* * * *
Once the movers finish loading everything into the pod and I put my padlock on it, they haul it away. The small pod will be delivered to my new apartment building once I confirm my address. It’ll be dropped into a parking spot I’ll never use—because I don’t own a car—where I, and another hired team of movers, can unpack it immediately upon my arrival.
Then they’ll move it to the storage unit complex for me, where I can unpack what’s left into my new storage unit.
Bingo, bongo, my life will start over.
Again.
I haven’t signed the lease for the new apartment yet. I’ll stay in a hotel temporarily, until after I look at the apartment in person, sign the lease, and then arrange the pod delivery with my things. One of the professors in the department wanted to move, because their parents had a rental house come available and let them have it for the same rent every month that they were paying for the apartment.
Problem was, they still had eight months on their lease and didn’t want to break it. The professor is holding off looking for someone else to take over the lease based on my department head vouching for me.
Meanwhile, I return to Leo’s apartment.
God, that fucking hurts, thinking of it ashisnow and notours.
Leo’s not home, for which I’m feeling…torn. It’s good that he’s not here, watching me finish my packing. The grief in his gaze has grown so deep over these past two weeks that it’s shredding my heart even more. I’ve whittled down what I still have in Leo’s apartment to four large suitcases, a carryon, and my laptop case.
I fly out tomorrow evening, but I didn’t tell him that.
I don’t need to.
He knows.
Without thinking, I shake my right hand as tears sting my eyes.
Yeah, my day collar.
That has to come off.
No, I don’t want to remove it. I promised him when I accepted it that I’d never take it off without permission.
Keeping it on is more self-torture of the unhealthy kind. It’s no healthier than Leo lying to himself about Elliot ever coming out of the closet.
Twelvefrickingyears, they’ve been together.
If Elliot can’t make himself come out in all that time, it ain’t happening.
Just sayin’.
Guy’s a decorated, wounded war vet, has an economics degree, is an experienced lawmaker. He’s the fricking vice president.
Yet he’s still terrified to come out.
It’s not like he’s a twelve-year-old kid petrified his ultra-religious parents might send him to a gay conversion therapy camp.
Oh, right. That wasme.
And yet, I still managed to reach out to Mimi—my grandmother—who literally lived on the other end of the country, seek her help, and change my life.
Chart my own course, set my own sails.
I wastwelve.
Elliot’s forty-three years old, and Leo’s forty-seven.
How many more years of Leo’s life is Elliot going to waste? How many of his own?
