Chapter Twenty-One
Gus
The front door banged hard enough to rattle the walls and bounce back from its hinges, springing wide open again. I stared at it, wondering if I was asleep in my bed, alone, and dreaming of all the bad things that could happen if I had sex with Billy and faced up to my feelings for him. Of the complications and weirdness I was nowhere near equipped to handle.
But I wasn’t asleep. I was awake, and three seconds ago I’d been so relieved to be home again with him I tripped over my own feet trying to get into my house.
Now, I was confused and so deflated I felt like crying. My head hurt too. It had come on while I’d been listening to the homeowner drone on about bi-folding doors and solar panels, and I’d driven home caught between the urge to vomit and a desperate desire to pull over and fall asleep at the wheel. It had worn off the closer I got to being home with Billy, but it still took me far too long to dash to the front door and call his name.
He was already gone.
And I had no idea in which direction.
Dazed, I shut the front door and returned to the kitchen. I was still clutching my phone, and Billy’s snarled words echoed in my head.“Your Grindr messages are waiting for you.”They made no sense. I hadn’t been on Grindr in weeks, except to touch base with an old friend to give me an alibi for stealing the dog. If I had messages in my inbox, I hadn’t read them. Or even wanted to. Billy had eclipsed my life so entirely, I’d forgotten Grindr existed.
With shaky fingers, I opened the app and scanned my messages. The usual dross was there—the creeps who hit you up with a dick pic the second you came online, but there was nothing else of any significance, only a couple of pings from my dude, touching base after the garbled phone conversation we’d had last night.
I read through them, my brain dragging behind, like how an elderly wolf trailed the pack. The seconds ticked by, and then minutes, until the implication of the friendly messages dawned on me.
...checking in after last night.Five words that could mean a thousand things, and Billy had run with the worst.
Shaking my head, I called him, but his phone rang from the charging point in the hallway. He’d left it behind, and perhaps it was for the best, as I had zero clue what I’d say to him. It cut me to the bone that he’d think I’d been hooking up on Grindr the whole time we’d been wrapped up in each other, but I couldn’t swallow the knot of frustration forming in my throat. He’d been through my phone and slammed out of my house without giving me a chance to speak. Did he really think so little of me?
Or was it that other people had let him down so badly that my betrayal made perfect sense to him?
Either way, the whole thing made my aching brain vibrate in my skull. Coming home to him had been my endgame the whole afternoon. I couldn’t deal with the fact that it had all been a pipe dream. That it was over before it had begun.
You could go look for him. There’s only so many places he could be.
But the thought of climbing back in the van made me want to die.
So I didn’t. I slumped on the couch and scowled through a restless doze until my phone roused me sometime later.
Billy.I lunged for it, hurling myself off the couch in the process. My phone was on the floor. I landed next to it and Mia’s face flashed up on the screen. Disappointment crushed me, but I answered anyway. Ignoring my sister was an ordeal I wasn’t down for right now. “What?”
“Charming,” she snapped. “Is that how you’ve been speaking to Billy?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means he just blew through here and told Luke he’s going back up north. What the hell have you done?”
“I haven’t done anything. And what do you mean up north? He didn’t come from up north in the first place.”
“Not this time, but he was living in Birmingham when he got hurt, remember? I think that’s what he meant, he wasn’t making much sense.”
“Birmingham isn’t up north. It’s the Midlands.”
“That’s what you’re going with? Do you even give a shit that Luke’s going to lose his brother all over again if you let this happen?”
“If I ‘let’ this happen? When did their family drama become my responsibility? I can’t keep Billy here if he wants to be somewhere else.”
“No, but you can make it easier for him to stay. Come on, Gus. Don’t pretend you don’t know what’s happening here. You hooked up with him, didn’t you? And then you did what you always do and rolled out of bed without looking back.”
Everything she thought she knew was assumption. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“So you didn’t fuck him?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
