Chapter Two
I opened my eyes and shot up from the sofa, alertly surveilling my hotel suite, a habit I hadn’t been able to kick since my first deployment even after seven years being a civilian.
The room was pitch black and I was alone and I wasn’t sure what had startled me. Something sure as hell did and dragged me out of a fucking great dream that I hadn’t wanted to leave yet.
“Fuck,” I growled, grabbing my cell phone, certain it was the culprit for disturbing my much needed beauty rest.
I swiped it on, noting I’d slept eight hours instead of the four intended, and then proceeded to thumb through the long stream of notifications.
Mixed in the endless line of texts from Alan’s kids wondering why I hadn’t shown up yet at the rooftop wrap party—oh, and one interesting text from Skyler. Game on—there were half a dozen missed calls from Zac.
It was unlike my lover to robo call me while I was on the road and it was even less like Zac not to leave a message. My thumb was poised at the spot on the screen to return his call when I heard that sound again—scratching against wood with a tap, tap, tap. I swiveled toward the door and locked on the source.
Oh fuck. The tip of an object poking under my door was fluttering every so often to make that fucking tap, tap, tapping. I tried my best to ignore it so I could continue on with my call and found that I couldn’t.
After tossing down my phone, I headed for the door. I snatched the envelope from the ground then gasped when I saw what it was.
Please call tonight.
What the fuck was this about?
In five years together, Zac had never left me a message through the front desk before, and I didn’t want to contemplate any of the implications of what this might mean.
Emergency or coded criticism? The knot in my stomach warned criticism, another remote Zac gripe session about us.
Shit, I wasn’t in the mood for a long conversation starting with I didn’t want to interrupt anything in case you were busy so I left the message with the desk clerk. That would be a direct hit scored by my lover from three thousand miles away using only a piece of paper. And fuck, this time my not calling home for too long didn’t require him to give me space or a bitch slap from a distance.
I crumpled the note in my hand—fuck. I hadn’t called him in over a week, but the schedule had been nonstop. At the end of every shift, I’d gone back to my room and immediately passed out, only to be awoken too early by my alarm to hurry to start my next shift.
Traveling from tour date to tour date surrounded by kids was at times like that movie Groundhog Day. I felt like Bill fucking Murray. Same exhausting grind over and over again, only at the end of the day I didn’t die, I went to bed—alone!
And now Zac had his briefs in a bunch because I hadn’t called him for a few days. Fuck, tomorrow I’d be in California. Why the drama my last day on the road? Then I rapidly banked my annoyance.
Zac’s occasional flashes of jealousy and his subtly creative mental punches were small things to tolerate given everything else between us. Not the least of which, he was faithful and I wasn’t. Which probably wasn’t fair to him, but it was how it was. And for the most part we got on pretty well together. That was what was important, though I would be a liar if I said Zac didn’t resent my extracurricular activities on the road. He wanted exclusivity, and while I might have been able to give it to him—eventually—I didn’t have a profession that would make that option anything but excruciatingly, unrealistically impractical.
Zac wanted more—marriage, kids, the whole ball of wax—and he probably deserved it, but the problem was there was nothing I could do about it. We were committed—sort of…in a fashion…hell, as much as I could commit—but, Christ, I had to make a living and we were two virile men who spent sixty percent of every year apart from each other.
Emotional exclusivity was the limit of what our lifestyle allowed. Physical exclusivity—not happening. Marriage and kids—off the table, permanently. I didn’t want that and never would. It was universally understood and accepted. Or so I had thought in the beginning. But, oh, clearly I was soon to be in store for another dose of Graham, this isn’t working for me.
I stared at the phone. Call or video chat? How big a crisis was this? I could feel it in my body that it was just going to be drama and nothing more. But I had a party to go to, an after-party to look forward to, for a change, and since these infrequent emotional hiccups of Zac’s never amounted to anything, I didn’t want him ruining my last night on the road.
I tossed down my phone and headed for the shower. Video chat. Zac never fought well with me face-to-face, and seeing me looking sharp and ready to go out for the night, well, that might make him rethink a few things and contain the issue before it spiraled into a Zac all-nighter.
He liked to push my limits at times—I knew it was part of him needing to test my dedication to him—but he never pushed things too far, and Zac seeing me looking good would get me out of here sooner.
Or so I thought before I sank down in the stuffed chair—dressed casually sexy and unshaved because a little hint of stubble only helped things with him—and clicked on the flat screen to connect via video chat.
Posh hotels were a fucking great thing because they included enormous flat screens in the rooms fully equipped with twenty-first century technology. Zac had that expertly cultivated inscrutable face of a psychiatrist. I needed all the help I could get at times to read it so I could defuse what was coming my way before it escalated and I hated staring down at a six-inch phone screen or the small square on my laptop.
“What’s going on?” I asked quickly without preamble when Zac’s face appeared on the screen. Shit, I hadn’t meant to sound impatient but I could tell how Zac stared back at me that I had been.
Good fucking move.
I tried my best to settle back into my chair more relaxed.
“I wasn’t expecting you to call tonight,” he said calmly and, out of the corner of my eye, I glanced at the clock. Eleven thirty. I wasn’t expecting to be alone in my room at this hour either.
I went through the motions of fixing myself a drink to give me something to focus on other than Zac. Seeing him kicked up quite a few things in me, but I could tell by the sharpness of his eyes and the stiff line of his jaw that it wasn’t going to amount to anything good—well, not this call.
Still, he was an extremely handsome man, rugged and robust even though twenty-five years older than me, sort of a hyper-sexy blend of Sean Connery and Hugh Grant. An all-out silver fox. Fuck, don’t judge me. A gorgeous man, calm, sophisticated, educated, with lightning intelligence and an air of old money chic that could get me hard every time.
