“I didn’t know how to answer,” Bing confessed. “I still couldn’t tell you the truth, and I couldn’t lie to you. Then you stopped emailing.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Bing grimaced. “There was an auto-repeat message saying ‘Call me—’”
“It’s still an email,” Walter interrupted. Then, when his eyes burned from emotions he didn’t want to express, he looked up to the top of the tent. Damn it, he hated how easily he could tear up. “I thought you were dead. It tore my heart out.”
Silence. When Walter finally looked back at Bing, the man opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. In the end, Bing sighed and shook his head.
“What does that mean?” Walter demanded. When Bing still said nothing, he slapped his hand against Bing’s shoulder. It was an open-palmed strike without much force, but it still rocked Bing back against the card table. “Talk to me!”
“Ididdie!” Bing snapped back. “In every sense of the word, I died. I am no longer acknowledged as one of Grand Master Wu’s pupils. So I am dead as far as my training is concerned. I have no job and no way to pay my parents back. This work now—this paranormal fight—was an accident. They didn’t mean to make me into a werewolf. The spell was for Laddin, but I was caught in it by accident. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and no one knew what to do with me. They told me that it was best to let everyone think I was dead.” He raised his hands in a gesture of futility. “I agreed.”
“But you’re not dead!” Walter bellowed. The words flowed up from the pit of his stomach. They rolled out of him on a tide of fury loud enough to shake the tent and startle some nearby birds… and they didn’t come close to expressing the pain of what he’d been through the past two months. “Don’t you understand?” Walter yelled. “You were my only friend, and you disappeared without a word as if I meant nothing to you.”
He watched Bing’s eyes widen. He saw horror in his expression as Bing realized what he’d done. Worse, he saw shame compress the man’s whole body, as if he’d just added more weight on shoulders already stooped with pain. But that was not at all what Walter wanted. “Bing—”
“I thought of you every day, every night. Every day during training and during every fight. I kept picturing you in a dying world if we failed to stop the demon at Lake Wacka Wacka. I imagined how you would react if you learned that I had tried to save you and failed. And so I didn’t. I didn’t fail. I mastered becoming a werewolf. I succeeded in controlling the beast within me. All because I was thinking of you.”
“I didn’t ask you to save the world. I asked you to call me.”
“To what end?” Bing whispered. “What could I say that would make any difference?”
Damn it, the guy didn’t understand a thing. “It wasn’t so you could talk, Bing. It was so I could.”
Bing frowned. “What would you have said?”
So many words crowded into his throat. So many things he’d imagined saying or screaming or whispering to the man he’d loved from afar.Why did you disappear? Why didn’t you trust me? Why didn’t you tell me you were gay?Out of all those words, memories, and mixed-up feelings, the main question burned hard enough to block out the others.
Why don’t you love me?
He couldn’t humiliate himself with that question, so he diverted it. “You know I’m gay,” Walter continued. “You watched me go on bad dates and hideous hookups.” All in an attempt to feel something for someone other than Bing. “You knew what I was from the beginning.”
“I know,” Bing said. “I never faulted you for it.”
“You knew I wanted you.”
“Yes.”
But he never reached for him.
Show him. Do it!
Monkey didn’t have the ability to move Walter’s body. Walter had locked Monkey into a tiny corner of his mind where he could comment but not command. But his words still had weight, and Walter swayed forward. And once he was moving, the rest was easy.
He kissed Bing. His movement was rushed, his desperation too obvious, but he didn’t care. Too much pent-up emotion—anger, worry, lust, love—all combined into movement without thought to consequences. He pressed his mouth to Bing’s lips, and he thrust his tongue inside. He gripped Bing’s shoulders and ground his pelvis against Bing’s hips. And he waited for Bing to throw him across the room.
Except that didn’t happen. Bing didn’t fight back. At least not in the usual way. Instead, he grabbed Walter’s robe and gripped the fabric tight—hard enough to keep Walter from pulling them onto the card table that would likely flatten beneath their weight. When Walter thrust his tongue inside Bing’s mouth, the man opened for him, even angling his head for a deeper penetration.
And he released a sound of need that shook Walter to the core.
Had he heard that right?
He pulled back and stared into Bing’s eyes. “I’m angry at you,” he rasped. “But I also want you so bad, I can’t think of anything else. Tell me to back off. Tell me you don’t want this.”
Bing stayed stubbornly silent.
“You have to say something. Yes. No.Something!”
He watched as Bing swallowed, and then a single word came out. A single whispered sound that Walter felt more than heard.
“Yes.”
