When Stryker shuts the door to the massive, all white en suite, Greg finds his underwear at the foot of the bed and slips them back on. He curls into a ball and closes his eyes, sinking into the memory foam pillow and wishing he could go back in time, delete the email from Bar Deco, and live the life he wanted before he ruined it all.
Twenty-Six
JULIEN
Sangria night morphs into a surprise going away party for Greg. Julien stands on a ladder, hanging up a sparkly banner announcing the departure of the first guy he’s fallen for in ages. It’s depressingly poetic.
Aunt Augustine and Uncle Martin have gone all out. They covertly passed around a card to the staff the night before so they could all sign their well wishes. They even wrote Greg a little going-away bonus check and stuffed it inside the envelope before they sealed it.
Julien hasn’t said a word about Greg leaving to anyone for fear they might read into it, hear his heartbreak acutely. The last thing he wants is sympathy. He knew Greg for, what, six months?
But he supposes his face is too expressive for its own good because as soon as they tie the knots to the beams above them and fold up the ladders, Aunt Augustine corners him and asks the question he knows she’s been itching to ask. “Did you ever tell Greg about your feelings for him?”
He flounders, unable to lie to his mother figure. “Not exactly.”
“So, that’s a no.” She narrows her eyes.
“The timing was wrong.” Julien sighs. “He’d made his choice.”
“What happened to what we talked about before you left?” Her confusion is evident by her closed-off stance.
He shrugs, nonplussed. “Greg drove me to the airport and sprang his interview on me. He kept saying how it was better pay and a good opportunity.”
“What did you say?” There’s an urgency embedded in her question that cuts through to Julien’s core.
“I said we hit the list and that we didn’t need him anymore.” He hates having to relay all of this. As if his mind weren’t supplying it intrusively every night after he shuts off the light. Sometimes, even before darkness takes hold of his empty bedroom.
Aunt Augustine’s eyes bug out, though she remains silent for seconds longer than Julien can be comfortable with.
“What?”
“Say that again.”
“Say what again?”
“What you said to me that you said to him.”
Julien squints but rolls the tape back once more, enduring the pain for the sake of this torturous but probably necessary conversation. “That we hit the list and we didn’t necessarily need him anymore.”
“So that’s where he got it!” She is nodding to herself, not letting Julien in on her private thoughts. She shifts her weight, appearing incredulous.
“I feel like we’re having two totally different conversations.” Julien props the ladder up against the wall, wipes the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. The quicker they can set this up, the quicker it will be over, and the quicker Greg will be gone. Just like Colin before him, Julien will spend several weeks dissecting his leave-ability and then ultimately hop back on the apps to start the process all over again.
Though there is a bothersome vibrating in his chest that tells him this time isn’t like the others. This time, the hurt is going to stick around for a while like gum in the grooves of the soles on his favorite shoes.
“When Greg put in his notice, he said we didn’t really need him anymore,” Aunt Augustine says. “You get to know a guy for half a year, and you start to predict what he would and wouldn’t say. That’s not something the Greg Harlow who came here in September would say unless he heard it somewhere, and I knew it wasn’t from your uncle or me.”
This statement creates a lump in the back of Julien’s throat. “Are you...” he tries to get his words out around the stubborn lump, but it’s difficult “...suggesting this is my fault?”
“No, Julien, of course not, but can’t you see how that might’ve come across as hurtful?”
They’ve had conversations like this one a lot. In childhood, because of Julien’s mostly undiagnosed mental health problems, he spent many social interactions sucked deep into his own mind. Which sometimes meant he responded rudely, and it wasn’t until reflection that he was able to see more clearly where he’d gone astray.
Julien seriously hasn’t considered that he’d been rude, but realizing it now still doesn’t quite color in the situation the way Aunt Augustine seems to think it does. “He waited until the last minute to tell me about the interview, he’d already accepted it, and he was going off about how good the pay was going to be. He wanted my permission to leave, so I gave it to him.”
Aunt Augustine puckers her lips before saying, “Or, hear me out on this, maybe he wanted you to give him a concrete reason to stay.”
Stay?No. In Julien’s experience, people don’t stay. Not his parents. Not Colin. When Uncle Martin and Aunt Augustine hit retirement age, they’ll pass the restaurant on to Julien and head south to Florida for good. Leave himhere.
