TWENTY

 

Not like this.

Maybe Judah was right, and this had been inevitable from the beginning. Will had certainly had his own thoughts about that, because what life did he have to offer, what could he give a man who was already really more or less married to his job?

But it shouldn’t be now. Will wasn’t done, and lately, he had even been having some hopes about it being more than just a temporary thing. Sure, maybe it couldn’t last, but there was no reason that it couldn’t last a few more months. Or years. Or decades.

Or the rest of their lives.

Even if it couldn’t, this wasn’t how Will would have ended anything. He would have gone to Judah, broken it off with him in person. It wouldn’t have been some misunderstanding, a situation of wrong place, wrong time.

It wouldn’t be because Judah had seen what he had thought to be Will kissing someone else.

The whole thing had happened so fast. Will had opened the door, and Jack had been there, and Will couldn’t even figure out how that had happened. He had most deliberately protected both himself and his son by not telling Jack anything about where he lived. But be that as it may, there he stood, and before Will even had the door fully opened Jack was speaking.

“I love you,” he’d said, the very first words out of his mouth. It seemed to be a shock tactic, and it had worked. For a moment, Will hadn’t been able to make himself speak, and Jack had taken the chance to go on.

It could work, Jack had told him. They could be together, a real family again. Jack hadn’t been ready before, but he was now, he had sworn to it over and over again. Even when Will found his voice, even when he started to break it to him that that was just never going to happen, Jack had just continued right on speaking.

Somehow, he had known, he had to get Jack away. So he had tried to reason with the man, but reason had never much worked on Jack. Very aware not only of Stephen innocently lost in dreamland but also of Judah waiting for him upstairs, Will had tried to keep it quiet, while still making it very clear that there was just no way in hell. Never. Not again.

But talking had not worked. So many times, Will had spoken, and Jack had just flat out ignored him. Had pretended, maybe, to see things his way, but it had always been just that, pretense.

It had always been hopeless, he and Jack, even before Jack had walked out on him. At the time, Will had been in denial, but he couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t talk to him.

Then, of course, the kiss had happened, and Will probably shouldn’t have been surprised by that, but he had been counting on one simple thing. Jack had never been willing to kiss him before out in the open, where someone could see. Even in the middle of the night, Jack would pull him somewhere private before he would do anything intimate, even as much as holding Will’s hand. People had thought that they were more best friends than lovers, and Jack had always liked it that way.

It seemed that, in this way, at least, people could change.

The kiss lasted only a split second. By the time Will became aware of Judah’s presence, he was already knotting his hands in the front of Jack’s shirt and pushing him away. His lips burned from the kiss, and he wanted to scrub them clean. That kiss had felt more like an attack than like any expression of intimacy.

It had been too late, though. Judah wouldn’t even look back at him, and Will wanted to go to him, to run after him and tell him that he hadn’t wanted that kiss, that he hadn’t initiated it and that he had pulled away as soon as he could. But when he moved, Jack put his hands on Will’s shoulders and held him in place.

“Let him go, baby,” Jack said, his voice just a little bit above a murmur, loud enough for Will to hear and maybe Judah, too. “It’s better this way.”

Shit.

Jack was right. It wasn’t how Will would have chosen to end it, but ending it was still the right thing to do. It was better this way, cleanly, all at once, because Will knew that he would never have been able to end it. Judah would have had to do it, and it seemed that Judah was no better at this than Will was.

Better this way, for a thousand reasons, but that didn’t mean that Will was at all happy with how this had happened. With his face feeling like it had been carved from ice and his heart a hard, tight little knot in his chest, Will pulled the door closed, grabbed one of Jack’s wrist, and brought him out into the front yard.

He would be damned if he would wake Stephen up with this conversation. He’d had quite enough of this for the night, and he went closer to the street, which was dead and quiet at this time of night. Not that it was ever exactly a bustling hive of activity.

“No.” Will knew that there was only one way to go, and that was bluntness. In his anger, he was no longer even all that worried about whether he hurt Jack’s feelings. Jack had, after all, made Will lose a hell of a lot more than Will would have wished. “No, Jack. Don’t you ever try to kiss me again. It’s over. Do you understand? You and I, we never should have happened.”

“Oh, come on, Will. You know that you still love me.”

