“I think you should go,” he said, voice flat and hollow.
“Iggy—” I started, tucking myself away.
“No.” He snapped the word out, sharp and sudden. “You clearly think I’m damaged goods because I took some fucking painkillers.”
I stood. “No. I would never?—”
“And you don’t even want me to suck you off,” he continued, throwing his hands into the air. “So what’s the point? You might as well fucking go.”
I moved towards him again, but he retreated, wrapping his arms around himself like he was bracing for impact.
“Iggy, please,” I said, the word tearing out of me. “It’s not like that. I just?—”
“Bodhi,” he interrupted softly. “I really think you should go.”
He sniffed and tried to smile, a thin, fragile thing I didn’t believe for a second.
“I’m sorry,” he went on, voice careful, practiced. “You’re—you’re right. I’m tired. We were talking about heavy stuff. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Baby.” I reached for him again.
He took another step back, until his shoulders brushed the wall. There was nowhere else for him to retreat, and still he put distance between us.
“I’m just tired, Bodhi,” he insisted. “That’s all this is. I just need to sleep, and we’ll start again tomorrow, okay?”
I wanted to scream. To grab him by the shoulders and shake him. To tell him I could see it, that I knew he wasn’t fine, that this wasn’t just exhaustion or bad timing or a conversation gone sideways.
But Iggy was a grown man. He was sober, by his word. He’d looked me in the eye and told me he hadn’t been using.
Without proof, all I had was trust.
And trust meant leaving when he asked me to.
I closed my eyes and nodded once. “Okay.”
I turned away before he could see what it cost me. Grabbed my suitcase from beside the dresser and wheeled it towards the door, every step feeling heavier than the last.
Before I left, I looked back at him.
“I’ll see you on the bus?”
He smiled again, but it was barely there, a ghost of something real. And the way my heart started to race told me everything I didn’t want to know. That something was wrong. That things were slipping. That this wasn’t okay.
“Yeah, Just Bodhi,” he murmured. “I promise.”
And just like that, I left him there.
Left to wait for him on the bus, hoping he was right.
Hoping that tomorrow, somehow, everything would be okay.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
IGGY
The bed was too big.Too cold. Wrong without Bodhi’s body filling the space beside me. There was too much room to breathe, too much air where his warmth should have been. After days of being constantly at his side, constantly wrapped around each other, sharing body heat and breath and small, unconscious touches, the emptiness felt obscene.
