No Distance Left to Run, page 4
part #6 of Wilde's Series
Don’t say anything, I silently begged, not sure if I was pleading with him or with myself. I can’t handle any more conversation tonight.
He didn’t say anything. Neither did I.
At the end of the hall, I closed my bedroom door and leaned against it. For a moment, I just breathed, wondering how long I’d been holding my breath, as if breathing had been more likely to wake him up than coming in and moving past him. He was a soldier now. Probably trained to be a light sleeper and aware of his surroundings. Come to think of it, I was probably lucky his reflexes hadn’t kicked in and he hadn’t snapped my neck or something.
I rubbed my face with both hands. I was losing my fucking mind.
I should have gone to a different bar. Under ideal circumstances, I might even have found a hookup without any of that baggage.
Though, deep down, I didn’t want to. The source of tension wasn’t hormones. The source of tension was lying on my couch. Under different circumstances, I’d have jerked off to help me sleep, but again, I so wasn’t in the mood, and I didn’t want him to hear anything—and join me —and give away just how shaken I was. I wanted this resolved and only hoped I’d have the balls to actually resolve it.
I tossed and turned for way too long. Still couldn’t concentrate, thoughts jumbling together with memories, things I would have wanted to say, things I remembered saying and not meaning. It was like Joshua was all scar tissue, and Julien had ripped it all off. Years of fucking healing undone with a smile and a kiss by a guy I didn’t know enough to trust, whom I didn’t know if I could ever trust again.
And I was still so, so fucking attracted and fascinated, and there was that bit of hope sitting like a stone in my throat. Under the circumstances, sleep really was the least of my worries.
And I wasn’t at all listening for signs that he was getting up and leaving. A rustling blanket. A creaking floorboard. The click of the dead bolt. As if he’d make a sound. He’d probably just vanish, leaving this plane of existence entirely with all the noise of smoke slipping under a door.
Eventually, I must have dozed off, because when I opened my eyes again, daylight was peering in between the blinds. Something in the apartment was different. Not just the light. What was—
Oh. The smell. Coffee.
Which meant Joshua—Julien—was still here. He was awake, and he’d made coffee. As tired as I was, the coffee was almost enough to negate everything he’d ever done. Almost.
I got up and shuffled out to the kitchen. According to the clock on the microwave, it was a little past five thirty. Far too early for a night owl to be awake, but whatever. At least the coffeepot was filled almost to the brim with that life-giving black liquid.
As I poured myself a cup, quiet footsteps behind me woke me up faster than the caffeine ever could have. I somehow had the presence of mind to set the pot down and not pick up the cup before I turned around and faced him. Good thing too. A shattered mug and hot coffee at my feet would have been unpleasant.
He was far too awake and bright-eyed for this side of noon. A layer of scruff darkened his jaw and neck, which was fucking hot on a face like his.
“Morning,” he said.
“Is it?” I grumbled. I turned around and dropped a spoonful of sugar into my coffee. Then I carefully picked up the mug in both hands. It was still too hot to drink, but at least it gave my hands something to do now that I was over his presence enough not to drop the damn cup on my feet.
“Sleep well?”
I glared at him.
Julien chuckled, but his expression edged toward sheepish. “Sorry. I’ve probably, uh, messed up your sleep patterns and everything.”
“Among other things,” I muttered into my cup and took a cautious sip. Ah, nectar of the gods…
The humor in his expression disappeared, but some of the sheepishness remained. “Look, um, we can talk about things. About…what happened.”
There isn’t enough coffee in the world…
“What is there to talk about?”
He swallowed. “What we’ve both been doing for the last few years. How you’ve been. Anything.”
“What we’ve both been doing for the last few years?” I took another drink and then set the cup on the counter. Facing him, I folded my arms across my chest. “Well, you’ve been gallivanting around with the French Foreign Legion. And I’m sure you have some stories. Me? I’ve been trying to figure out what the fuck I’m doing. I came home from my mission a wreck, and I’ve stayed a wreck since then, especially because I couldn’t get a fucking answer from God about why He would let someone like you die while you were out doing His work, and—” I cut myself off, snapping my teeth together. “It’s been rough, okay?”
