8. Remy
“My God, you’re popular today,” Remy said, glancing over when Zach’s phone buzzed for about the thousandth time. They had been in Remy’s hotel room for the last few hours, Zach reading another of his romance novels while Remy scrolled through job sites.
After spending all day yesterday lounging by the pool with Zach (and all night fucking on every surface in his hotel room), he really needed to buckle down on the job search. He’d be heading back home in only a few days, and he hadn’t applied for anything yet.
Zach shot him an apologetic look. “Is it distracting you? My thing is in a little over an hour. I can leave early or?—”
“No, no.” Remy waved a hand, brushing Zach’s concerns away. Even if the constant buzzing slowed him down, he’d have plenty of time to concentrate while Zach was off on his little jet skiing excursion. “It’s not bothering me at all. Just being nosy.”
The tension left Zach’s shoulders, and he smiled. “Good. If I’m distracting you at any point, just tell me and I’ll leave, okay?”
In answer, Remy moved over to the sofa, propping himself up with some throw pillows so he could sit with his legs draped over Zach’s thighs. “You’re not going anywhere, pretty boy.”
Pursing his lips to hide a smile, Zach looked back down at his book. “As you wish.”
Another few minutes ticked by as Remy scrolled through job descriptions, sending himself a couple so he could research the hotels later. He’d just started reading about a promising job at a boutique hotel in North Carolina when Zach’s phone went off again, an actual call this time.
“Go ahead and answer if you want,” Remy said, not looking up from his laptop screen. “Don’t worry about me.”
“Hi, Mom,” Zach said a few seconds later.
Remy stopped reading for a moment, the words on the screen suddenly out of focus. Not only did Zach willingly answer the phone when his mother called, but he even sounded happy to talk to her. Must be nice.
Repressing the pang of jealousy pulsing in his chest, he tried to concentrate on the screen, but little snippets of Zach’s side of the conversation kept pulling him back in.
“Oh my God, Dad, you’re completely off-key,” Zach said with a bright, joyful laugh. “No, she started singing first. You have to match her.”
“Yes, of course I’m going to celebrate.”
“No, I’m not alone.”
The shout coming through the phone was so loud, Zach yanked the phone away from his ear. Remy heard the woman’s voice as clearly as if it were on speakerphone: “Zachary Dwight Potter! Are you telling me you have a boyfriend, and you didn’t tell us?”
“Oh my God.” He sounded simultaneously mortified and amused. “Trust me when I say you don’t want me answering that question.”
After a few seconds, he burst out laughing. “Jesus, Dad, I can’t believe you just said that.”
“Love you both, too. Bye.”
Remy gave up all pretense of working, snapping his laptop shut. “Am I very much mistaken, or is today your birthday?”
A guilty blush colored the younger man’s cheeks. “I thought it would be weird to bring it up.”
Putting the computer aside, Remy swung his legs out of the way so he could haul Zach onto his lap. “Happy birthday, my lovely little imp.” Cupping Zach’s face with both hands, he kissed him long and slow, taking his time. Zach tasted like the espresso he loved so much—rich and bitter and perfectly delicious. When at last he pulled away, they were both out of breath.
“If I knew you’d do that, I would’ve told you first thing this morning,” Zach said with a little smile.
“How old are you?”
That little blush colored his cheeks again. “Thirty. I know, I know. I’m a baby.”
“Thirty is a perfectly respectable age. I’m just old.” He tilted his head to one side. “That raises an interesting question, though. Am I a cougar?”
“Only women can be cougars,” Zach said, smirking. “Pretty sure fucking a younger man you just met only makes you a slut.”
Remy threw back his head and laughed. “I can live with that.” Leaning forward, he kissed the tip of Zach’s nose. “Dwight, huh? That’s not one you hear a lot these days.”
Rolling his eyes, Zach said, “Family name. My mom knows I hate it, so she says it when she wants to annoy me.”
“Grandfather?” Remy asked, trying to suppress the memories now running rampant in his brain.
“Great-grandfather. He died like twenty years before I was even born. Some big war hero in World War II. He must be turning over in his grave to have me for a great-grandson.”
