Chapter 19
Chapter 19
Lance woke to an empty bed, and a silent house.
It had been a difficult night. Tanner had woken again and again, yelling and thrashing around. Every time Lance jolted awake, he felt as if he’d lost another year of his life. Attempts to calm his wild animal of a boyfriend had been quite the challenge.
The last time they’d woken had been around 5:00 a.m., and that was the end of the nightmares. The beside clock now read 8:15 a.m. How in the hell had Tanner managed to slip out of bed without his noticing it?
Sighing with exhaustion from sleeping so poorly, he got up and put on some sleep pants. Moving slowly down the stairs, he rubbed his eyes and gave a jaw cracking yawn. The kitchen was empty as well and there weren’t any signs of Tanner having fixed anything before leaving the house. The coffeemaker wasn’t even turned on. Wherever Tanner had gone, he’d left in a hurry, without fixing coffee or breakfast.
He made himself a cup of joe and headed into the living room, grabbing his cellphone from the charger to check his messages in case Tanner had left him one.
He found three missed calls from his mother, a voicemail from Parker, and an unread text from Jeremy.
Jeremy
Parker told me.
Hope your BF is ok. Mom’ll come around.
You should have told us.
While Jeremy’s text didn’t exactly shower him with love and acceptance, it was a ringing endorsement compared to his mother’s ugly attack the night before. Too tired to respond, he left it for later.
He moved on to Parker’s voicemail.
“Hey—uh—so, listen—I don’t really know what the fuck to say, Lance. Kind of a shocker, you know?” He paused for a quick laugh before continuing. “I don’t care. Like, at all. I have a frat brother who’s gay. Doesn’t bother me, you know, I just—I never would have guessed.” Lance could easily visualize Parker’s nervous habit of running his hands through his hair while awkwardly explaining himself. “Just call Mom back, ‘K? We can, like, fix things.”
Maybe. Maybe things could be fixed. Lance just wasn’t sure how long it would take to return to normalcy after her tantrum in the driveway. At the moment, he had a much bigger issue to deal with than calling his bitchy mother. He sighed and skimmed through his contacts list to find Tanner’s name. There were no new messages, no missed calls. Nothing at all. Alarmed, he quickly pressed Tanner’s number.
It rang six times before Tanner’s voicemail picked up. The generic kind that simply stated the phone number and requested that he leave a message after the beep. While Lance usually didn’t leave messages for Tanner, he forced himself to leave one this time.
“Hey, I don’t know where you are, and I’d really like it if you could like—give me a sign of life before I call the National Guard and go on a wild goose chase only to find out later that you went for a drive or some shit,” he paused and chuckled, running a hand through his hair. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be smothering you or anything, but—” he laughed again, and realized he was about to run out of time. “Anyway, call me back? Or send me a text. Something, alright?”
And then he hung up and began to wait.
His patience ran out after about 20 minutes, so he called Tanner’s sister.
“Lance?” Cameron was surprised by his call. He could hear the sizzle of bacon frying in the background and his mouth suddenly watered. He’d been sick with nerves, so worried about Tanner’s whereabouts that he hadn’t been able to eat anything yet.
“Hey—uh, did you hear from Tanner this morning?”
A fork, or something metallic, dropped onto the stove, as Cameron replied, “No, nothing. Why, did something happen?”
Taking a deep breath, Lance wondered how to put this so she wouldn’t freak out.
“Kinda—yeah,” he confessed. “We went to my mother’s 4th of July party yesterday, and there were fireworks—”
She cut him off with an angry shout, “You took him to a fireworks show? Are you insane?”
He yanked the phone away from his ear, wondering if his eardrum was still intact. And while he totally deserved to have his ass kicked, her yelling at him wasn’t terribly helpful.
“There weren’t supposed to be any fireworks at the party. I asked ahead of time to make sure it wouldn’t be a problem. But one of the guests decided to set off fireworks and we didn’t know anything about it until it was actually happening.” Despite her pissed off mumbling, he plowed ahead.
“He sort of lost it—and then, after he calmed down, my mother put two and two together, and she blew a gasket about our relationship and there was a lot of yelling and shouting and cursing.” He wasn’t sure if he should have told her that, since it didn’t help in locating Tanner, but he needed to get it off his chest. “We got home, and he seemed better, but he had nightmares all night and—and—I,” his breath suddenly caught on a sob. Was he about to fucking cry? Jesus Christ! He coughed and cleared his throat. “He wasn’t here when I woke up this morning. He didn’t text me, didn’t call—I’m—I’m just worried.”
Cameron took a deep breath.
“Okay, no need to panic. He probably just went for a drive or something,” she said, and it sounded like she was trying to convince him and herself. “I’m sorry about what happened with your mother.” Her sympathetic tone and depth of sincerity surprised him.
