Chapter 9
Will
This tea is too strong.
Will never drinks tea this late, and the tea is definitely too strong. If the caffeine does its job and keeps him awake, he’ll be dead tired for his shift tomorrow. And the work’s hard enough as it is. Trying to push through a shift tired is a great way to wipe himself out for a whole week.
I should have ordered something else.
“Will?”
His eyes flicker from the too-dark tea in its functional white mug, up to Nathan’s face, and straight back down again. His brain helpfully reminds him that he has breakfast with Jon before his shift, offering up all sorts of logistical details to focus on, crowding Nathan out.
“Will? You okay?”
I can’t do this.
His eyes flicker up again, vision flooded with familiar green before he looks back into his mug. “Give me a minute.”
“Alright.” In his peripheral vision, he sees Nathan’s fingers tighten around his own mug, knuckles pale. “Take your time.”
The fluorescent light hanging above their table blinks out with a metallic ping, harsh light returning a second or so later.
He’s never visited this cafe before. It might well be the neutral ground Nathan said they needed, but it feels wrong.
Too sterile, too functional with its scrubbed white tiles and plastic tables, when all Will wants is warmth and comfort.
Actually, what he wants is to wake up at home in bed and find that the past hour was nothing more than a nightmare. Unfortunately, since he lives in the real world and not in a soap opera, that seems unlikely to happen.
His overtired, overloaded brain resists, but the swirling mass of emotion he thought he’d banished forces his mouth open. “I thought you were dead.”
Nathan jolts, tea slopping over the edge of his mug to soak his fingers. “You what?”
Will looks up, taking a deep breath and forcing himself to pretend he’s at work, detaching himself from an emotional situation he doesn’t want to hit home. “I thought you were dead.”
“I heard you.” Nathan dries his fingers on a thin paper towel and resumes gripping his mug. “I, uh… why?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Will’s voice is neutral, like it is at work. It’s good, that neutrality. Like he’s talking about someone else’s pain in a way that won’t spook them. “You disappeared. The bond faded until I woke up one morning and there was nothing left. What else was I meant to think?”
“I’m sorry. Fuck, I’m so sorry. I never thought you’d…” Nathan reaches out, and Will pulls back instinctively, wrapping his arms around his stomach. The flinch that follows barely registers. “I’m not dead. Obviously.”
Will reaches for sarcasm. “Obviously.”
They sit in silence for a little longer, the plastic clock on the wall above them marking the seconds resolutely.
Fuck it. “What happened, then? After… when you disappeared.”
“My father happened.” Nathan takes a swig of tea, grimacing and placing the mug back down on the table in front of him. “He drove me to my uncle’s place that night. Took my phone.”
“I figured he had something to do with it.”
“He put a lot of effort into keeping me isolated, believe me.”
The memory of a secondary emotion tugs at Will’s stomach. He felt that isolation, felt it gnawing at Nathan’s nature, felt it souring optimism into desolation. There were tiny sparks of hope, at first, but they didn’t last.
He doesn’t want to remember what he felt after the last spark died away. The emptiness that followed, the fuzzy nothingness that muffled the bond between them. He could feel Nathan through it, that dampened darkness. He could feel him in the depths of it, so far from the surface.
Until he couldn’t feel him at all.
“Can we talk about it?” Nathan’s fingers flex, clearly debating reaching out again and thinking better of it. His voice is sombre, matching the feeling that sits heavy on Will’s chest. “A lot has happened since then. I want to tell you everything.”
Boundaries. Successful palliative care nurses know how to draw boundaries. “I can’t do this now.”
“Okay. I understand.” Nathan pushes a lock of wavy brown hair back from his forehead, the movement a familiar ghost come back to haunt him.
“I thought you were dead.”
“I know. You said.” A brief pause, the silence heavy and suffocating. “I’m sorry.”
“Nathan. I really can’t do this now.”
How can I feel like I’m drowning and overjoyed at the same time? I lost him, I moved on, and now he’s here, like a ghost from the past. I missed him so, so much…
Nathan pushes Will’s mug back towards him. “Drink your tea. I put extra sugar in it. For the shock, you know?”
Will remembers a time when Nathan would walk into their house and make a beeline for the kitchen, flicking the kettle on and flinging teabags into mugs with easy familiarity.
“Oh.” Nathan’s eyes slide away. “Maybe I don’t know how you take it anymore. Maybe that’s changed.”
So much has changed, Nathan. So much. “I still take it the same as I always did. But you’re right. It’s been a long time.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” Nathan tucks his chin down towards his chest, his whole body radiating sadness.
Will’s eyes prickle with tears, boundaries crumbling. “I’m sorry too. I know… I know you wouldn’t have left me if you had a choice.”
The blurry shape across the table leans forward, green eyes visibly blazing even through the veil of tears. “Never. I would never have left you.”
But you did. And I was so lonely without you.
Exhaustion washes over him. The ordinary stress of the day already weighs heavy on his shoulders, and the extra load is almost too much to bear.
He stands, the cheap metal chair screeching as he pushes it back. “I need to go home. Can we talk another time?”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” Nathan pushes his chair back too, hovering at the other side of the table. “Can I give you my number? Would you let me drive you home?”
Will hands his phone over immediately, hands still trembling.
He watches Nathan tap out his number and hit the call button, hanging up immediately when his phone vibrates in his pocket. “Call me whenever, okay? I mean it. Whenever.”
“Okay.”
“Can I take you home?” Nathan looks up at him, concern tugging between his brows. “Please? It’s late. I dunno how long you’ll have to wait for another ride. You can sit in the back and ignore me if you want.”