Julien fixed his gaze on the floor. “I’m sorry. I wish there was more I can say, but we both know I can’t change anything.”
Another tirade sat on the tip of my tongue. All the fury I’d thrown at God for the last few years was ready and waiting to be fired off at Julien. But to what gain? As furious as I was with him, and hurt and betrayed, pure relief kept tempering that rage and pain. He was alive. He was here. Wasn’t that what I’d been begging for all this time?
Finally, I whispered, “You could have said something.”
He lifted his head and met my eyes. “What?”
“When you…left.” I picked up my coffee and took a sip just so I could keep my emotions in check. When I set the cup down again, my hand was shaking, and the click-click of the cup wobbling before it settled completely on the counter gave me away. “When you left, why didn’t you say something? Leave a note. Something.” I forced myself to look him in the eye. “Why did you make us all think you were dead?”
Julien broke eye contact again. He rested a hip against the counter, and his straight, strong shoulders sagged beneath an unseen weight. “I thought about it. A lot.”
“But why…?”
He pulled in a deep breath. “Because I realized it would be easier for my family to accept that I was dead than it would have been for them to accept I’d abandoned my faith.”
My heart dropped. I wanted to tell him that was ridiculous, that he was an idiot, but he was right. I couldn’t argue with him.
“I thought about sending you a letter,” he went on. “Just something to let you know. I didn’t want to put you through all this.”
I was afraid of the answer but asked anyway: “Why didn’t you?”
He cleared his throat—twice—and looked me in the eye again. “Because I’d always admired your faith. And I didn’t want you to know I’d lost mine.”
It was my turn to use the counter to hold me up. “Julien…”
“I am so, so sorry, Chris. I never set out to hurt anyone. I was…I was a mess. I just completely fell apart, and I—”
“Don’t,” I whispered and pushed myself off the counter. I crossed the tiny kitchen and wrapped my arms around him.
“I am so sorry,” he said again and hugged me back, and now he wasn’t Joshua or Julien or anyone I’d ever known, just someone who’d been as lost as I had for all this time. He was shaking. Maybe not crying—God, I was close—but definitely not the confident, rock-steady soldier who’d come up to me at Sea-Tac yesterday.
I closed my eyes and just held on to him. For the first time, I wondered how much hell he’d been through since he’d disappeared. I’d lost my friend, and eventually my faith, but he’d lost his faith, his family, everything he’d ever known. Maybe on some level he’d embraced that loss, but holding him now, I couldn’t imagine it had been easy.
He released me, and as he drew back, said, “I don’t know if it makes a difference, but a day hasn’t gone by that I haven’t thought about you.”
“Same here.” I swallowed, forcing back my emotions. “And now that you’re back, I don’t know what to think. About anything.”
“Neither do I.”
I turned away and reached for my coffee. “I guess no one expects us to figure it out overnight. But your priority needs to be your dad anyway. We can…we can…”
“That’s another thing, actually.”
“What?” I took a sip of my cooling coffee.
Julien shifted his weight and folded his arms, not appearing defensive at all but nervous. In fact, he looked a lot like he had back in high school when he’d been trying to psych himself up to face his parents with some failure, like a B- on a midterm. “Deb is going to see our parents today. She hadn’t wanted to tell them about me until I was actually here.”
“Okay…” I swallowed another gulp of coffee and put the mug aside.
“Assuming they want to see me at all, I could, um, use a little moral support.”
“Moral supp—” I stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”
His brow knitted together. “Will you come with me?”
“I…”
“I know I’m asking a lot. And I am in no position to ask any favors from you.” He chewed his lip. “But I honestly have no idea what I’m walking into.” He laughed softly, almost bitterly, and shook his head. “I’ve spent months on end in Afghanistan and places you’ve probably never even heard of, being shot at, having bombs going off way too close for comfort, but”—this time it was definitely a bitter laugh—”I’m scared to death to walk into my parents’ house alone.”
