Chapter 54
Chapter Fifty-Four
Brayden
The man behind the bar—the burly bartender with a neatly trimmed beard who always seems to be working—narrows his eyes when I drop myself onto a stool. “You’re back.” He doesn’t exactly sound happy to see me.
“Looks like.” I tap my credit card against the polished surface of the bar.
There are only a few people here: the day-drinking-on-a-Monday crowd is pretty pathetic.
And now you’re one of them. Still, the bartender pours me the whiskey I order, does it again after I toss the first one back.
By now, it barely even burns, but it burns just enough to keep me going.
“You got someone at home missing you?” he asks.
“Not anymore.”
And he frowns at that, but he brings me another.
Sometime later, I come back to myself. The club is dark and full of bodies, people drinking and dancing and rubbing against one another under the flashing lights. A different bartender is slinging drinks for the line of customers all shaking cards and cash at her.
I’ve flagged her down plenty, judging by the emptied glasses lined up near me.
I’m about to wave her this way again when I realize there’s someone on my lap.
A woman half across me, half leaning on the bar as if she doesn’t trust me to hold up her weight.
She smells like vanilla and she’s tiny enough I can almost span her waist with my hands.
This is wrong. It’s all wrong. “Hey,” I say, and wrap my hands around her hips to move her.
She misreads the gesture because she wiggles in my lap, her body rolling against mine.
My cock doesn’t even stir—whiskey, maybe, or the sudden tightness in my throat. “Hey,” I say again, “I’m married.”
The woman laughs. “I don’t see your wife here.”
I don’t know if she’s still my wife. Sometime during the evening I’ve lost a button on my shirt collar and who knows what else.
But my wedding band—the black silicone one—is still on my finger.
That has to mean something. That has to mean something, otherwise…
my throat does that thing again, like I’m trying to breathe but can’t quite take in a lungful of air.
The bartender delivers me a drink I don’t remember ordering.
I reach over the woman on my lap to pick it up.
The glass is strange in my hand—the heft of it somehow unsatisfying.
I could drink this. I could drink another.
If I asked, they’d bring me the entire bottle and look away as I poured it out into my belly.
My throat isn’t just tight now—my whole body feels like it's collapsing in on itself somehow, a weight threatening to crush me from within.
Once, when we were kids, Blake and I were wrestling too hard and he flipped me on my back, knocking the wind out of me. All I could do was lie there in the dirt, while Blake freaked out that he’d killed me and Brad told me to quit being a pussy by pretending to be in pain.
It took five minutes for me to get my breathing back, longer than that to begin feeling okay. Blake sat with me the whole time, joking and talking about nothing, throwing me worried looks when he thought I wouldn’t notice.
And he still left and Savannah left. Everyone who you love will eventually leave.
Asher didn’t leave but he’s not here, either.
It’ll hurt less if you leave him first. Still, it hurting less doesn’t mean not hurting at all, a sensation crawling below my sternum that no amount of whiskey can seem to dislodge.
I put down the glass, undrunk. I need to be…somewhere else. Right now.
The woman on my lap is looking at me funny, like I’ve said something rude, and maybe I have. I scoop her up, shift her until she’s standing on the points of her heels. “You’re leaving?” she pouts.
“Yeah.”
“Are you coming back?” She flutters her eyelashes at me. I’m not worth the effort. But I’m trying to be, and maybe that’s what matters.
“No,” I say and find that I really mean it. “No, I don’t think I will be.”
Lights. Headlights for the Uber I call, traffic lights that smear by on the way home, my phone screen as my fingers fumble over my texts. The porch light flicks on as I make my way up the front path. Is Savannah home? Is she here? But no, it’s on a motion detector.
The walls are shadowed inside, everything dark and matte.
We should put up some pictures. I pull out my phone, spend a while looking at the picture I took of the three of us: Savannah’s hand curled in mine as she laughs.
Asher isn’t laughing, but there’s something playing at the edge of his mouth that carries the same amusement.
I’m smiling too—not at whatever we were saying but just at the idea of both of them.
That things could be like this. That we could be like this, together.
