“Uh, they actually papped us on the train. When you were asleep and holding my hand.”
Micah closed his eyes. “Come home with me?”
“I can’t. I have to work.” It was the hardest six words I’d ever uttered, but I needed my job too much to walk out in the middle of a shift. My stockroom meltdowns had me on thin ice as it was. “I’m sorry.”
Micah opened his eyes. The haze of anxiety had been there for days, but the burning embers of pure panic seared my soul.
“Micah—”
“Don’t.” He caught my hands as I reached for him and pushed me away. “I can’t handle you being nice about this. It’s bullshit.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Isn’t it? If I hadn’t blown all my money, I’d never have turned up in your life and wrecked it—”
“That’sfucking bullshit,” I snapped. “Are you seriously saying you’d be better off if you hadn’t met me? You realise most of your drama happened before, right?”
Micah’s expression collapsed. “Dude, I meantyou’dbe better off.”
“Don’t fucking ‘dude’ me.” I reached for Micah again, but he turned away before I could comfort him and, despite his dragging leg, slipped through the gate and out onto the street. Given the circumstances, chasing him or shouting him down wasn’t an option.
With a heavy sigh, I trudged back inside, leaving the soggy evidence of our entwined lives behind.
* * *
Sam
The night wore on and didn’t get any better. On my break, I logged into my neglected Twitter account and dropped onto a damp bench with my head in my hands. Me and Micah were trending, in London at least, and there were even more pictures circulating than on the gossip sites. On the plus side, the queer community was raising hell that Micah—that both of us—had been so cruelly exposed, but their righteous anger didn’t change much.
I clicked on tweet after tweet of me and Micah together. Some of them appeared so innocuous I was almost amused, but as I looked closer, I realised that every shot told a story, even if we hadn’t known it at the time. In one, we’d been caught in the pub’s outdoor smoking area. Micah was on his way out, and I was waving goodbye. His smile was electric, and I looked so happy I barely recognised myself.
My heart ached. If I ignored the barbaric violation of our privacy, it was beautiful.
But there had been nothing beautiful about the raw horror in Micah’s face when he’d hurled the newspaper at me. Any joy he may have found in how he felt about me—and by default, about himself—had been stolen from him.
Again.
I went back to work, counting the minutes till my shift ended. Andy asked me to stay late and help clean the ale lines. I told him to get fucked, in my head, at least. Out loud, I told a lie about an exam in the morning and left. I ran home, sensing eyes on me as I passed the handful of pubs and bistros that still had customers lingering outside. It was probably all in my head, but my skin crawled nonetheless, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I reached my building.
Inside, I took the stairs two at a time and burst through the front door like a man possessed.
Micah was waiting for me in the hallway. There was no music on, no scent of toasted sandwiches filtering out of the kitchen.
I dropped my bag and coat on the floor, half expecting him to step around me and pick them up like he’d done so many times. But he didn’t move. Just stared at me with hollow eyes. “A photographer followed me home,” he said flatly. “And they’ve been camped out across the road ever since. Did they get you?”
“I didn’t notice anyone.”
“That doesn’t mean shit.”
His aggression got under my skin. “So, if they did pap me, it’s my fault for not paying attention?”
“No, it means they’ll take advantage of the fact that you’re not paying attention and rinse your life until you’re as fucking nuts as I am.”
“You’re not nuts. Don’t say things like that.”
“Don’t fucking tone police me.” But the fire had faded from Micah’s voice, and his full bottom lip stuck out like it always did when he was in a bad mood.
I eyed it, wishing I could run my thumb along it. There’d been times when I’d found his sulky expression endearing, funny, even, but I’d left my sense of humour on the proverbial bus. I wanted this to go away. For everything that had hurt him so much to have happened to someone else, and for him to have lived a life that let him brush this off and go back to the bubble that had surrounded the flat, protecting him—and us—from the outside world.
