The color of his eyes made him feel helpless.
The way he smiled twisted him up inside.
It made his heart do a little skip in his chest at the worst possible moments.
Like now.
He was flushed, and his hair was standing up from running his hands through it. That little charge to his body made him want to run more. In the back of his head, there was what his mother said.
He was running because this man made him feel again.
And he wasn’t allowed to keep living.
Because Will hadn’t.
What he wanted to do was take a chance, but he couldn’t. This was a straight man. Yeah, they could be friends, but Corbin suspected that he wanted more than that. If he was going to risk it all, it had to be a sure thing.
It wouldn’t work out.
“You should go,” he said. “I don’t want you near me right now,” Corbin stated. “You’re drunk and disorderly. Don’t make this mistake, Alex. Don’t lose your job over nothing.”
Oh, well, mistakes were his whole identity.
He lived by the compassion of the people who saved him. What was one more embarrassment in a long line of them for him?
He was leaving the FBI anyway.
Alex was too tired to keep doing this. That was the bottom line. He’d lost two great partners in the FBI, and two men he felt something for too.
There was no way he could do this again. It took until Corbin showed up to feel alive again. That was a year and a half of emptiness that nearly broke him.
Plus, this was more than‘nothing’to him.
It was everything, and while he didn’t understand how, that didn’t make it less true. Instinct told him to fight for Corbin, and hope he’d do the same for him.
“I’m not going until you tell me what is making you ditch our partnership.”
Corbin lied.
It was all he could do so the ugliness didn’t come out, and he wasn’t splayed out for the world to see. He was so broken and unfixable.
So, he did the one thing that he knew would hurt the most. Out of trying to protect himself, he hurt an innocent man.
He aimed at Alex, and let that arrow fly. Oh, and it was a direct hit.
“THIS. THIS BEHAVIOR!”
He saw the flash of pain, the hurt, and knew that was a low blow. Alex had nothing to do with this because he was the broken one.
Clearly.
At his words, it made its mark.
That ended it for Alex.
It broke the last piece of him. He was exactly what everyone told him he was.
Nothing.