“It’s fine,” he dismissed quickly.
“It’s really not. She has no right to treat you so badly,” she countered, making it clear he had a right to be upset. “I’ll call around. I know a few places he likes to hang out. I just tracked his phone, but it looks like he left it at your place.”
Fuck. Well, at least that explained Tanner’s radio silence.
“Okay, thanks. Let me know what you hear—” he said, feeling a little breathless as the stress of not knowing where Tanner was made his heart race. Why was he so fucking panicked? Tanner was a grown man. He could take off anytime he wanted to. It didn’t mean he was doing something stupid, or something terrible had happened.
Then again, the statement made by the little girl’s father haunted him. The man’s heartbreak over the tragic loss of his friend was painful to witness.
Five tours in the Middle East and he took his own life two months after being discharged.
Tanner wouldn’t do that. He wasn’t—things had been bad last night, but not that bad, right?
“Of course.” Cameron answered. “I’m sure we’re both being obnoxious mother hens over nothing.”
But her sisterly platitudes did little to alleviate his anxiety. He thanked her anyway, and they hung up.
He looked for ways to kill time while he waited for updates about Tanner. He took a shower, put away his clean laundry, cleared out the dishwasher, and sorted through the mail. After doing all that, he stopped for another cup of coffee. He still couldn’t stand the thought of food. He checked the clock on the microwave again. He’d managed to kill just one fucking hour. He sighed, gradually going insane in his suddenly too big house. He nearly jumped out of his skin when his phone finally buzzed. He jumped for it, pressing accept call mid-flight.
“Hello?” He didn’t check the caller ID.
“Hey Lance, I called everywhere, and no one has seen him all morning,” Cameron informed him in a shaky voice.
“Fuck!” Lance began pacing anxiously around the living room. “What do we do?”
“I’m not sure there’s much to be done. Can’t report him as missing unless it’s been 24 hours.”
“But he’s a vet with PTSD, doesn’t that make him more—”
“With no history of suicidal thoughts, they won’t budge,” she cut him off, like she’d been there, done that.
“Fuck!” Lance exclaimed viciously. Panicking was not normal for him. Panic was a loss of control, and Lance never lost control. Not like this.
“Mark and I are going to go tour the neighborhood—I’m not sure it’ll do any good, but I can’t—” Lance stopped listening the second his front door opened, making the alarm system beep. Tanner strolled in and closed the door behind him.
“He’s here!” Lance exclaimed.
“Tanner? Is it Tanner?”
“He just walked in. He’s here. I gotta go, Cameron. I’ll call you back—” He hung up and tossed the phone onto the couch.
He didn’t exactly run to Tanner, but it was damned close.
“Cameron?” Tanner asked as Lance rushed up to him.
“I lost my mind a little,” Lance confessed as he body slammed Tanner, hugging him tightly.
Tanner chuckled and returned his hug, squeezing him hard and then resting his chin on his shoulder.
“You left—” Lance said, his voice muffled by Tanner’s shirt. “I didn’t know where you were and after last night—” Lance’s voice trailed off.
“I left a note for you.”
“No, you didn’t,” Lance refuted, shaking his head, but not letting go of Tanner.
“Yes, I did,” Tanner countered quickly, pulling away from Lance to look down at him. “In the fruit basket. You have a banana every morning. Figured you’d see it there,” he explained with a shrug, nodding towards the kitchen.
And yeah, Lance had a banana almost every morning, except this morning, he’d felt too sick with nervous tension to bother eating.
“I—” Lance stammered in shock, feeling extremely foolish. Tanner chuckled and shook his head, then he leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Lance’s lips. He pulled Lance along behind him towards the kitchen.
“So, you called my sister—” Tanner said, shaking his head and sighing in resignation. “Have you notified the police yet?”
“No. It hasn’t been 24 hours,” he replied, his candor making Tanner chuckle. He grabbed the note from the fruit basket and handed it to Lance with a smirk.
Lance read it quickly.
Gone to see my shrink.
Be back later,
Xoxo
“Well, don’t I feel fucking stupid!” Lance ducked his head, looking abashed. Sitting down on a bar stool, Tanner grinned and pulled Lance towards him, positioning him between his legs.
“I didn’t want to wake you, again ,” Tanner explained. “But I needed to see Dr. Jones. So, I called her up early this morning to get an emergency consult.”
“She does that?” He’d never heard of anyone being able to do that.
“Uh—I don’t know, actually. I think I sounded pathetic enough that she may have made an exception.”
“I’m so fucking sorry about last night.” Lance couldn’t help repeating himself because he felt so bad about taking Tanner to the party in the first place. He never should have allowed his mother to pressure him into going, and he vowed it would never happen again.
Tanner shook his head and looked up at Lance with a brilliant smile.
