Graham, baby?” I reached over, my eyes still closed. Too sleepy to open them.

My hand went out, and I felt the pillow. Where was he?

It was cold, and I couldn’t feel a dent in it, or the residual warmth that would be there had he just gotten up.

I ran my hand down his side of the bed. It was cold, too, and the bedclothes still neat. I remembered the last forty-eight hours.

He was gone.

The hot tears fell down my cheek and wet the pillow. I didn’t open my eyes. If I did, I would see the empty space, and that would make it real.

* * *

I woke before my alarm went off. Was last night real? Had I really seen Dhameer, or was he merely a hallucination?

I knew that Graham was gone. My eyes had the gritty feel that comes from tears, and now, in the dawning light, I could see the neat side of the bed.

He was still gone.

The bed nearly undid me with each glance. So I got up and headed for a hot shower. I thought better in the shower, anyway.

There was no time to waste. I needed to fix the things that weren’t right, and then he and I would be together again. This would be a shitty chapter in our history.

However, that didn’t stop a few more tears in the shower. Along with the voice that sounded a lot like my dad’s, telling me that men didn’t cry.

I really wanted to tell him he was wrong.

Damn it.

* * *

When I got to work, Tibby was already there. I stuck my head in her office.

“Hey, you make coffee?”

Because dear lord did, I need it today.

“Yeah, and I even brought in the creamer you like. I figured you’d need plenty of coffee after the family celebrations last night—holy shit, Bry, what is going on?”

Tibby looked up at me.

I opened my mouth, but I didn’t know what to say. How to make this not a big deal?

She was up and to me before I could figure out what I wanted to share. “What did they do now?”

She knew my family well. She also knew I’d been dreading dinner with them.

“It wasn’t them,” I said quietly.

“What, then?” Her tone sounded fierce.

Tibby always told me that I’d rescued her from a world of shit—now that I knew about her wishes, I understood, sort of, what she meant. It was hard to follow all that had happened. I couldn’t keep track of where she’d been, or how she’d lived multiple lives. She said she did, and I left it at that. The truth was, while I’d rescued her from Gerry the jerk, she’d rescued me as well. Other than Graham, there was no one who loved me like Tibby. Unapologetically, completely, and fiercely.

Well, now there was only Tibby.

“Graham left,” I began.

“Why now?”

Her question startled me. “What do you mean?”

Tibby pursed her lips. “He’s been unhappy for a while, but he loves you, so…” she held up her hands helplessly. “He wanted you to work things out for the two of you without nagging.”

“He talked to you about this?”

Tibby frowned. “Well, yeah. We’re friends, Bry. I mean, I’m not as close to him as I am to you—that would never happen. But he and I were friends. You guys have been together for a long time.”

“Not anymore, I think,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because he wanted to come with me last night.”

“Oh.” Her tone said it all.

Tibby, like Graham, felt I should be honest with my family. However, Tibby also understood why I wasn’t. She had her own crappy family, and I think she won in the crappy family department between the two of us.

The difference was, she was honest with her family. Her parents’ drinking had quietly but definitively torn her family apart. Because of that, she kept her distance, and she wasn’t shy about telling them so. They didn’t care for it at all.

“Because it will force them to look at their own shit,” Tibby always said.

Her sigh brought me back to the here and now.

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him no, of course,” I said. I held up a hand to stop the lecture. “I know, I know! I was an ass, and I need to fix it.”

“Fix what? Which part? How?”

“Enough with the questions, woman! Have you no decency? It’s not even 8:30 in the morning, and I am as yet un-coffeed.”

“Fine, you big chicken. Go get your coffee and hide out until I’m taking a break and come looking for you.”

As with Dhameer last night, I knew when to not look a gift horse in the mouth. I smiled and practically ran from the room.

Once I collected the much-discussed coffee with my favorite creamer, I hid in my office.

With the door closed.

