Worked Up! (Grovemoor Guys #1)

PROLOGUE

LARRY

I stare blankly at the two faces in my living room. My living room. One of them belongs to Wesley, the man I’ve loved for the past six years, the man I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with, and the other… the other I don’t know, but I don’t feel like I should be staring because he’s yet to put his underwear on.

“Larry, it’s not what it looks like,” Wes says quickly, brown eyes blazing and dark hair wild around his head. It’s a cliché. Who actually says that in real life?

“It looks like you were sleeping with him,” I reply sharply.

“Well… then it is what it looks like,” he says, a little more subdued. It almost seems like he’s making a joke, but I swear if he tries to laugh this off I don’t think either one of us will be walking out of this room alive. “I… I don’t know what to say.”

“Can you put some bloody clothes on?” I bark at the other man, though it doesn’t come out as the bark I intended, more like a squeak. The words catch in my throat. This isn’t what I thought was going to happen when I came home early from work to surprise Wes. I thought we could go out to dinner. I thought we could have a date night, and maybe I would be the one of the people starkers in our living room. But apparently he thought differently. He thought he could fuck around behind my back.

I wait until Wesley’s naked guest leaves, trying to ignore that Wes walks him to the door and that they actually have a short conversation before the door closes. A whispered conversation that I am absolutely not a part of. What’s going on? I want to walk out there and invite him back in, just so I can slam the door in his face. He owes me that much.

I sit down on the sofa, and Wes goes to sit next to me but thinks better of it and sits on the nearby armchair. He’s staring into me. I can’t bring myself to even look at him.

“How long?” I ask.

“You saw it.”

“Not the time for joking,” I snap. “How long?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“Larry—”

“Don’t,” I say, finally looking at him. I can’t imagine how much of a wreck I look right now, how red my eyes must be, but at least I’m not sobbing. That’s the only saving grace of this moment. The tears are just rolling down my face, cascading off my chin and onto my sky blue button-down shirt. “Just answer the question.”

“A year,” he says.

“A year,” I repeat, breathing the words out into the silence of our living room. We’d shared so many laughs here, so many joyful moments in the past twelve months. They all seemed tainted now. “Who is he?”

“Andrew,” he replies. “From work.”

“Right.”

“Have I met him?”

“You have now.”

“I mean before.”

“No,” he says. “It… it didn’t seem appropriate.”

The silence pushes its way between us again and I take my eyes off him. They’d been doing it in here, so maybe they’ve done it in our bed too. They clearly feel comfortable having sex in our flat—in our home. I feel sick.

“Are you sorry?”

Wes shrugs. “Not really.”

“Wes—”

“What do you want me to say, Larry?”

“I don’t know. Not that,” I say.

“Look, I think you should go,” he says.

I blink. How did this happen? How did I go from catching him cheating on me to being the one kicked out of our apartment? How did we get to this?

“Why should I go?”

“Because I don’t think we should be together anymore.”

It hits me so fast it knocks the wind right out of me. The tears are really coming now and I’m fighting the urge to cry my little heart out. I can hear it breaking. With every word he says another crack forms and it gets closer to shattering into a million pieces.

“Why? Where has this come from? We should talk about it?—”

“I don’t want to.”

“Wes—”

“No Larry, come on. I’m clearly not happy in this relationship,” he says, getting to his feet and starting to pace in front of me, in the very spot I’d found the two of them stark bollock naked a few minutes ago.

They couldn’t wait to get to the bedroom. Just had to do it right here.

“But we need to work on this. I love you.”

“I… I don’t know if I do anymore.”

Somehow that hurts more than catching him with someone else. The knife has been driven in, and now he’s just twisting it.

“Wes—”

“No, Larry. For fuck’s sake,” he groaned. “Look at you, you’re sitting there like a lost little puppy. Don’t you want to fight for this? Don’t you want to yell at me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then why don’t you do it?”

“Because I want to talk to you. I want to figure out what went wrong!” I protest. I try raising my voice but I know that it just doesn’t have the right amount of conviction in it. “What happened to us?”

“This is what happened to us!” Wes doesn’t seem to have a problem raising his voice, doesn’t have a problem getting defensive. “Where’s the passion? Where’s the fire? You just drift through life, Larry. I’ve been fucking around with Andrew for a year and you either haven’t noticed or you didn’t want to.”

“I didn’t notice,” I say. “I thought… I thought we were going somewhere. I thought we were good together.”

“We were good together,” Wes replies. “But we’re not anymore.” He stops pacing and there’s a moment, however brief, where I think I can see regret. But it’s probably wishful thinking on my part. “I’m going out.”

“To see him?”

“Yes,” Wes replies, and he waits for a second. “Even now you’ve got nothing to say. You’ve got no passion, no drive, no get up and go.” He shakes his head. “Be out of here when I get back. I’ll be a couple of hours.”

“Where am I supposed to go?”

Wes shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “But you don’t live here anymore.”

He walks away and slams the door behind him. He slams the door on me, on the life we built together, and on the future we potentially had. And I have no idea what I’m supposed to do next.