“Abe, please.”
Fuck. Was Oliver ever good at that. Goddammit.
Calling him Abe. Aberlour hadn’t been Abe to anyone in years. He’d been Aberlour, Gavin, dude from the booth, or nothing at all. He’d thought—hadn’t Abe died along with his men? Hadn’t Abe’s head rolled, albeit figuratively, when Abby had crash landed onto the scene?
He swore softly to himself, reluctantly returning to sit down again.
“How long?” Aberlour asked once he was sitting again. He played with the stray pieces of thread hanging from a rip in his jeans to keep his hands from shaking.
“A little more than a year. I did eight rounds of chemo. It just—” Oliver shrugged, like all of it was banal. Average. Just another day. “It never really worked.” He was so calm. How was he so fucking calm?
“A year? A full fucking year and this is when I hear about it?” He was full of rage. He’d felt this coming. Like molten lava, it had always been there, simmering, always right there, bubbling and ready to erupt. Fully aware that the chip on his shoulder—well, it had never been just a chip. It had always been so much more. So much deeper, darker, and far less under control than he’d ever willingly admit. It was all there now, though. Right there. Begging to be let out. He could kill Oliver, he mused. Kill him and save himself the trouble of going through the grief, despair, and helplessness that would keep him up at night. He could kill Oliver and be done with it. Pulling the trigger would be easy. It would have nothing on the guilt that already rotted him from the inside out, eating him alive. But then, what difference would it make either way? So, he just sat there, helpless, trapped by pain and indecision, listening as Oliver explained himself further.
“You weren’t at the wedding,” Oliver said, sounding small and fragile. “You never called, never wanted to see me, never asked about the kids.” He looked and sounded as if he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. As if Aberlour was directly responsible for that. “You weren’t at the wedding—I thought you didn’t care.”
His pathetically weak shrug made Aberlour’s eyes burn with unshed tears. Once upon a time, Aberlour had cried all the tears that a man could possibly spill in a lifetime. Once upona time, Aberlour had believed that easy lie he’d told himself, simply because he was so incredibly tired of crying.
It had been a lie then. Nothing but a lie. He knew that now.
There were still tears. So many of them. They took over like a flood over a plain. They wrecked him. Made him double over in pain. He didn’t make a sound, he simply watched them drip onto the floor, his chest filled with a newer, sharper kind of pain he’d never thought possible.
“Abe?” Oliver asked, sounding confused.
“Didn’t care?” Aberlour whispered, barely able to breathe.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t feel the same.”
Would Oliver never learn? How many fucking ways could he break himself apart until Oliver understood? How many ways did he have to tell him, show him? There wasn’t a single emotion that Aberlour didn’t feel when it came to Oliver. Not a single one. He hated Oliver. Hated him as much as he hated that moment when he reached the bottom of a bottle of whiskey. Hated them both because they left him hollow and with no means of escape.
“I saw the ring box at the bottom of your duffel,” Aberlour said. “I knew you were going to marry her before we shipped off. I saw the ring, and I knew—” he shrugged, trying to calm his breathing before he fell apart. “I knew you’d chosen her,” he said. “I couldn’t watch that. Then the boys—” he trailed off, trying to avoid saying the words that burned like acid.
“I was holding out hope, at first, because you’d promised you wouldn’t—” Aberlour said as the tears kept falling to the floor. “But—” he shook his head and dried his tears with the back of his hand. “You chose her,” he said, defeated. “In the end, you chose her.”
Oliver laughed and sobbed at the same time.
Aberlour finally looked up into those gorgeous blue eyes.
Oliver leaned forward and firmly grasped Abe’s hand, pulling it to his own chest.
“That was supposed to be yours.”
Silence. Dead fucking silence. Like after a big roll of thunder when Mother Nature pauses and waits for lightning to strike. Aberlour stared into Oliver’s blue eyes that looked just like swirling pools of cerulean.
Then Oliver gave another weird laugh. “Did you look at the ring?” He asked in clear disbelief. “It was just a gold band! Abby would have thrown it back at me if I’d proposed with it.”
And it shouldn’t have been funny, but it was, and a retched, wet sob of a laugh escaped them both before fading as quickly as it started.
“It was supposed to be yours. I told you—” Oliver began, defeated. “I promised I wouldn’t marry her.” He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “I bought your ring after I saw my brother in rehab. It was nothing crazy—just a band. But it meant—” he swallowed, like the words were choking him. “I proposed to Abby with the ring my mother gave me—” and he stopped there, but Aberlour heard the rest in his mind—but I bought yours.
Once upon a time, Aberlour had believed every word out of Oli’s mouth. But then, when everything had been on the line, he’d lied, so Aberlour had stopped believing in anything at all.
But it was too much. The knowledge of what he’d potentially lost weighed like the world on Atlas’ shoulder, and Aberlour already carried too much. He sidestepped it as quickly as he could.
“You’d promised you wouldn’t marry her—so why did you?” Aberlour asked instead.
“I thought you’d moved on. That I was too late. You wouldn’t talk to me after the funeral. I tried, but you refused—” he shrugged.
Moved on.Aberlour breathed through the pain, pressing his hands hard against his face, wondering if the skin would give way. If his fingers would go right through to reveal just how rotten, broken, and hollow he was. Move on? There was nowhere to go. No one to move on to. Didn’t Oliver realize that?
