He'd done the right thing by every measure he’d been raised with, and he’d lost everything because of it.
“Are you sure you’re alright?” Ryan asked after a good three minutes of Graeme being lost in his thoughts as he searched through the tools and things he’d brought with him.
Heat flooded Graeme all over again. “I can’t find the stakes,” he said, avoiding looking at Ryan in case one look would reveal everything Graeme was trying to hide. “Maybe they’re in the trailer.”
“Let’s go look, then,” Ryan said with a smile.
“Are you sure you don’t have something else you’d rather be doing?” Graeme asked as they walked around the side of the house to the parking lot where Graeme had left his truck and thetrailer attached to it that contained everything important for his business.
Ryan shrugged and looked suddenly uncomfortable. “I should be designing a fall collection for February’s fashion week, but I’m fresh out of inspiration.”
“A fall collection in February? Wouldn’t you do a spring collection then?” Graeme perked up, despite what Ryan had just told him being negative.
Ryan shook his head. “Fall collections in February, spring collections in September. It gives retailers a chance to buy the designs they like and have them manufactured in time for the appropriate season.”
“Right. That makes sense,” Graeme said, “I bet you’ll come up with something.”
“Yeah,” Ryan sighed, pushing a hand through his damp hair. “Losing your job because you refused to let the boss fuck you kind of saps all your creative energy.”
Graeme’s insides flipped. It was way too easy for him to imagine Ryan Hawthorne in some sort of porn situation with what he assumed was an older man. He’d watched a bit of gay porn in the early days of trying to understand himself and why he was so different from the salt of the earth, Christian family he’d been born into and raised by. It had definitely answered those very important questions about himself. And now it provided an intrusive highlights reel to the things Ryan had confessed earlier.
It was a good thing they reached the truck then and he could use the excuse of searching through the contents of the trailer to hide his face and thoughts from Ryan.
“I’ve gone through spells where the inspiration well dries up, too,” he said over his shoulder as he pushed a lawnmower aside to reach the bundled set of stakes in the back corner of the trailer. “It sucks.”
“I guess you do know what it’s like to live off of your creativity,” Ryan said as he waited at the open back of the trailer. He sounded happy about his discovery. “It can be a challenge to work in a field that relies on keeping the creative juices flowing.”
Graeme grabbed the first bundle of stakes and walked them back to hand off to Ryan. “We live in a world that values hard work and the sweat of our brows, but never really understands the creative process that has to come before all that,” he said.
Ryan looked like he’d handed him a golden rose. “You’re so right,” he said. His smile grew. “I had no idea fashion design and gardening had so much in common.”
Graeme shrugged with self-deprecation and headed back to the far end of the trailer to get the rest of the stakes. “It doesn’t, really,” he said once he came out with that bundle in his arms.
“Of course it does,” Ryan said as they walked side by side back toward the kitchen garden. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. We’re both in the business of designing beautiful things to decorate the world with. I decorate people and you decorate the spaces they’re in.”
“Maybe,” Graeme said, tipping his face up to the sun and allowing himself to enjoy being compared to someone so much more sophisticated than him. “Although, to be honest, my wife always said that I just like digging in the dirt and making more laundry for her. Not that I didn’t always offer to do my own laundry, mind you. But she insisted?—”
Graeme stopped when he saw the light go out of Ryan’s smile. The smile was still there, but it had gone from being warm and hopeful to…polite.
“I’m divorced,” he blurted quickly.
“Oh?” Ryan turned to him, the sudden, frosty politeness replaced by curiosity.
A sharp shard of anxiety shot down Graeme’s spine. Shit. He hadn’t meant to blurt his life out like that. He sure as hell wasn’tready to talk about the carnage that had followed his revelation about Damien. And he definitely wasn’t ready to talk about Damien yanking the rug out from under him either.
“Last fall,” he said, scrambling to reveal the truth with the bare minimum of details. “It was a mess.”
That didn’t come close to explaining things.
“I’m sorry,” Ryan said, his tone more formal, but still friendly. “I’ve never been through a divorce, but I’ve had a break-up or two in my day.”
“And a career change.”
Shit! Why had he brought that up? Ryan had made clear not even an hour ago that it was a sore point for him.
Fortunately, Ryan smirked and huffed a laugh. “And a career change,” he repeated. “Life has a way of kicking us in the balls sometimes.”
“Yeah,” Graeme said. He wanted to find better words than that so Ryan would consider him a good conversationalist. Words weren’t his strong point, though.