“But it wasn’t your fault.”
“Kinda was—” Lance replied with an eyeroll. Tanner suppressed his smile, trying to keep this discussion on a serious level.
“Here’s the thing—this morning, I was so damned angry—not with you, but with myself. I kept—I kept thinking, what kind of fucking idiot loses his shit at a barbecue, you know? Like—how am I ever supposed to get my life back together if I blow a fuse every time a car backfires, or someone lights a firecracker? I was so damned pissed. And sad. And I wanted to apologize and dive off a cliff at the same time.”
Lance opened his mouth to say something, but Tanner wasn’t done yet.
“That’s why I went to see her. And she said some interesting things.” Tanner said, his tone making it clear he hated to admit that his shrink might be helpful sometimes.
“What’d she say?” Lance asked, curious.
“She said I had a right to be angry.”
“Hell yeah, of course you do! You fucking asked me before the party about those goddamned fireworks, and I assured you—”
Tanner kissed him, which was the best, tried-and-true way to shut Lance up. “I’m not talking about you, honey.”
Lance sat back, pleasantly surprised to hear Tanner’s new pet name for him. Honey began running on an endless loop in his head, making him forget what he was going to say.
“She said I had the right to be angry with the people who fucked my life up. That I was allowed to hold them responsible, but that anger wouldn’t help me at all in getting my life back. And she’s right.” He sighed deeply. “I’m fucked in the head right now, Lance. And if—if what you saw last night scared you or makes you want to pull the plug on us, I’d totally understand. You know it’s probably going to happen again. And I’m okay with that. So, that means I have to be okay with the consequences too. Like your leaving me.”
It took a full minute for Lance to process all that.
“I’m not leaving you,” he stated calmly.
“You could—” Tanner began.
“Fuck that noise! No, I’m not leaving you.”
Tanner seemed amused by his certainty and nodded.
“What do you mean you’re okay with it happening again?” Lance asked, trying to get them back on track.
“I lost three years of my life in the sandbox. Three years of my life and a big-assed chunk of my sanity are gone. I’m not wasting any more time. The memories, the panic, all of it, isn’t what fucked me up the most yesterday. It was the shame. I just kept thinking—what a fucking loser I was. Over and over. I just got caught in a nasty little loop of my own misery and shame and I couldn’t break free of it,” he admitted, shaking his head. “And then the little girl’s father came over, and he fucking thanked me—and—I kept thinking of Ahmed.”
That was a name Lance had never heard before. Well—no, that wasn’t exactly true. He’d heard it dozens of times, but only during Tanner’s nightmares, and he’d never dared to ask any questions about him.
“Ahmed?” Lance was concerned about whether Tanner was really ready to talk about this person.
“Ahmed, yeah. He was the kid I was locked up with over there,” Tanner explained, swallowing against a tight knot of emotion that formed whenever he thought of Ahmed. “Well, he was 16 by the time I left, but—he was a kid to me.” He gazed blankly at his hands, lost in memory. “His father got in trouble with the militant group that had imprisoned me, so they kidnapped Ahmed and held him for ransom. The father had no choice but to infiltrate state government—” he shook his head, not wanting to talk about the kid’s father. “Ahmed sat across from me in that fucking cell for three years, but in the end, I left without him.”
Lance could see and feel Tanner’s guilt as he relived those days in the desert. “I’d never told anyone about him, but after last night—” he shook his head. “After the dad thanked me, that was all I could think about—all I could dream about,” he said shakily. “I told Dr. Jones this morning, and she said—she said the best way to get over my guilt was to confess it to someone who matters. So that’s what I’m doing.”
“Why, Tanner Casey, are you saying you care about me?” Lance asked with a teasing smirk that lightened the mood.
Tanner chuckled and looked away. “You’re a fucker,” he muttered accusingly. Lance chuckled in response, placing a hand on the back of Tanner’s neck, gently rubbing the skin behind his ear as he waited for Tanner to look at him again. When he did, Lance met his gaze directly.
“I’m sorry about Ahmed. It wasn’t your fault.”
Tanner shook his head and opened his mouth to argue, but it was now Lance’s turn to silence Tanner with a quick kiss.
“It. Wasn’t. Your. Fault.” Lance repeated, sternly. “You weren’t responsible for him. You did what you could in an impossible situation. The guilt you’ve been carrying around doesn’t belong to you. It’s not yours. You don’t need it. You don’t deserve it.” Lance must have said just the right thing, in just the right way, because Tanner finally nodded his agreement.
Wanting to offer comfort and reassurance, Lance wrapped his arms around him, pulled him against his chest, and kissed his ear and neck.
“This got so gay, so quick,” Tanner mumbled against his chest. Lance burst into laughter and dragged Tanner up to their bedroom.