It wasn’t until he got to the bar and let Faith off that he pulled his phone out to check the time and saw that he had a new email. That didn’t exactly happen very much, he hardly got a ton of them, and he frowned as he clicked it open and saw that it was from Facebook.
Someone had sent him a friend request. For a moment, the world seemed to freeze, along with his heart, because he already had pretty much everyone that he knew already on his friend’s list. So who could it be, except …
Except Theo. Theo Savage. Theo Savage has sent you a friend request, the email cheerfully and blandly informed him, as if this wasn’t the news that Eric had been hoping for without actually a lot of hope. He’d wanted it, and now that it had, what was he supposed to do? What did it mean?
Taking a deep breath, Eric clicked on the link, and then accepted the request, just as he’d always known, deep, deep down, in the most secret places of himself, that he would if Theo ever reached out to him. It had never, after all, been Eric’s idea that they stop being friends, and no amount of anger could make him stop wanting it.
Eric just drove after that. He drove, and he thought as he could only really seem to do when he had smooth, black asphalt under his wheels. He could let his mind range free then, even more free than it made him feel to just put miles of road behind him.
He thought of Faith. She understood that feeling. He somehow knew it, on some deep, instinctive level that he wouldn’t have known how to explain to someone else. But how could someone who had just blown into town a month ago on the back of a motorcycle not understand how he felt? She might understand it even better than him.
She was a cool girl, for sure, and maybe he should be trying to make something work with her. Even if she was only interested in sex, well, that could work. Or maybe it could be something more. He sighed as he hit the road between Fall City and Carnation, not going anywhere in particular, just letting his car pick its own way.
Damn it, he even liked her. So why would his mind just not let him go there? He was getting closer to thirty than he liked to admit, and in some way, which he didn’t want to admit even to himself, he was thinking that it might be nice to settle down some day. Maybe even pump out a couple of kids. Not that Faith seemed like the settling down type, but who knew?
It certainly wasn’t going to happen if he had this block in his head about even being with another person. He was doing this to himself. There had been girls, more than one of them, actually, who might have been happy to give things a serious try. But Eric had never been able to get past a stupid, futile hope that someday, the person he really wanted to be with might come back.
Well, that hope had played out, at least a little. Theo was back in town, and he had even reached out to Eric. In a really lame, pathetic way, of course, through the power of social media, but it was more than Eric had really ever thought could happen.
Abruptly, he pulled a U-Turn on the road. Theo hadn’t even spoken to him, not one word, and Eric was already ready to run back to him? What the hell was wrong with him, anyway? Did he even have anything like self-respect?
Of course he did. He would never let anyone else just ghost on him for eight years and then accept them back into his life at all. The fact that he was willing to consider talking to Theo at all …
He drove, and he drove, and he got back toward Fall City. The sun was starting to veer off toward the west, the colors of late afternoon, golden and bronze and green, when he pulled up in the parking lot of the local park, green and beautiful, with the Snoqualmie River, which bordered the park on two sides, shimmering in the springtime sun.
He parked his car, not even sure if he intended to get out, or why he’d stopped at all. He was running, he realized, more or less on pure intuition, and it was intuition which had him pulling his phone out of his pocket.
When he flicked the screen lock off, then looked down, the screen was still open on Facebook, where he had just, Facebook informed him, accepted Theo’s friend request. Frowning, he tapped on the link which took him to Theo’s page.
Facebook stalking. That was a whole new low for him, and yet, he started to flip through his former friend’s pictures. Though he didn’t admit it fully, not even to himself, he was looking for that blond man he’d seen before, the one who was …
… Draped all over Theo in a good half of the pictures that had been put up in the last few months. Nothing before that, but this man, this Liam, was all over Theo’s Facebook wall, as well as all over Theo.
A tinge of red colored everything that Eric could see, and it wasn’t from the sunset, which was hours away still. It was the red of jealousy and one that Eric was perfectly aware that he had no call to be feeling. He gave a soft growl, looking down at the handsome blond man.
What was Theo doing with this man all over him? Was Theo straight or what? The way Liam touched him, it was with more than friendship, he could swear to it. And, no matter how much it pissed Eric off, no matter how much he hated seeing it, he wasn’t even allowed to get mad about it. He had no right to claim Theo at all.
Not that it wasn’t irritating that the man he had driven away by kissing now seemed to have no problem kissing other men. Or at least this Liam. Sure, it was just on the cheek, but still.
Angrily, Eric threw his cell onto his car seat and stepped down into the warm spring sunshine. It should have soothed him a little, but it didn’t, nor did the sound of kids playing in the park, the wind rustling through the trees. None of it. And he knew that the only thing which would actually make him feel better was not going to happen.
From there, everything happened very quickly. He was walking, and he had to admit that he really wasn’t paying attention to where he was going, but still, he was in a parking lot. What could happen to him there, of all places? Later he would think that his momentary lapse of judgment shouldn’t have been so harshly punished.
To be fair, though, the huge truck really shouldn’t have been going as fast as it was in a parking lot.
The first thing Eric knew about it, he was hearing the horrific nails on chalkboard screeching of the brakes, which didn’t seem to be responding, and he glanced up just in time to see the enormous grill of a truck which seemed to him to be about ten times as big as a truck should be.
Time slowed, and he was acutely aware of his own heartbeat, thrumming through his veins, reminding him that, for a moment, he was alive. Maybe not for longer than that moment, because even as he turned, feeling like he was moving through cold molasses, he knew it was too late. He could try to throw himself out of the way, but he wasn’t going to make it.
He tasted the thick, coppery taste of blood in his own mouth, and something else, too, something bitter that stuck in the back of his throat. Terror. Utter terror. Through some freak accident, he was going to die, probably.
Seconds, if that, before Eric expected to be hit by the truck, he was hit by something else, something from an angle he hadn’t expected. Strong arms wrapped around his waist in a football tackle and then Eric was in the air, flying through it with the wind whistling past his ears, almost drowning out the sound of the truck slamming into some other vehicle.
The ground rose up to meet him, or so it felt, like he had escaped gravity, but only for a short time. The earth was coming to claim him, and he landed hard, on his back, with someone on top of him, someone who seemed to weigh at least half of what that truck did.
Eric groaned, and looked up into the eyes of the man who had just, let’s face it, saved his life. His words of thanks died on his lips because the man was not some stranger. The man was, unaccountably, by no logic at all that Eric could see, Theo.
Theo, who had his legs tangled around Eric’s. Theo, whose slender hips rested against Eric’s. Theo, with those beautiful hazel eyes looking down at him, the longish dark hair in a cloud around his face.
All of a sudden, the stones of the gravel parking lot didn’t seem to cut quite so sharply into his back. After all of these years, Theo was on top of him, and even the shock of the near accident couldn’t take away the thrill of that.
So close to him. Pressed against him, along the length of their bodies, all the way up to their chests. Theo’s lips were inches from his, mere inches, and Eric found that he was breathless for a reason which didn’t actually have much to do with the impact of being tackled out of the way of the out of control truck.