Yep, sexy and smart was my type, you know the kind of guy who looked like they should be smoking a pipe in a faculty lounge while wearing a sweater, and Zac was the motherlode of my ideal, which made it all the more perplexing that I could never quite give him everything he needed.
“So what’s going on?” I repeated, grabbing a smoke from the table and lighting it.
“We haven’t talked for two weeks and I thought it best we talked before you got back to California.”
My brow hitched up since it didn’t go unnoticed that he hadn’t said home but instead California. It was as I suspected. This was going to be a long call.
I took a long drag of my cigarette and exhaled slowly. “So talk.”
“Listen, Graham—”
That shot tension through my body with the power of an EpiPen, from irritated and preoccupied to overly alert in a millisecond. There had never been a time in the history of lovers that a sentence starting with “listen” ever ended in anything good.
“—I’ve been seeing someone.”
That news flash was unanticipated but not a relationship deal breaker, so I couldn’t figure out why Zac was staring at me the way he was. Was he expecting more of a reaction out of me? A hint of possessiveness? A touch of temper? That wasn’t me and it never had been.
“You don’t look surprised,” Zac muttered.
“Well, I’m not.” And I wasn’t. A man had needs, and a man should definitely understand that one.
Zac lifted his chin, just a tad, in his half challenge, half superior way. “It shocked me. I never thought I was built that way, you know? Not once in five years have I stepped outside of us.”
My jaw tightened as I nodded. “I know. I wish I could say the same to you, but that I can’t doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. It will be all right. I’ll be home soon.”
“I think we’re beyond that. Fixing us that way.”
There was a tiredness in his voice I’d never heard before. An air of defeatism. Oh Christ, was I about to get dumped remotely via video call?
I stomped out my cigarette in the ashtray. “I never expected you not to see other people while I worked,” I said in what I hoped were steady, measured tones. “I don’t know why you are upset, why this is a major crisis for you. I don’t necessarily see it as an issue between us.”
Something flashed in his eyes, disappearing too quickly before I could read it. “Maybe that’s the issue, Graham. That it isn’t an issue.”
“I know you—”
“Please don’t,” he interrupted quickly.
“Don’t what?” I countered, frowning.
“Promise we’ll sit down and work on it when you get home. It’s not going to help this time.”
Oh fuck. Submarined before I could even table the suggestion. Not a good sign. The corners of my lips softened. “You know me well.”
Zac gave me a slight laugh for that.
We stared at each other a handful of minutes saying nothing and I noted how incongruous it was how I felt and the substance of the call. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t jealous. I wasn’t panicking. I just sort of was, resigned out of nowhere to where he was taking us, if that made any sense.
Maybe that was why Zac was being silent when he was a proponent of talking things out: so I could feel the inescapable, unspoken finality to this. It was a powerful sensation.
“What is it you want, babe?” I began slowly. “Or maybe I should say what is it you want to tell me?”
Zac’s eyes brightened appreciatively. “You know me well.”
And the strange part was I did and we did—know each other well—which made it all the more unbelievable that what was happening was happening so effortlessly.
“When you land in LA, Graham, don’t hop a plane for Sacramento,” he said quietly, and that gently he ended us. “I’ll pack up your things and ship them to Southern Cal.”
I nodded. “Are you sure that’s how you want to handle this?”
“There isn’t any reason to make this harder for either of us.”
I smiled, a touch amused. “You know the irony of your timing is brilliant. You were finally going to have things your way, Zac, since I am going to be home for an extended period. Alan is cutting all us guys loose tomorrow and Jared hasn’t found me a new client. It could be months. Even a year.”
Zac made a sweet half smile. “You’re good at coming home. But you’re not good at being home. Things were never going to be my way.”
That struck a nerve because it was the truth. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You are a wonderful friend. You were a fabulous lover. You just weren’t good at being home and we want different things. I want more. A husband. A family. A normal life. I want it all.”
I leaned forward in my chair, raking my hair, since his assessment was spot on and I hated that word all. Why couldn’t people just be content with what they had? There was no such thing as having it all, not for anyone, no matter how many Madison Avenue advertisers tried to sell you on the notion. It just wasn’t possible. It wasn’t real. It was a fantasy that kept people from being happy together.
“Maybe I’m just not built that way,” I murmured. “Wanting it all. Needing total commitment and have it in return from someone.”
Zac shook his head. “No. I don’t believe that. I prefer to think you just haven’t met anyone who makes you want the entire package.”
His generosity was leveling given how little I’d invested in us, how much I could see that this parting hurt him, and how much he’d always unconditionally given to me.
I was starting to feel keyed up, since this conversation naturally stirred things I didn’t like thinking about, and since the call had gone well—when it shouldn’t have, given the substance—I decided it was better to cut it short and leave matters where they were.
“Talk to you soon?” I asked.
Zac smiled sadly. “Talk to you soon.”
I don’t know how long I sat in the chair staring at the black flat screen. It was quite a while. I wanted to feel more lousy than I did because I thought I owed Zac that, but I just didn’t feel as badly as I thought I should and no amount of time sitting in my silent hotel room freshly single was going to change that.
Another notification from my cell phone dinged. There were people at the party trying to hunt me down and I wondered if there was something wrong with me that I wanted and fully intended to still go to the rooftop. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, my long-term lover just ended it with me and all I wanted to do was have a few laughs and a few drinks and perhaps have something with Skyler Mathews as well.
As I left my hotel room it occurred to me that for the first time in a very long time I was one hundred percent unattached.
No one to go home to.
No one to leave.
How I preferred my life.
How I’d lived before Zac.
I didn’t feel sad; I felt okay.
No wonder he’d just dumped me.