“Because in the past when I’ve gone to Europe for stuff, I’ve always made it a longer trip for efficiency’s sake. So, if I was going normally before I met you, then—”
“You would stay there and come back after the convention,” he filled in.
Nodding again, I grimaced. “I don’t want to leave you for that long and I’m not sure how it would work if you wanted to come with me.”
The way Bear went quiet and still scared me. He didn’t look at me, and I could practically see the cogs turning in his head.
“What will you do for those three weeks?”
“Normally, when I do something like this, I either rent a chair in one place between locations, or put out word that I’m in Europe and ask if anyone wants to have something done and then go to them.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay. I need to think.” Then he pushed away from the island and walked to his room. He closed the door.
I did what I could for dinner, which wasn’t much since my mind was doing complicated things, mostly telling me he wasn’t going to forgive me. I couldn’t concentrate on much, so I made chicken nuggets and French fries in the oven—I had never gotten the American urge to deep fry everything—and made a salad to appear a little healthier than that.
At one point, I head a raised voice coming from Bear’s room, and took a few steps closer until I realized he was on the phone with someone.
Logically, because I was a mostly functional adult human being and I had been raised well, I knew he likely wouldn’t be super upset once things calmed down a little. I hadn’t fucked up horribly, just… been a faulty human being with insecurities and issues of my own. Bear would see that, I was sure of it. It didn’t make the current distance between us any easier to deal with mentally.
Even with his mood going up and down, sometimes within the same hour, we’d been happy. It had taken me until now to realize how dysfunctional my relationship with Elio had been. While I’d had a really good example of a healthy relationship in my parents growing up, they weren’t super demonstrative with their affection.
Bear had grown up in a cold, affectionless environment. We were doing our best to figure out what worked for us and had done well so far. I hoped he’d “get his little on” as Shauna would say, soon, because it made him cuddlier and that was something he needed. Not that he didn’t cling to me during the night a lot anyway, but that wasn’t the same.
The oven dinged and I pulled the tray out.
“Bear, dinnertime!”
I had made my own plate and had the condiments on the table by the time he appeared.
“Oh, nuggets!” The excitement in his voice told me he was getting littler. “And a salad….” And there was the whine.
“Come on baby boy, you need to eat some of everything.”
I poured him juice and water for myself, and soon we sat at the table.
“I called Uncle Mal,” he said, surprising me.
“Oh?”
“Well, I called Jamie, but then I talked more with Uncle Mal.” He gnawed a bit off a nugget, chewed on it thoughtfully, and then said, “When you leave to travel, I’m going to stay home. Then if I get lonely, I will go stay at their place.”
Without thinking, I said, “You know I want to check with Uncle Mal, right?”
The way his little side receded was scary. He put his fork neatly on his plate and leveled me with a look that chilled me. “Fuck you, Luukas.”
Then he got up, grabbed his plate and drink, and walked into his room.
I pushed my plate away, leaned my elbows on the edge of the table, and hid my face with my hands. I was a fucking idiot.
When I went to bed that night after not seeing much of Bear after dinner, there was a very pointed line of all his stuffies in the middle of the bed. He’d made a barrier out of them, and the message couldn’t have been any clearer.
He still wanted to sleep in the same bed, but he was mad at me—deservedly so—and he wasn’t ready to confront me. So he made a wall of the things that were most important to his little side, a side that I had drawn into the fight when it had no place there.
Then it hit me: he’d said my name earlier. He’d called me Luukas for the first time.
I was. A fucking. Idiot.
I had early morning appointments the next day, and by the time I got home in the afternoon, the apartment was quiet.