I’m not sobering up yet, but I’m reaching that stage of being drunk that everything is a strange, stumbling whir.
I walk up the front hall, past where Sav left a pair of shoes in a loose tangle.
I pick one up by its thin, breakable strap before setting it next to its pair.
I drag myself over to the couch where I’d watched TV with Sav, body thrumming with so much energy—with how much I wanted to reach out and touch her and couldn’t—that I had to go for a late-night run to get rid of it.
I lie back. The world starts to spin, so I put a foot on the floor. It sort of helps. I pull my phone from my pocket, ask the voice assistant to make a phone call. It rings once, twice. It’s possible he won’t pick up.
Finally, the phone clicks and there’s a noise like it’s being moved around. “It’s three o’clock in the morning, Bray. Are you alright?”
I’m fine. What I’d normally snap at Blake—no matter how many times he asked. “No,” I say. The word comes out wet. “No, I’m not.”
“Where are you?”
“At home. She’s gone.” I rub my eyes; my hand comes back wet. “They’re both gone.”
Blake pauses like he might have misheard me. “Both?”
I shouldn’t even say that much but fuck it. “Sav left me. Asher…” Wasn’t mine to begin with.
“Sav left you for Asher?”
“No.” I shake my head. The world starts tumbling again like it’s spinning the wrong way on its axes. “He’s…we were…all of us were together. I thought we were, anyway.”
I wipe my face again. I shouldn’t be telling Blake any of this. He’s in Boston. He chose to leave. He’s busy hanging out with his girlfriend and their bear of a roommate. Fred? Fabian? Felix. That’s it.
Another long pause, this time with murmuring in the background like Blake has his hand over the phone speaker and is talking to someone who he doesn’t want me to hear. Even so, his hand can’t quite muffle the rumble of the other person’s voice. “You were dating both of them?” he asks.
Dating. The word feels entirely incomplete.
“Sav is my wife. Was my wife. Asher is…” A pain in my ass.
Mostly because I told him to keep his distance and I hate that he listened to me for once.
“We both love her.” I lower my voice, like I don’t want the street outside to hear.
“We were trying to make it work between the three of us. You wouldn’t get it. ”
Another pause, this one much longer and more pronounced. “I think I would more than you know,” he says eventually.
“What does that mean?” I spit.
“I’d like to tell you about it some other time,” Blake says, gently enough to be infuriating. “Some time when we’re in person and I can re-introduce you to Shira and Felix.”
The world shifts again. This time I don’t even bother to stop it from spinning.
“You’re—” I don’t even know the word. Or I do: one of the ones Brad is still so fond of.
Ones that people hurled at Blake until he put away anything other than baseball.
Ones that I told myself they’d never have a chance to throw at me.
“Yes.” Blake has iron in his voice. “I am.”
“Fuck.”
“Took time for me to admit.” He pauses for a second, then adds, “And a lot of therapy.”
“Do Brad and Barb know about that?” Because therapy was high on the list of things that neither of them approves of.
“They should. I invited them to a few sessions.”
“Did they go?”
“You know the answer to that one, Bray.” He shifts the phone again. “Do you want to come?”
Right now, it feels hard enough to tell Blake these things, let alone some stranger. “Not really.”
“Yeah, I don’t like doing it either. But it feels better, you know? Half the time when I’m telling my therapist about something Brad did, she just goes, Well, that’s fucking unacceptable. Hazards of a Boston therapist, I guess.”
I can’t help it; I laugh. “She sounds cool.”
“After that night when I got you out of jail, I made a list. Therapists in Atlanta with no ties to the church who specialize in substance use. I could find ones who’re also queer friendly if that would help.”
“You made a list?” My throat goes tight again. “Why?”
“I hoped one day you’d call me and ask for it.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Yeah.” He sighs. “You’re right, you didn’t.”
I pull down the blanket from the back of the couch, the one that smells like Savannah’s perfume and the expensive stuff Asher uses in his hair and pretends he doesn’t.
They could be here right now. We could be together right now.
All of us. Happy in the way I can hear threading through Blake’s voice.
We could be like that if things were different, maybe.
If I was different.
“I didn’t ask you for the list. Could I have it anyway?”