As if Will could sit quietly in the back and ignore him. “That’d be rude.”
“You can sit in the front and ignore me. Whatever you want. Just let me get you home, please? I want you safe.”
Part of Will wants to lash out, remind Nathan that he’s spent years keeping himself safe without Nathan’s help. The words sit like poison on the tip of his tongue, vindictive and unreasonable, an emotional reaction he knows he’ll regret.
“Please, Will.”
He swallows the words, pushing them deep down to mingle with the echoes of redundant grief. “Alright. If you insist.”
Nathan smiles at him, just a quick, resolute little smile, nothing like the smile that spread across his face after the bond snapped into place. Will banishes the memory and follows him outside to his car. He takes the passenger seat, of course, eyes fixed dead ahead as he recites his address.
He’s half expecting awkwardness, sitting uncomfortably close to Nathan as they drive through the quiet city streets, muted yellow lighting flashing through the windows to punctuate the dark.
The first few minutes are a little tense, but then Nathan turns the volume up on the stereo, the familiar sounds of old rock tinting the air.
Nathan sings along under his breath like he always has. Like he used to sing along in the passenger seat of Jon’s car, when he deigned to let Will borrow it, and Will in turn deigned to let Nathan choose the music.
They pull up outside Will’s building three or four songs later.
“Thank you.” Will steals a glance at Nathan, only to find he’s doing the same thing. They smile uneasily at each other, gazes pinging off elsewhere.
“You’re welcome. Goodnight, Will.”
“Night.”
It’s an effort not to look back.
Home is thick with silence, a faint streetlight glow spilling in through the living room window. He makes himself a cup of tea (herbal, brewed weak) and throws himself down on the sofa, murmuring a quiet hello to the pair of pet rats already asleep in their cage.
He texts Alessia, wondering if it’s too late to talk. She calls him back less than a minute later.
“What’s up?”
“Why does something have to be up? Maybe I just want to catch up with my best friend.”
“It’s past midnight. You did the late shift, you have your usual breakfast thing with Jon tomorrow, there’s no way you’d be awake if something wasn’t up.”
Will sighs and takes a long sip of tea. “Alright. Fine. You got me.”
“So?”
“Remember Nathan?”
“Of course.” Her voice turns soft and supportive. “Memories?”
“No. Turns out he’s alive.”
A beat of silence, thick with surprise. “He’s what?”
“Alive. Decided to splash out on a ride home and there he was in the driver’s seat.”
“Fuck. Wait, I need more wine.” Footsteps, the squeal of a fridge door, liquid pouring into a glass. “What did he say? What did you say?”
“He convinced me to go to a cafe and talk. But I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t what?”
“Couldn’t talk. I was just so shocked, you know? I guess I still am.”
Alessia takes an audible gulp. “Understandable. How was he?”
“He looked good. The same, but different, you know? Older. But still the same. It’s strange.
I spent so long hanging on to the memory of how happy he looked when we bonded.
And all the pictures I have of him, he’s smiling, like really smiling.
There’s maybe one picture from one of those events his dad used to throw, the ones with the powerful Gifted families.
He looked weird in that one, like he was hiding behind this bland little smile.
” Will is vaguely aware he’s babbling, mouth running away with itself as memories flicker past in a blur.
“He was kinda like that tonight. Not quite the same, but he looked like he was holding back. It’s been a long time since I saw him try to hide himself like that. ”
“What did he say?”
“Not much. Neither of us really said much at all. It was a mistake, going to the cafe. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for talking.”
“Oh, Will.” Alessia lets the silence stretch on for a handful of moments. “You want to know what happened, right?”
“I guess.” The last of the tea disappears down his throat.
It doesn’t warm him from the inside out the way it usually does.
“Yeah, actually, I do. Closure, I guess? And I wanna know if he’s okay.
If he’s happy.” A realisation hits him, cutting through the confusion with razor sharp clarity.
“It’s… it’s important to me that he’s happy.
I’m upset he didn’t get in touch, I mean I grieved for him, properly mourned him even though he was still out there, but…
even with all that, I want him to be happy. ”
“You didn’t ask him anything? About what happened, why he’s back?”
“Too shocked.”
“For someone who spends their days caring for people, you can be amazingly unempathetic sometimes. He must have been pretty shocked too, right? Seeing his long-lost true love sitting in the back of his car.”
Will frowns, shame washing over him. “He was my bondmate. We weren’t bonded long enough to know if it would’ve been true love. The marks were so new, I thought we had all the time in the world to set them… But you’re right. I didn’t even ask if he was okay. Fuck. Should I get in touch?”
“You got his number?”
“Yeah. He kinda begged me to take it.”
“Then yeah. I mean, if you want to. It’d be kind.”
“Okay.” Will yawns, face almost splitting open with the magnitude of it. “Okay. I’ll send him a message or something. Apologise for being so self centred.”
“And ask him out for coffee.”
“Sure. But not out out.”
“Not yet.” Will can hear the smile in Alessia’s voice.
“Whatever. The bond disappeared, remember? I researched it. It’s rare for bonds to break or fade, and when it happens it’s usually because the couple weren’t really all that well suited in the end. Anyway, I’ll message him. And then I’m going to bed.”
“Good luck. You know where I am if you need to talk, okay? Love you.”
“Thanks, babe. Love you too.”
It takes twenty minutes to write the message, the right tone hiding elusive through the fog of tiredness that clouds his brain. It takes five minutes more to summon the courage to send it, and only a minute of waiting for Nathan’s reply to arrive.