My mouth had gone dry. “What about your sister?”
“I’m hoping she’ll be there too. Quite frankly, I need all the backup I can get.”
Most likely. Well, definitely. I had no idea what the state of Mr. Hawthorne’s health was—I only knew that he’d been fighting cancer on and off, and in round three, the damn illness seemed to be winning. The first round hadn’t even seemed so bad, but then it had cropped up again, had been halted, and then they’d found it was everywhere. That particular battle had been going for about two years, so his decline was not exactly unexpected. But I saw in Deb what it was taking out of the family. The hope, the grinding helplessness, then hope again. The fact that Mr. Hawthorne still clung to his faith in the face of an obviously uncaring universe told me he was either a great deal stronger than I would have been or a great deal more stubborn. Neither of those traits would bode well for embracing the prodigal son.
“Chris?”
“All right.” I realized it sounded grudging, so I smiled. It shouldn’t have taken me aback so much that he smiled too. Sun going up, birds tweeting, fog lifting—the whole nine yards. That smile had always been powerful; now it was positively heart-stopping. In a good way. “I mean, yeah. You’d do the same for me.”
“I would.” Not a moment’s hesitation, and I hated that I’d had to consider it.
“So how did you get back in touch with Deb? Facebook?”
“I was just homesick, so I kept tabs on her. I told myself I shouldn’t have, but she was posting all those photos, you know. Sometimes, when you’ve had a close call somewhere in Helmand, those photos become really important. What are you fighting for. What else is there in life but dust, rocks, and blood.” He shook his head. “I did have quite a bit of time to think. Being a soldier is mostly just waiting and waiting. And you start doing these things to pass the time. And then she posted that Dad had bad news. So I pieced it all together, and I finally sent her a message.”
“How did she respond?”
“It took her a few days, I think, to get her head around it.” This smile was a lot more subdued. A thoughtful smile. Fond more than relieved or joyful. “So, e-mails. I still had time to serve, but I did keep up-to-date.”
“What about me?”
“Your Facebook profile is set to private.”
After some weird stalkery moments with one-nighters who didn’t get the message when I hadn’t called them back, I’d locked everything down pretty tight, unaware that a ghost from my past was watching me from a third-world Internet café half the globe away. Wow, the irony. Some stalkers were evidently good news. Who’d have thought?
“Yeah, I…could be better about updating it.” I didn’t share much on it anyway. I met hookups mostly in real life. I didn’t post photos—I figured I might regret oversharing once I’d decided on some office-based career and went for an interview. “So, Afghanistan?”
He shrugged but nodded. “I’m with the paras. We do the kind of stuff that tends to be handed over because the ordinary French army gets too much flak in the press when those flag-draped coffins come home.”
I couldn’t begin to imagine Joshua or Julien involved in anything like that. Varsity football and wrestling were about the extent of his violent tendencies. And how many times had he come close to really dying instead of just on paper?
“Wow,” was all I could say.
He laughed dryly. “I’ll tell you some stories one of these days.”
Please don’t. “Maybe over a couple of beers.”
Chuckling, he clapped my shoulder. “I’ll need more than a couple of beers for these. You probably will too.”
My lips parted. So he drank now? And he’d been through shit that required beers just to face? Yeah, this was all getting a little surreal.
“I guess we’ll deal with that when we get there.” I busied myself emptying my now-cold coffee into the sink and rinsing my cup. “Do you know when your sister is meeting with your folks today?”
“No.”
“Okay. Well.” The cup was as clean as it was going to get. I leaned against the dishwasher and absently toweled the cup. “As far as jobs go, I talked to the guy in charge of the bouncers at Wilde’s last night. He was especially interested in you after I said you were part of the French Foreign Legion.”
Julien smirked. “Big surprise.”
“He said to come by today. His shift starts at seven, so any time after that. Ask for Jack.”
