Bet on It (75)

He’d missed his friends, the easy camaraderie that he hadn’t always realized was so important to him. He’d even missed his office—though he planned on talking to his editor about transitioning to remote work once he got settled in a little more. He had enjoyed the freedom of it and had even been more productive working from Gram’s house than at his actual desk.

There was also the tepid relief that came with not having to deal with the state of his relationship with his father. He wasn’t completely delusional; it would have to come sometime. It loomed over him, shadowing everything he did.

He had more than one shadow too. One seemed to exist for every good thing he’d walked out on. He missed his Gram in a way he hadn’t let himself miss her in years. He missed the smell of her perfume and hearing her whistle as she moved about the house in the morning. Missed the way she threaded her fingers through his hair and made him feel like a coddled child again.

He’d left with the promise that he would reach out to her more, and that when he did, their conversations would be better than they’d been in the past. He’d promised that he’d keep opening up to her and allow her to do the same.

And there was Aja.

Thinking about her made his chest ache. He knew he should try to get his mind off her, but he couldn’t bring himself to. She invaded every single one of his thoughts. He didn’t have her physical presence with him, couldn’t touch her or talk to her—hell, he hadn’t even had the forethought to take a picture of her before he fled. When left with nothing but memories, his mind refused to wipe her out.

She was there when he woke up, while he worked, before he went to sleep. He jerked off to the thought of her damned near every day. It was nothing for him to experience something interesting or funny and immediately get punched in the gut with the need to tell her about it. He always forgot that he couldn’t. Then when he remembered, he was almost knocked off his feet by the reality of it.

He hadn’t planned to end things that way. He hadn’t been entirely sure how he and Aja were going to bring about the end of their arrangement, but he knew that they hadn’t planned on this. Not him leaving in the middle of the night, right after the best sex of his life, without so much as an earnest good-bye. God, he was an asshole. Every way he turned it, he was at fault, and that made him feel like the most worthless piece of shit in the world.

He had her number in his phone, still sitting right up near the top of his recent calls list. His thumb had hovered over the call button a dozen times since he’d been back in Charleston, but he never pressed it. He didn’t know what to say or how to say it. There was no explanation he could give her that would make his actions any less awful. She was probably better off without him. Maybe a clean break was what she needed to forget him completely—though the same could never be said for him.

So he wallowed. Alone in his rumpled bed. He spent the time that he didn’t spend working thinking about her. About the countless different ways that things could have turned out for them.

Maybe the mature thing would have been to try out a friendship. Maybe that would have meant they were extra evolved, that their relationship went past the need for a romantic entanglement. But Walker didn’t want to be her friend. He’d already tried that, and he’d failed so spectacularly that he had gone and fallen in love with her like a fool.

He resigned himself to spending his days without her, constantly wondering, forever longing. He moved through his life as he would have before. Now, though, everything felt sluggish, devoid of vitality. He tried to hide this, tried to make himself look as normal as he possibly could. But he knew people could smell the misery on him. At some point, it became so obvious that he stopped trying to hide it.

Eventually it got so bad that, at another awkward dinner party sometime in mid-August, three weeks after he’d returned, he found himself cornered.

“OK, so, we didn’t exactly know how to stage an intervention, but Adya said they were pretty much like dinner parties without the hors d’oeuvres, so we just … kept the hors d’oeuvres,” Corey said. He was holding hands with his girlfriend on the couch across from Walker, their dark, imploring eyes peering over at him.

Jamie sat next to him, the only other white dude in their small circle, looking just as pale and uncomfortable as Walker felt. Andre and Nate hadn’t been able to make it tonight. But neither were great at emoting verbally, so he wondered if they’d balked at the idea of having to talk to Walker about his feelings.

He’d been looking forward to eating some of the spinach dip Jamie always brought. Now he felt nothing but envy for the two men who got to be anywhere other than Corey and Adya’s apartment.

“What in the hell are you talkin’ about, Corey? An intervention? I barely like smokin’ that awful pot you like bringin’ around, I’m not a damned addict.”

“This isn’t that kind of intervention.” Adya ran a hand through her dark hair. “It’s an emotional intervention.”

“An emotional intervention…” He said it like it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. Hell, maybe it was.

“Yes.” Corey nodded. “Ever since you got back you’ve been walking around like you’ve got something heavy sitting on your spirit.”

He did. A heap of pain the size of an elephant sat on his chest everywhere he went. He knew that there was only one way to get rid of it too, and that would do him more harm than good in the long run.