Chapter 33
33
SETH MAYS
Did you mean what you said?
ELLIOT CRANE
Of course.
N6628 WI Hwy 47.
What’s that mean?
Where I live.
So you know I’m serious.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I’d been thinking about what he’d said—about the Shawano PD needing a CSI tech, about how I could come and stay with him—for the last two days. I’d been thinking about it constantly . Part of me thought it was completely insane. I’d never even left Virginia. Not once. Not even on a vacation.
I’d never had the money for a vacation, and none of my boyfriends had ever done for me what Lulu was doing for Noah. The vacations I’d been on had been camping—which I love, don’t get me wrong, but the Shenandoah valley is in Virginia, and it’s beautiful—or somewhere close, like a weekend in Virginia Beach or a day trip to Williamsburg.
And here I was, seriously considering driving halfway across the country—more than a thousand miles—to essentially throw myself at a man who had made it clear that he didn’t want a romantic relationship with me.
In my defense, he’d said that the second time we’d seen each other, three days after we met. Neither one of us had expected more than a night of hot sex that had become several nights of hot sex, which had now become what I thought of as a friendship, if not something that had the potential to become more than friendship. But I had no idea how Elliot thought of what we had.
And I was honestly a little afraid to ask.
There is nothing more awkward than asking someone about your relationship only to find out that they do not think of it the same way you do—they aren’t in love with you, they don’t want to be exclusive, they aren’t interested in romance with you at all. And I was absolutely certain that while I was very interested in a romance with Elliot, I was skeptical that he felt the same, or even a fraction of what I felt.
But he’d laid down Rule Two when he thought he was going back to Wisconsin and I was staying in Virginia. He went back to Wisconsin, but I was now thinking about moving out there. And it made me wonder if he’d be more interested if I didn’t live a thousand miles away.
At the very least, I hoped I’d at least have a friend.
He’d said I would have a place to stay.
He’d even sent me the address .
Everyone else I knew and cared about lived in Richmond.
I had a job working for Hands and Paws, but I hated it and it wasn’t paying me enough to cover expenses. I could have used their meal program—that was an option available to all employees, whether they were homeless or not—and saved some money on food, but I hated the idea of having to stay at work to eat, too. That, and my dietary restrictions made feeding me more difficult—there were always things I could eat, but several sides of frozen or canned vegetables and some bread wasn’t my idea of a hearty meal. Or a tasty one.
I sometimes ate lunch there, because I was already there and it meant that my food bill would go down a bit, but I never enjoyed it. It’s hard to make food for as many shifters and other Nids—because their meal program was open to all Arcs and Arcanids, as well as their families—as they had to feed on a daily basis.
It was also depressing, because it made me confront the number of people whose new bodies or abilities had left them homeless, jobless, or otherwise desperate.
Like me.
I believed in what Hands and Paws was doing—I had ever since I’d first learned about them and they’d given Noah and I the help we’d needed as kids. I’d even volunteered before, serving meals over holidays with Noah, helping out with food drives and at community events—although I was always conscious that I didn’t really belong among the other people there. I’d always been a normie, a non-Arc human who was there for his brother, not himself.
That feeling hadn’t really gone away. Whether you wanted to call it memory or habit or just a kind of social lag, I still felt like I didn’t fully belong. Only now I didn’t belong anywhere else, either. I knew other shifters—and other Nids and Arcs—went through a period when they felt like they no longer fit in at work, or in their social circles, or even with their families. But person after person, sometimes to someone near me and sometimes directly to me, said how they finally felt like they’d found their people at Hands and Paws.
Not me.
I didn’t know who my people were.
Noah, obviously, but…
Noah deserved to have his own life. Lulu might not be my favorite person, but there wasn’t anything wrong with Lulu. The whole reason I didn’t like Lulu was because they weren’t absolutely perfect, rich, and saintly. It was an impossible standard, and I knew that. Noah’d never liked any of my boyfriends, either. I’d say it was for the same reason, but I had genuinely terrible taste in men.
None of them had ever been like Elliot, though. So maybe this time my heart had led me different.
Who was I kidding? It was my dick that was doing the leading.
It usually was.
But maybe it had made a better choice this time…
Assuming that his invitation to his home meant something more than just?—
Well, you didn’t just invite a random one-night or three-night stand to stay in your house for some undetermined amount of time if you only thought of them as a one-slash-three-night stand.
It all boiled down to a handful of a few very simple facts.
First—Noah deserved to have his own life. One that didn’t involve taking care of me. He deserved to be happy. To embark on a new life together with Lulu without my eye- rolls and snark. We were thirty years old. More than old enough to be on my own. To have made significant life decisions. To have a career and an apartment that were mine—not shared with my twin who had been hauling my ass out of a ditch for the better part of the last three decades.
Second—other than Noah and a few friends, I had nothing here in Richmond. And, yeah, leaving Noah would be unbelievably weird and probably hurt like hell, but I probably should have let him have his own life a long time ago without being the lead weight around his neck.
Third—if Elliot was right, his tiny town in Wisconsin might give me an opportunity to do what I really wanted to do with my life: work in a crime lab. I’d lost the ability to do that in Richmond. Probably the whole damn state of Virginia. If I had to move a thousand miles to do it in Wisconsin… well, Hart had done it in the other direction, so why not?
Fourth—I needed a new start. I needed to show myself that I could be an actual responsible, mature thirty-year-old man who could take care of himself. Not rely on his twin for housing and support, not be given handouts and pity jobs, and not be forever a failure.
I felt like I’d just been getting my feet under me—a career I liked, coworkers I liked and got along with, some people who were on the way to being friends… And now Arcana had ripped all of that away from me. It wasn’t like Quincy or Hart or any of the people I thought of as friends—or even friendly—had stopped talking to me or anything. They’d all been supportive in their own ways.
Quincy talked to me and met me for lunch, tried to keep me up to date on the lab gossip, even though I didn’t actually want to hear about it—it just reminded me that I wasn’t there to hear it for myself .
Hart had left me at least four different boxes of baked goods, all of them dairy-free.
Maginot had sent me a fruit basket.
Maza had taken me out for fried chicken and beers.
There were people who cared.
But it wasn’t enough.