Jack sounded so sure of himself, but Will shook his head. Once, he might have even been curious about that statement. He would have had to try it on, try to mentally poke holes in it before he was willing to say that it wasn’t true. But not this. He knew his own feelings, and there was nothing that Jack could say to change that.

“I don’t still love you. I haven’t loved you for years.”

The words were cruel, and he knew it. He saw the way Jack recoiled back away from him, but maybe Will had been too worried about being kind to Jack. He had wanted to encourage him, in some way, from the moment that he’d heard that Jack had gone to rehab, but maybe that had been a mistake.

Even though Will had never wanted to get back together with Jack, and even though he had tried to make that clear to him, it clearly, demonstrably, hadn’t worked. Jack still had some delusions, obviously, so bluntness, to the point of rudeness, was the only way to go.

It was his fault, at least in part, for thinking that logic, that reason, would work on Jack. But then, Will had always had some bad habits when it came to assumptions like that.

“You don’t mean that, baby. I know I was a dick, but I’ve changed. I went to rehab …”

Will shook his head and took a step away from Jack, who had raised his hand like he might touch Will’s face. At this point, if Jack did touch him, Will sort of thought he might actually vomit. Any allure that Jack had had for Will once had worn off a long time ago.

“I don’t give a flying fuck,” Will told him bluntly, and it even sort of grimly amused him when he saw how Jack recoiled, obviously shocked by the expression. Will was usually far too logical to say something like that. “I’m glad if you’ve gone to rehab. I’m glad that you’ve gotten better. But if you ever touch me again, if you ever come near me or my son, you will regret it.”

“Will …” Jack’s voice was wheedling, in a way that Will once would have found charming. He had often found himself doing things that he didn’t want to do because Jack asked him in that tone of voice. But in using it, Jack made a fatal mistake, and not the first one that he had made that night.

He reminded Will so much in that moment of the many times that he had acted against his own self-interest. Of all of the times that Jack had made him feel unreasonable, no fun, a stick in the mud, because Will didn’t want to party with Jack and his friends. Party, of course, having always meant drink until the world turned blurry and nothing made any sense.

Will hadn’t let himself think about it all that much, but the truth of the matter was, seeing Jack had been good for Will. Had put a lot of things, things that he hadn’t even known bugged him anymore, into perspective. Made a lot of what had been bugging him about his relationship with Jack make a lot more sense.

“No, Jack. Leave.” Will took a step away from him, back toward the house. It was taking a risk. Jack could still cause a scene, and there wasn’t much that Will could do to stop him. He would just have to take that risk. “I mean it. It’s over. Accept it and move on. You will never be a part of this family.”

Once, it was all that Will had wanted, for Jack to want to be involved. That ship had sailed, and when Jack looked into his eyes, he seemed to realize, at last, that there was no point in trying anymore.

“Call me. Just … if you change your mind,” Jack said, and there was something almost defeated in the way that his shoulders slumped. At the same time, though, as he turned away, Will saw a gleam in his eyes that was almost certainly a trick of the moonlight, or the stars, as they glistened off the lenses of his eyes.

In any case, Jack was soon gone. That was good, and Will even had some hope that it might just be forever this time. He had done the hard thing, he had outright ripped the band-aid from his skin, without mercy or compassion he had ended things with Jack. If he ever felt bad about that, he knew he could always call to mind how Jack had simply left, how he hadn’t even done him the courtesy of actually ending things.

So yes, that part was good, but the rest of it was a mess. Judah was gone, and Will had seen the finality of the parting in his eyes. In one night, Will had lost both men that he had loved, only in Judah’s case, he couldn’t even fool himself that it had been in the past.

He still loved Judah, and somehow, he was going to have to try to deal with that.

There was only one small mercy about this whole experience, and that was that Stephen hadn’t been involved. It had been the right decision not to tell him, because it was very clear to Will that nothing ever could have happened there. Jack was or had been, too desperate to make things work between himself and Will once more.

So Stephen was safe, and Will, well, he would just have to mourn alone. Wasn’t that what he was good at? What he had done for far too many years to count? He had done it before, and he would do it again.

Somehow, he would get over Judah. He had to because he knew that everything was far, far too messed up ever to work. Somehow, though, he already knew that it was going to be the hardest thing that he had ever done.