NINETEEN

 

Early in the morning, Aaron snuck away, feeling like a thief as he did. Brad was still asleep, lying on his back, his heavy breathing just short of soft snores, and if Aaron let himself, he could feel far too much as he looked at him.

So he made himself leave. It was the right thing to do, and not only because he had scheduled a Skype session with Leah. Though it was a good reminder to him why he was doing this, why he was deliberately pushing Brad, and everyone else, away, when he saw her face.

She looked good. Almost happy, and like she’d been eating regularly and getting enough sleep. Maybe even going to school. Certainly, she seemed to have a better grasp on her schoolwork, since one of the things that they nearly always did when they spoke was to help her through her homework.

Somehow, Aaron had been given a second chance. He had messed up all of those years ago when he had picked the career that he had. He had assumed that it would give him the money that he needed to support her, but he’d learned the truth soon enough. The money, yes, it gave, but it was the time which was the real issue, and time was in short supply right now.

“When are you coming home?”

The question touched Aaron, way down deep in the very core of his heart, where he let very few people. After having failed her so much, she still wanted him around, and that meant a lot to him.

“I’ll be back in Los Angeles in two months,” he told her gently. “But I’m coming back to the United States in a couple of weeks.”

“Well, at least we’ll be closer to the same time zone,” Leah said, her tone of voice a bit wry, and Aaron laughed a little bit. It had definitely been a struggle to find a time when they could both meet.

“It’ll be over before you know it,” he promised her before they signed off, and Aaron flopped back against the couch where he’d been perched for this meeting. It would be over before he knew it, too. This time, these stolen moments with Brad, as well as his friendship with the rest of the band, it was all coming to an end.

It was time to get this over with, but when Aaron finally pulled himself together, when he got all of his courage together and went into Brad’s room, using the key that the other man had given him to get in. He found that all of the nerves that he’d pulled together made exactly zero difference when he saw that Brad was still asleep on the bed.

Whenever Brad was awake, there was this smirk on his face, a barrier behind his eyes. Sometimes the barrier was a stone wall, high and thick as a fortress, and sometimes it was made of wet tissue or even plastic so that Aaron felt like he could at least see some of what was going on behind them.

But it was always there. Brad was always protecting himself, and from the little that Brad had told him, Aaron thought he could understand why. Brad had pulled himself up in the world when most people would have assumed that he couldn’t. Most people except for Julie.

It had made Brad reluctant to trust. More likely to smirk than to smile. In some ways, he was just as remote as Aaron was, even if it manifested differently. But Aaron felt like he understood, at least a little bit.

As he looked down at Brad, he saw a man. A handsome man, but a man without all of the defenses that he usually kept up. Brad stirred in his sleep, and Aaron felt his heart clench when he saw Brad’s lips part in a soft sigh. When the dark, almost black, eyelashes spread out over his cheeks fluttered a little, Aaron realized that Brad was dreaming.

He couldn’t wake him up. He just couldn’t do it. Maybe it was that Brad looked so peaceful, and Aaron couldn’t stand to take that away from him. Or perhaps it was just that Aaron was too much of a coward to face Brad and tell him of his decision. Honestly, it was probably a little bit of both.

In the end, Aaron did something that he wasn’t proud of. When he went to put Brad’s key card back on the table, having already decided that he would tell Brad later when he was awake, that was when he saw Brad’s briefcase. The night before, Aaron had grabbed it from the older man and shoved it aside, and that was where it had ended up.

Before he gave himself time to really think about it, he was moving. He watched, almost not aware of what he was going to do before he was doing it, as his fingers closed on the gleaming metal latches that held the briefcase closed. He watched as he opened it, an incredible invasion of privacy that no one had to tell him was wrong.

Inside, there were two contracts, as he had known there would be. Aaron took them both in his hands, gazing from one to the other. The six-month one was almost ludicrous now since the ending date was only two months away, but it was the ending date that was important, he supposed.

Then he looked at the other one, and for just a moment, he considered what it would mean for him to sign that one instead. For him to put his faith in Brad. But when he remembered how it had felt to hear Julie say that Leah had gone missing and that she needed him, he realized that he didn’t have a choice. He had never had a choice.

There was a pen in the case, too, and Aaron took it into trembling fingers. For a moment, the simple pen looked like a snake that was rearing up to bite him. No matter what he picked, it seemed to him that the outcome wasn’t going to be good. Closing his eyes, he breathed deeply, and when he opened them again, the pen was once more just a pen.

Without thinking about it anymore, Aaron scrawled his name on the bottom of the contract. The short contract, just as he should have done four months ago. That contract went neatly back into the briefcase, along with Brad’s pen, which left Aaron with just the long contract.

For a moment, he almost put it back into the case along with the other one for Brad to find later. But in the end, he couldn’t quite do it. Maybe it was just that he wanted something of a keepsake, a memory of this later—when a tall, dark, gorgeous businessman had wanted him, and he’d been on the brink of having the whole world in the palm of his hand.

It might comfort him a little bit when he thought back on this time. After all, whatever he was going to find to do for work, he knew that he wouldn’t love it, it wouldn’t fit him, even half as much as this did.

That was why he folded the contract and slipped it into his back pocket as he left the room, taking just one more lingering look back at the man that he knew very well that he was betraying. He was taking the coward’s way out, and Brad was probably not going to want to speak to him again.

And that was fine. It had to end sometime, right? Might as well be on Aaron’s terms.

The contract went safely into a zippered pocket of his luggage, though. Not because it would ever be signed, because that ship had sailed, but just so that he could remember.

It wasn’t much, but it was all that he had. Or all that he would have very soon.