Zach clearly intended the remark as a joke, but it hit Remy with such force that he couldn’t breathe for several seconds. Closing his eyes, he willed his lungs to draw in air that didn’t seem to be there anymore.
“Whoa, what’s wrong?” Zach’s warm, gentle hands found his face. “Breathe through your nose. One, two, three, four. There you go, now out, two, three, four. Perfect. Do that again.”
Such a kind, soothing voice. Remy felt like he could do anything so long as he had Zach to guide him through it.
When at last his breathing returned to normal and his heartbeat slowed, he opened his eyes. The concern in Zach’s sea glass green eyes lodged itself in his heart, taking root there. That this man who only knew him a handful of days could show more concern than his own flesh and blood ever had...it made him want to hold Zach close and never let go.
“I’m so sorry if I said something that hurt you,” Zach said, running his fingers through Remy’s hair. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“You don’t want to hear about my bullshit family. Especially not on your birthday.” Even so, he leaned into Zach’s touch, desperate for as much connection as he could get.
In answer, Zach rearranged himself so his head rested against Remy’s chest. “I’m here and happy to listen to whatever you want to talk about. Or I can just hold you if that’s better. It’s up to you.”
Closing his eyes again, Remy focused on the feel of Zach’s weight on top of him. The sensation helped him stay in the here and now, instead of getting lost in the past.
“Your parents clearly know you’re gay and are totally okay with it. Were they like that when you came out, or did it take a while?”
Zach didn’t answer for a moment, and hesitation was clear in his voice when he finally did. “They told me they’d known since I was seven years old, and that they’d always love me.”
“That’s wonderful.” Remy smiled, though it felt bittersweet. “Every gay kid in the world deserves that kind of reaction.”
“I’m guessing your family didn’t take it that well.”
With a little shrug, Remy said, “My parents obviously weren’t thrilled, but they accepted it. More or less, anyway. Anytime I mentioned going on a date or something like that, they’d just change the subject. Didn’t take long for me to take the hint and stop bringing it up.”
“Fuck that very much,” Zach said, some real heat in his voice. “That’s not accepting it. That’s pretending your sexuality doesn’t exist.”
A frown tugged at his mouth as he thought about that. His parents hadn’t exactly been overly interested in his life before he told them he was gay, so the change hadn’t been a stark one. But Zach definitely had a point.
“My mom got drunk at my cousin’s wedding a week later.” He tried to sound as if the memory no longer pained him and failed dismally. “I overheard her crying to her sister about how she’d never be a grandmother. That’s the only time I ever heard either of them say anything about it after the initial conversation.”
“I’m sorry. You deserve so much better than that.”
And he hadn’t even gotten to the bad part of the story yet. “My first name is actually Jeremy,” he said after a while, his voice a little strained but still strong. “Named after my grandfather. I didn’t start going by Remy until I was twenty-six. That was the year I came out to my family.”
Zach took one of Remy’s hands between both of his, stroking a thumb back and forth across his skin. “How did Grandpa Jeremy react?” he asked, a hint of dread threaded through his voice.
“He lost his fucking shit. Disowned me, cut me out of the will, the whole shebang.” It came out in a cold, almost disinterested voice, as if it no longer felt like barbed wire wrapped far too tight around his heart.
In reality, some wounds never heal, no matter how much time passes. You just learn to live with them.
“That was the last time I ever saw him. Want to know what the last thing he said to me was?”
Zach nodded. He was holding his breath.
“He told me never to have children. That the only thing family ever does is disappoint you.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. So I’m sure you can understand why I started going by Remy a few days later.”
Pressing a kiss against the center of his chest, Zach said, “Let it be known that the name Jeremy shall never be spoken again.”
A smile stole its way onto his face. How Zach managed to get him to smile while talking about this shit was a mystery for the ages. “I tried to talk to my parents about what happened, but they just shrugged it off. That whole ‘he’s from a different time’ thing people always say when older people are racist or sexist or homophobic.”
“I fucking hate that,” Zach said, his voice shaking slightly. “Like no one back then was a decent person. Like they have no capacity to learn or grow or be better.”
