“I like hearing about you and your past. You’re so cryptic. I keep thinking of you as a complicated puzzle. But it’s a puzzle I wouldn’t mind taking some time with.”
Understanding as he was being, I could hear frustration in his comment, and it left me wanting to bridge a gap. “Anything in particular you’re interested in knowing about?”
“The kid Liam, maybe.”
“As I mentioned before, I don’t know that I got to be a kid very long.”
“Any story. Anything you haven’t told me. I just want to get to know you, Liam.”
I thought for a moment. I wanted to please him, and also, it was nice having someone so willing to listen, someone Iwantedto listen.
“When I was a kid, I mostly felt on my own, but I did have a dog, a black Lab named Blake. He was a loyal guy, and when my mom was working tricks at night, he’d keep me company. Made me feel that much less lonely. Hell, he was my best friend really. I didn’t get along with kids at school. Never felt like I fit in much. When Mom didn’t come home for a few days, I remember curling up with him and crying. Wouldn’t have been the first time I thought she was never coming back. Well, when the police came, and the woman who ended up taking me to the shelter, they told me I couldn’t have Blake, and I threw a damn fit, and he was barking like crazy. And the woman calmed me down. Told me I’d see him again later. He’d be fine. So I went with her. She kept telling me I’d see him again. Everything would be okay. She dropped me off, and I asked the guys at the shelter when I’d get to see Blake, and you know what they said? I wouldn’t. That he would be taken to the animal shelter, where he would probably find a good home.”
I couldn’t even look at Ty as I shared the story.
“Bawled my eyes out. Not just because I’d lost the only friend I had in the world, but because in a moment, I really saw humanity—in the eyes of that woman who kept assuring me with such a pleasant smile and soothing words that everything was going to be all right. The fucking liar. The fucking monster to do that to a kid. To leave me with that buried in my fucking brain for the rest of my life. Mind’s a cruel thing too. Even after all these years, left wondering what the hell happened to him, I still have these dreams where he returns and I’m as happy as ever and we’re playing together. But then I wake up and I’ve lost him again. And I’m left hating that lying fuck from child services like it just happened.”
“I’m so sorry, Liam.”
Even as he lay there, so open and sympathetic, I felt like such a fucking idiot. “God, all the things I could have told you, and here I am talking about some stupid story about a dog from my childhood. Pathetic, isn’t it?”
“That was tragic. And wrong. I can’t imagine what that must have been like to not have anyone to turn to and the only creature you had bonded with taken from you so heartlessly and with such little consideration for your feelings.” He took a moment before adding, “Can you untie me?”
I was surprised by his request, but I obeyed, and he reached out to me and grazed his thumb across my cheek. I could tell by the way he shook that he was uneasy.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Just…how you react… I don’t ever know what’s okay or permitted, or if I’m crossing some line.”
I took his hand and pressed it against my face. “Does that help?”
He snickered. “That helps a lot, actually.”
His hand relaxed against my skin. His entire body seemed to settle as he continued looking at me, and I felt like he was seeing me a little bit more than he had been able to previously.
“I’ve never shared that with anyone, Ty. And I do mean anyone. Always thought they wouldn’t understand or would make fun of me. But I still miss my friend.”
A tear pushed free and slid down my cheek.
Ty slid his thumb through it. “I don’t totally understand all your boundaries, but, Liam, I don’t ever want you to feel like you have to push through them any quicker than is comfortable for you. All the patience and care you’ve shown me physically, I want you to know I want to show you that same care with everything you tell me.”
“I know you do. Your patience has been part of what’s been making it so easy to get to know you.”
After everything that happened and everything we’d talked about, there was something else I wanted to tell him. I hesitated, but in my moment of weakness, allowed the impulse to reign and the words pushed past my lips. “Have you ever met someone you feel like you just know in some way, but you can’t explain how? Like surely you must be friends with them or have met them before?”
“Yes,” Ty said.
“Sometimes it’ll be a person who has a familiar personality, like someone else you knew, and you sit there trying to recall where you know them from, or who they remind you of, and you just can’t get there.”
“That’s how I felt when we met, but it was different because I knew I’d never laid eyes on you, never met anyone like you before. But there was this familiarity to you.”
“I felt that too. I thought it might have been that you’re Eric’s kid, and I knew him well enough. But even then, I knew it was something different.”
That was as far as I was willing to go—the most I was willing to admit even to myself, really.
“Sometimes you simply click with people,” Ty added. “When I met my friend Jesse for the first time, we just sort of hit it off. He was so easy to talk to and such a cool guy, but you know, you can talk to thirty or forty people, and then suddenly, in a minute, you feel something different with someone. At first I thought I had the hots for him, but then I realized it was something else. It was like we’d been best friends all my life, and the more we hung out, the more I started going back and putting him in memories where he didn’t even belong, because we just fit together in a way you don’t fit together with most people.”
“Is that what it felt like with me?”
