yes, I had to sit there with my family and the other families and watch as my naked ass flung agents around the room and then dropped onto the ground when shocked…three times.
No, I didn’t like to think about that.
As for the evidence against Walker? Raymond had been just as meticulous and vicious there as well, picking it apart and casting doubt on everything.
By the time he was done, it looked like a case of a passionate, vulnerable veteran with a great sense of harsh patriotism was taken advantage of by a third party, and now his country was punishing him after years of having abandoned and mistreated him.
It was hard to deal with every day, but when I stood back and looked over everything, the way Raymond worked was as terrifying as it was impressive.
So now me and the freshly freed man were going to start a life together.
“Ew,” Clay groaned. “Isaac, they’re doing gay things!”
“Mmm,” Walker said with a smirk, pushing against me, and I grabbed his ass as he kissed me again. “Hear that? You’re doing gay things.”
“And when they get that bed put together, I’m gonna do a lot more gay things to ya,” I said, loving that I could still feel that flutter in my gut when I looked at him.
Maybe it was because I was still in love with him, or maybe because I was looking at a free man who seemed freer in other ways.
We were never going to escape our pasts, our demons, but they didn’t follow him around as much.
They were still there; that’s how demons worked.
You never got rid of them, not all of them, and not all the time.
The trick was to learn to live with them and accept that when they took over you had to go along for the ride.
There would be days when something got under your skin, and I couldn’t always predict when it would happen.
I couldn’t always head it off at the pass.
Even with my physical and mental therapist visits, there were times when I fell apart.
I got lost in my thoughts, drowning in memories and emotions from a time before I got my shit together…
as much as I could. There were days when I didn’t know where I was, but now I had Walker to help bring me back to reality, comfort me when I grasped what was real and got hit with a wave of self-loathing and regret.
I wasn’t alone, and it wasn’t one-sided.
There were days when Walker got lost in his thoughts, finding that his regrets had teeth and the memories had claws.
Those were the days he was edgiest, when he couldn’t decide what he hated more, the world we lived in or himself.
I had to remind him of gentleness and compassion, of what it meant to remember the good things.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
Sometimes I could coax him back, but other times I had to wait until he climbed out of that mental hole and wrapped himself around me, murmuring apologies as I whispered reassurances.
There were days when we were both in our respective pits. Those were the greatest lessons in compassion and understanding for us. We had gotten this far, though, and while there were rough days, we came out a little better each time. More capable of doing better next time.
After all, it was easier to get through life with someone you trusted completely at your side to bear some of the weight…and for you to bear some of theirs.
“Oh my God, Isaac!” Clay cried out dramatically.
“I am building the bed as quickly as I can.”
“No, they want to do gay things on it!”
“Why do you think I’m doing it as quickly as possible?”
Walker made a choking noise as Clay groaned. “Idiots.”
“True,” I said, thinking of our team and how ridiculous they had been. “Sounds familiar.”
“I was just about to ask if you would have grabbed my ass and shoved your tongue down my throat in front of the team just to torment them, but yes, yes you would have,” he said with a laugh. “Have you told the families?”
“What about these?” I asked, raising his left hand with mine and letting our rings softly click together. “Not yet. I figured when we called them next week, we could tell ’em.”
“They’re going to lose their minds,” he said with a sigh. “Probably more than my parents did…though only half as much as my sister and your mom did.”
Meanwhile, my dad said that at least one of his boys was finally going to be honest, God save me.
“Clay! Get in here,” Isaac called out.
“You just kicked me out!”
“Yes, and they’re having a moment, so get in here and close the door, and maybe I’ll do gay things with you when we get back home.”
“Hard to argue with that,” Clay said, and I rolled my eyes.
“You’re sure about this?” I asked, looking around at all our stuff shoved into boxes.
“It’s kind of bad timing to ask after we’ve signed the lease, flown out here, flown all of our stuff out here, and got jobs,” he said with a chuckle.
“Well, yeah,” I said, looking around. “But about us, all of this—”
“Ever since the moment you told me you were falling in love with me in that interview room, I’ve never once doubted that being here, or wherever, with you at my side was the place I needed to be,” he said, tilting his head back and smiling up at me.
“Also, I agreed to marry you, so yes, Cade, I’m fucking sure. ”
“Good,” I said, my chest squeezing as I kissed him. “It’s time we had a place we can call home.”
“Agreed,” he said, closing his eyes and pressing his face into my chest. “But I think it already feels like home.”
I breathed deeply, holding him there as I considered what we’d gone through and what still lay ahead. The worst was behind us. I had to believe that, so that meant only the best was waiting around the corner, if not standing in the room with us.
“Jesus Christ!” I heard a muffled complaint. “The fuck is that?”
“Is the box of toys back there?” Walker asked wryly.
“Look at the size of that thing, holy hell!” Clay said, sounding horrified and intrigued. “Babe, look at this!”
Yeah, it felt like home.