“In their case, I think they just didn’t have the guts to stand up to my grandfather. He cut me out of the will, and they didn’t want to be next. Easier to just look the other way and tell me to pretend I’m straight.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
Remy closed his eyes, letting his head fall against the back of the sofa. “Nope.” He sighed. “Whenever birthday parties and weddings and things happened, they kept trying to get me to go, even though Grandpa Jeremy would be there. They said if I could just ‘act straight’ and not intentionally upset anyone, all would be forgiven.”
“Intentionally upset anyone,” Zach repeated in a dull, disbelieving voice. “Just by daring to not keep a huge part of who you are hidden.”
“I see I don’t have to explain to you why I chose to decline invitations to all these events.”
The sound Zach made then was half sigh, half groan. “I’m sure they all took that super well.”
Remy snorted. “Oh, totally.” Snippets of the lectures he endured in the beginning ran through his head. Things got way more heated once he lost his patience and started arguing back. But no matter how they threatened or guilted or cajoled, his answer was always the same. He would gladly attend if he was welcome to do so as an openly gay man. Otherwise, he had no choice but to decline.
“I’m proud of you for standing up to them,” Zach said, placing a soft kiss against his jaw. “I know it can’t have been easy.”
“No, not easy,” Remy agreed, trying to focus on the tingle of his skin where Zach’s lips rested moments before. Dwelling on the past for too long brought a darkness he wasn’t prepared to deal with right now. “But after I finally found the strength to come out, I wasn’t going back in the closet. Not for anything.”
Another kiss, against Remy’s neck this time. When they met a few days ago, Zach had only the hint of a five o’clock shadow. Now he had enough stubble for it to tickle the sensitive skin of Remy’s throat.
“Did they ever come around?” When Remy didn’t respond for a bit, Zach added, “You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.”
“No, I want to,” Remy hurried to say. “I’m just trying to figure out what to say. I’m starting to realize some things that are kind of hard to wrap my head around.”
Zach snuggled against his chest, making a show of getting comfortable. “Take your time.”
Letting his thoughts wander through the last fifteen years, Remy tried to pinpoint exactly when he’d become completely and utterly obsessed with work. But there didn’t seem to be one defining moment so much as a slow, inexorable slide. “While all that mess with my family was getting started, I got my first job at the hotel I just left. Assistant to the director of event planning.” He was basically just Debbie’s glorified secretary, but he didn’t care. That job and that hotel meant the world to him. Even now, despite how utterly Gary and Mitch fucked everything up, he felt like he’d left a piece of himself behind.
“Considering you stayed there for fifteen years, it must’ve been a great job,” Zach said, pulling him back out of his thoughts.
“No one expected me to pretend I was straight there. People liked me for exactly who I was, and the harder I worked, the more I got rewarded. Praise, promotions, raises. It was like I’d finally found a place where I belonged.” A cold feeling of dread crept up the back of his neck, but he forced himself to keep going. “So whenever my parents tried to guilt me into attending some event or other with the whole family, it was easy to say I couldn’t because I had to work. After a while, I stopped taking their calls. What was the point? But then I...” He let the sentence trail off, frowning as more memories flashed through his mind.
Texts and voicemails from his friends that he never found time to answer, until they stopped coming altogether.
The look of pain and betrayal on his ex-boyfriend Brandon’s face right before he walked out of Remy’s life forever.
Christmases and Thanksgivings alone in his condo, or eagerly volunteering to work on the rare occasions they had events booked on the actual holidays themselves.
“I let work become my whole life,” he said at last. “I didn’t mean to. It just sort of happened. And the part that worries me is I don’t think I regret it. I might have done a few things differently, I guess, but I’ve loved my life these last fifteen years. I can’t say the same for the twenty-six years that came before that. What does that say about me?”
“It says you’re a workaholic,” Zach said simply. But then his voice turned sly and flirty. “Luckily for you, though, I’m the cure. Now come on. We’re getting out of here.”
Remy’s brows arched, and he didn’t know whether to laugh or object. His gaze darted toward the laptop he’d put aside. “I really do need to start sending my resume out.”
But Zach was already on his feet, grabbing his hands and yanking him off the sofa. “Those jobs will all still be waiting for you when we get back. Right now, though? You’re on vacation. And you deserve a fucking adventure.”