My chest was heaving, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so angry.
“I’ve hadone dream,Jamie. One dream my whole life. And that was to open a restaurant in O’Leary. My father thought I was an idiot to want amenial job. My mother thought I was an idiot to want to live in O’Leary. I didn’t care. I went off to college, I got my degree, but that dream never died. And finally,finally,after years of working, of living as modestly as I could takingno handouts from anyone,” I added pointedly, “I had the money, and I moved back home to open the bar withmy name on it. It was going to be beautiful. Everything I wanted. Theconsequenceof all the fuckingactionsI’d put into it.”
“Itwasbeaut—”
“Itwouldhave been, Jamie,” I said bitterly. “Itcouldhave been. Except I’d kinda hoped that my once-upon-a-time best friend would be happy to see my face when I got back, and instead I found out that he hated me with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns. I mean, one would think eleven years would be the fucking statute of limitations on you hating my guts, right? On you being illogically and non-specifically angry about my very existence? Especially considering you’d done everything but stick me in a FedEx box andship me to Boston, so I’ve never understood why you seem to be so pissed and betrayed that I actually went.”
“We’re not talking about—”
“Oh, fuck you,” I said, pushing him just a little. He didn’t move. “You sayIhave to have everything my way, butyou, Jameson…” I shook my head. “And you know what? That’s not even the worst of it. Not by a long shot. Because then, the fucking bar burned to the ground, and camethis closeto actuallykilling people,and all of a sudden my income, my savings, my future home, and my entire plan for the future weregone, and I sometimes have these nightmares that just—” I swallowed. “What the hell did I do to deservethatconsequence, Jamie?”
He shook his head mutely.
“And then my landlady, who I’d already given notice to since I was tired of paying an arm and a leg for a studio apartment that smelled like tuna fish sandwiches, told me she’d already re-rented my unit, which maybe smelled like tuna but was stillmine, goddamn it, and I had to move my shit into a storage unit, since there’s not another fucking apartment in all of O’Leary, and I ended up at the Crabapple, until they got overbooked and kicked me out too, and my choices were homelessness, visiting my parents in Arizona, or listening to Rena Cobborgasm, and for a minute there,I considered homelessness!”
I slapped my palm against his chest to illustrate my point, but Jamie didn’t seem deterred. In fact, he moved closer, wrapping his arms around my waist.
“Shhh. It’s okay. Calm down, Parker,” Jamie began in a placating voice, like he didn’t know that was the conversational equivalent of throwing gasoline on a fire.
I sucked in a ragged breath. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my temples. “Do noteven ‘Calm down, Parker’meright now, Jameson. I’m nowherenearcalming down. I’m just getting warmed up! Because then theinsurance company, which I’d naïvely thought was meant to actuallyinsure meagainst catastrophic damage like a giant fucking fire, decided that, no matter what the official fire department report said, the fire wasn’t just tragic butsuspiciously tragic, and sent out a little asshole with a twig up his butt who looks unironically like the insane brother fromPeaky Blinders!”
“You mean Cillian Murphy?”
“No!” I shouted. “Theotherinsane one! And stop interrupting!”
Jamie held up his hands in apology.
“I have tried to make the best of things, Jamie! I have smiled, I have kept a stiff upper lip, and I have employed so much positive thinking that by rights I should have my own goddamn horde of innocent woodland animals traipsing along behind me while I walk through town. I should be Cinder-fucking-ella, spinning around a ballroom while sparkles fill the air. I should be fending offunicornswith astickbecause my heart isjust that fucking pure.Thatshould be theconsequencefor my actions! And instead?” I threw out my hands. “Instead I find myself stranded on the side of the road, in a blizzard, and who comes along to rescue me when I’m at the lowest point in my life, when I have not even one tiny scrap of dignity left to my name, butyou,the one person I… I…”
“Parks,” Jamie breathed. He wrapped his arms around me again so tightly that my face was mashed against the softness of his cotton t-shirt and the steady beat of his heart filled my ears.
And it waseverything.
I felt his shirt get damp under my cheek and realized I was crying. I tried to pull away, becauseJesus, of all the people I didn’t want to see me weak, Jamie and my father were tied right at the tippy-top… but Jamie wouldn’t let me go.
“You’re alright,” he whispered. “You’re alright, I promise.”
“But I’m not,” I told his sternum, beyond caring that my words were all garbled. “I’m really not. Because I just threw myself at you, practically begged you to have one night of no-strings sex, and you don’t even want me forthat. And it’s so trivial, but it’s one more straw and I… I am avery tired and fucking overloaded camel, Jamie.” I tried to catch my breath and it came out halfway between a sob and a laugh. “Damn. And if my dad saw me crying right now, he’d bepissed. Hoffstraeder men don’t cry.”
“Hoffstraeder men do whatever the hell they want,” Jamie whispered. His arms squeezed me even harder, holding me against him so tightly there wasn’t a molecule of available space between our bodies. It was painful. Breathing was almost impossible. And yet that strong comfort was exactly what I needed, and I hadn’t realized it until that moment. Plants could keep their oxygen so long as I had Jamie.
Danger, danger, danger.
But Jamie stroked his big hand up and down my back over and over, his fingers surprisingly gentle as they tapped out a rhythm on my spine, and I didn’t fucking care that this was going to end badly. Enough shit in my world had ended badly no matter what I did, so why deny myself this?
“Do you know what I thought that day, Parker? The day we kissed for the first time?” Jamie whispered roughly, like the words were being pulled from him involuntarily. “I thought, ‘Holy shit, he’s so beautiful.’ I thought, ‘In my whole life, there will never be anyone I want as much as I want him right now.’”
I drew a shuddering breath. “So you’re saying you were insane that day? Is that it?”
Jamie slid both hands up to my shoulders and then farther, until he was cupping my jaw. He forced my head back a few inches, and I opened my eyes, blinking against the brightness of the room and then again at the expression on his face—open, intense, and entirely focused on me. He slid his thumbs over my cheekbones, wiping away the wetness there.
“Not insane.” His lips quirked up in a ghost of a smile. “Prophetic, maybe. There hasn’t been a single moment since then that I haven’t wanted you just as much. I don’t hate you. I never have.”
“But then—” Why did you push me away back then? And just now? Why did you say what we had was dead? Why, why, why?
“Parker?”
Jamie’s voice interrupted my fragmented thoughts, and I focused on him again, which was possibly the easiest thing in the world anyway. “Yeah?”
