Chapter1
Adam
Ten Years Ago
For Adam, things had been weird for days. His son, Wyatt, was acting like he wanted the earth to swallow him whole, his best friend, Grant, was avoiding him like the plague, and Cooper…
Cooper was another story entirely, but a story he didn’t have the synopsis for.
Or the table of contents.
Or even a reading light.
With Cooper, Adam was lost, and he maybe hated that most of all.
Whatever was going on with Cooper was a side effect from fucking your friends, and for the first time in Adam’s entire adult life, he found he hated it.
There were things Adam had always known about himself, even if he’d tried to shove them into the deepest and darkest corners of his mind when he was younger. Even though he had a son and had been married to a woman, even though he was still sometimes attracted to women, even though sometimes he stillsleptwith women, Adam preferred men. And in that moment—that series of moments—he favored Cooper Hendricks most of all. But Cooper was complicated and wanted things no one had asked of Adam in years…and it spooked him.
That was how Adam found himself alone in his driveway the day Wyatt left for college, watching Wyatt’s tail lights fade into the distance. He stood there long after the hand-me-down car disappeared around the corner, and when Grant’s front door opened and closed, he stayed rooted in place. Quietly in his head, Adam counted the number of steps between his driveway and Grant’s front door, waiting for his awkwardly silent best friend to reach him.
It was twenty steps.
“He’s gone?” Grant asked, sounding relieved and sad at the same time.
Adam sighed. “When did I get so old?”
Adam and Eileen had fallen into bed as eighteen year-olds, promptly had Wyatt, then got married and divorced all before the age of twenty-one. Having a college-age son wasn’t what made him feel old.
Adam wasn’t even forty yet.
Yet, somehow, the eighteen years since Wyatt’s birth had passed faster than the blink of an eye. He could clearly remember what it was like to be nineteen with a brand new baby in his arms, worried about how he was meant to keep another human alive when he hadn’t even had to take care of himself for more than a handful of months. But he’d managed. He and Eileen did the best they could, trying to do right by their families and their son although marriage shouldn’t have ever been in the cards for them.
Adam was grateful that he and Eileen were able to remain friends as Wyatt grew up, even if Adam wasn’t a fan of her second husband, Clark. He wished that she would have stood up for him, though, for his rights as Wyatt’s father when Wyatt became a teen and resentful of the distance between their houses in Myers Bluff and North Edgewood.
Adam hadn’t wanted to be the bad guy back then. When Wyatt said he wanted to stop spending summers with him, Adam had tried to take it in stride. He didn’t want to force himself into Wyatt’s life, but he often wondered if maybe he should have. Would things have been different between them if he’d acted more responsibly? If he had forced Wyatt to continue coming?
But he also knew that second-guessing his past choices wouldn’t get him anywhere. Life wasn’t made for second chances and do-overs. You got what you got. In Wyatt, he had a son who tolerated him, and with Cooper, a pseudo-ex-partner whose heart he’d just broken beyond repair.
“You’re not old.” Grant’s voice pulled him out of the miserable spiral he’d sent himself down.
“You’re just saying that because if I’m old, you’re old.” He bumped his shoulder into Grant’s and shrugged, feigning indifference and hoping to change the subject. “Do you want to come in for a bit? I get the feeling we need to talk.”
“Do we?” Grant asked, glancing at Adam from the corner of his eye.
“You tell me.” Adam turned to go inside. Grant could follow or not. “But you’ve been acting weird for weeks.”
Grant hesitated, but followed him in.
“I haven’t been acting weird,” his best friend protested, closing the front door behind him. “You’re the one who was hot and bothered for Cooper and then trying to act like you don’t even remember his name.”
“I’m very familiar with his name,” Adam muttered, well aware of all the times he’d moaned it, sighed it, growled it, and pleaded with it.
“Where is he, then?” Grant threw himself onto the couch with a groan, raising his bare feet onto the coffee table and crossing them at the ankle.
“Probably at work since Wyatt is gone.” Adam went into the kitchen to get a can of the sparkling water Grant favored and to pour himself a glass of wine. It was almost noon, which meant it was three in New York, and that was a perfectly reasonable time to start drinking. After all, his only son had just left for college. He was allowed some emotional liberties. He carried the drinks back into the living room and sat down next to Grant, handing off the can of water.
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
