I don’t like it. Tanner has an ageless face, and he’s gonna look exactly the same in ten years’ time. But right now he looks older than the twenty-eight years I know him to be. “It’s a weird thing,” I say when he doesn’t speak. “It literally tore me in two, but I didn’t feel it until much later, and by then, it was all different.”
“What was? Fuck, don’t answer that if you don’t want to. We don’t have to talk about this.”
We don’t. And I know that. But sitting so close to him, half drunk on heady cider, I don’t mind talking. My hand hovers over where his is still on my knee. I don’t cover it, though. I settle for tracing a pattern on his knuckles as the recollection of him searching my body for scars sweeps over me. Even if I didn’t have massive gaps in my memories of that fateful day on the beach, Tanner’s scorching touch would win out. “I really don’t remember it. One minute I was in the water, the next I was in the hospital. In between there’s just…nothing. If I hadn’t had teeth marks in me I’d have thought I was being punked.”
“Eve said you died on the beach.” Tanner speaks so softly I barely hear him.
I peel his fingers from my knee and lace them with mine as though I do it every day. “That’s what they said, but it was after that I felt the worst. I didn’t expect blood loss to make me so ill. Like, I was totally dismantled by it. I felt like Ihaddied, and I couldn’t find the space to come back from it.”
“Why not?”
I shake my head. “The day I came home from hospital, Ka—my wife—sold the story to a magazine. And that kind of shit kept happening. I couldn’t—” I gather myself before my emotions run away with me and I want to Hulk smash Tanner’s living room. “I didn’t feel better for a long time, and by then, my life was a train wreck I couldn’t escape. It was so fucked up, man. These days it feels like it happened to someone else.”
Tanner says nothing for a long time. Then he squeezes my hand and blesses me with the gaze I dream about when I sleep alone. “You’re safe now. You know that, don’t you?”
I do know it. I knew it the moment I left California and discovered the sweet-smelling state of Vermont. But every word that falls from Tanner’s lips is a gift, and his hand wrapped around mine means the fucking world.
Chapter Seven
Tanner
I’m not cut out to be anyone’s roommate. Jax makes me feel Zen, but he has his life, and I have mine. We don’t get to hang out much, and it doesn’t take me long to realize I’m some type of mess right now when he’s not around. Logical me knows I’ve been like this since long before I met him, but I feel so profoundly better when he’s close that I can’t help connecting the two. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop touching him. And why I’m addicted to the fact that he doesn’t seem to mind. That he touches me too, and now I can’t brush past him without squeezing his hand, or rubbing his arm.
Jax has good arms. They’re hard and strong, and more than that, I can feel his pulse thrumming through his warm skin, even when he’s just come home from a day spent in the cold. He’s so fucking alive. Everything about him—his easy smile, his glittery eyes. Some days he doesn’t seem real, and I’m not ready to deal with the reality that he’s going to move out soon.
So I don’t. I ignore it and pretend he’ll be on my couch forever.
The day after Jax gets paid, I come home to find he’s left a roll of bills on my kitchen counter. There’s a note too.
For all the food and booze you’ve spotted me.
Thanks mate, J
I stare at the note as if the words will somehow rearrange themselves to say something else. Then I slowly turn and swing my gaze to the couch, bracing myself to find it empty, and Jax’s tiny collection of personal effects gone. But the couch isn’t empty. Jax is there, tapping away at his laptop, and I claim the few seconds it takes him to look up to fix my clattering heart rate.Man, you need help.
It’s true, but my insurance company stopped funding that shit months ago, and I don’t earn enough at the bar to pay for it myself.
“Hey.” Jax appears in my personal space. I’ve missed him getting up and crossing the room. “You want a tea? I bought some Tetley from the store.”
“Nice. Show me how you drink it?”
Jax grins and reaches around me for the kettle. He fills it at the sink and slings it onto the stove, and the sight of him moving around my kitchen makes up for the minor meltdown at the thought of him being gone. He looks good in my space. Like he’s meant to be there.
I don’t want him to be anywhere else.
So tell him. Right. Because that’s how it works. I give a dude a bed for a couple of weeks then take him hostage for the rest of his life because I can’t imagine a time when he won’t be brewing his English tea in my apartment. It’s a bad joke even without what Gabi told me about his ex echoing in my head. I watch him fix mugs of dark tea, then add sugar and milk.
He hands me a mug of rosy warmth and his grin turns shy. “You’ll probably think it’s weird as hell, but English people live on this shit.”
“Even the Cornish ones?”
“Yup.”
I take a sip. It’s not coffee, but it’s not bad, and not all that unfamiliar. Despite what Jax seems to think, lots of Americans drink tea. “I have to go to work. Are you going to be here tonight?”
Jax shifts his mug from one hand to the other. “Probably. Jerry’s found a buddy with a studio I can get on a short-term lease until my contract runs out in the spring. I said I’d meet him tonight.”
“Don’t leave without getting drunk with me one last time.”