“Will do. Thanks.”
“Okay. Well, in the meantime, you’re welcome to stay here.”
“Thanks.” He smiled. “I appreciate it.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I put the cup and towel on the counter. “By the way, just so you’re not completely shocked, Wilde’s is…uh…”
“It’s a club on Capitol Hill. I can put two and two together.”
“Well, okay, but it’s… Let’s just say it’s one of the racier clubs on Capitol Hill.”
His eyebrows jumped. “In that case, I’m looking forward to seeing it.”
By now, espresso-shot-ordering, beer-drinking, aggressive, self-assured, swearing Julien shouldn’t have surprised me. I certainly knew what I was, and considering what we’d done—and that last kiss—I knew what he was. He’d gone from My-Dad-will-kill-me gay to Wildes?—Bring-it-on gay. Six years. plenty of time. I’d gone from oh-God-I-want-my-best-friend gay to please-let-it-just-be-a-phase-like-everybody-says gay to, well, “just” gay. Also six years. It still surprised me a little. And being gay in the Legion? Did they have DADT? Something like it? Then again, put a bunch of ultra-fit young guys in the same place, and something was bound to happen, right?
“Anyway, you’ll see it tonight. It’ll be really busy.”
And everybody’s going to swarm all over you.
Something twinged in my chest, and there was no way to pretend it wasn’t jealousy. Which was stupid. I had absolutely no claim over him, and the last thing we needed was some drama about rules that had never been set. I was usually quite happy to play the field. Up to the point, apparently, where my teenage crush showed back up, alive, after having been presumed dead for five years. “But it is the best place in town. Best guys, best drinks.”
He grinned. “Hot guys serving great drinks?”
Be still my heart. He was flirting. Right? He was? “Wait till you see Kieran and Liam.”
“Mm-hmm.” And the Up-Down Eye Rake.
It made me laugh, half nervously and half because my balls tightened in that delicious way. Chemistry? We had that. If he kept going like that, we had a full Breaking Bad meth lab full of chemistry.
“I, uh, have to work at six.” I swallowed. “If you want to come with me and wait for Jack so you can talk to him, I can drive you in.”
“Drive?” He quirked an eyebrow. “How far away is this place?”
“Mile or so.”
“And you drive?”
“Hey, fuck you. After being on my feet for nine hours, I’m usually not too keen on walking home.”
“Mm-hmm.” He smirked again. “I suppose I can handle a little luxury for once.”
I rolled my eyes. “Let me guess. You’re used to walking that far, barefoot, before breakfast?”
“Absolutely.”
“Welcome to America, monsieur. Where we drive when we can walk, and—”
A high-pitched sound turned my head.
“Shit. Phone.” I darted past him, down the hall, and snatched my phone off the bedside table, hitting the button just before it would’ve kicked to voice mail. “Hey, Deb. What’s up?” And why are you calling this early?
“Hey, Chris. Can I talk to my brother?” Her voice sent a shiver through me.
“Yeah. Yeah, of course. Hang on.” I returned to the kitchen. “It’s Deb.”
He glanced at the clock and mouthed oh, fuck before he took the phone. “Hey.” His eyes lost focus and his brow furrowed. “Okay. Oh. Wow. Already?” He ran his free hand through his hair, the tremor doing nothing to unwind that knot that had reappeared in my stomach. “All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
My blood turned cold. That was never something I wanted to hear when there was a terminally ill person involved. Things could get real bad, real fast.
He hung up and held out the phone. “Deb talked to my mom last night. Told her everything.” He gulped, and I swore his tanned face paled a little. “She wants to see me. As soon as possible.”
“At”—I glanced at the clock again—”this hour?” It was barely six.
He nodded. “I don’t suppose I can convince you to drive me, can I? I don’t have a license in this country anymore.”
A moment ago, I’d have ribbed him about suddenly doing an about-face from his “driving is a luxury” stance, but there was no room for humor just then. “Yeah. Sure. Let me get dressed.”