* * *

Thankfully, Tibby didn’t come and find me until nearly the end of the day. We both had a lot of work. Seth’s grandfather was getting ready to retire, and he was transferring the entire business to Seth. He was an only child, so there was no one who could protest. I think there were some cousins, but none of them were interested in the old man’s business except Seth.

So while there were no personal complications—I envied him with the burning of a thousand suns on that aspect—there was a ton of work to do. Seth’s grandfather had been around for years. His business was complex and tangled.

There was also the complication that he had his own attorney, an old boyfriend of Tibby’s. Which meant that Seth was in our office more than we were used to seeing him, even given that he and Tib were married.

“He was my first love,” Tibby said after the first time Seth had shown up. “Rick, I mean. Not Seth. Seth knows that. He also knows that Rick is happily married and has no interest in me other than an old friend. But that doesn’t stop Seth from being all caveman-like,” she rolled her eyes, although I could tell that it really didn’t bother her one bit.

“You avoided me at lunch, so let’s finish this up, and get out of here early so we can go and talk,” Tibby stood in front of me with hands on hips.

Shit. “You’re not going to take no for an answer, are you?” I asked.

“Nope. It’s for your own good,” she mimicked my tone of voice. “Remember when you laughed at me for hiding out after we met Seth and Rick? Yeah, well, payback’s a bitch, my friend,” she grinned.

“You have no pity in you at all, evil woman.”

“Not a drop. Finish up. I’m going to save you from yourself.”

“What, you’re done?” I ignored her saving you comment.

“Totally,” Tibby was smug. “I’m always done before you.”

I balled up a piece of paper and threw it at her. “Get out of here. I’ll come over in a bit. I’m almost done, Miss Smarty Pants.”

“Don’t sit in here trying to avoid me, either,” she said as she left.

I grinned. She had definitely rescued me. It would be for my own good to hang out with her. Not that I’d tell her that today.

Tomorrow, maybe.

* * *

We ended up going to a bar around the corner from our office. Tibby thankfully waited until we’d sat down and gotten a drink before going into information gathering mode.

“Okay, spill. And don’t leave shit out because you know I’ll know.”

In all honesty, I didn’t know where to start. Strangely, I didn’t want to tell her about Dhameer. The tasks that he’d given me were lacking in any sort of organization, and they certainly weren’t straightforward. From what Tibby had told me, she’d had a pretty clear task. So had Xavier even though he hadn’t remembered it. He had to get out of his own way.

Although given who Xavier was that only sounded easy. I’d argued with him a few times. ‘Stubborn’ didn’t even begin to cover it. So getting out of his own was a mammoth task. Like me, there were no direct paths, or plans. You had to figure out when you were in your own way.

Maybe each of us had an equally hard task. In my sulking, I didn’t want to consider that, but the lawyer in me insisted.

“Well?” Tibby asked with some impatience.

“I’m thinking. There’s a lot to unpack,” I said, trying to find the right way to tell the story. Without mentioning Dhameer. “So I told Graham the family dinner was last night a couple of weeks ago. He gave me a funny look but didn’t say anything. I said something that was probably inane and meaningless, and I forgot about it until earlier this week.” I hadn’t forgotten, but I’d hoped he had.

And that he would be distracted once I’d proposed.

“What happened?”

“We were talking, and he said he wanted to spend my birthday with me.” Everyone who knew me knew that my mom had a rule we spent birthdays together. Tibby had come for a number of years, but she hadn’t been around last night.

“I said that I wanted to spend all my birthdays with him, and…” I took a deep breath. “I asked him to marry me.”

“What? Wait, stop right there! You proposed to him? And you didn’t tell me? What kind of best friend are you? You didn’t even tell me you were thinking about it!” Tibby glared.

“I had been thinking about it, but I was nervous and until that day, I hadn’t decided whether I would do it.” I sighed. “It was all good, at first. He looked at me and he didn’t say anything, then he shouted yes and threw his arms around me. So we were laughing and hugging and kissing, and then he asked me about dinner.” I sighed. “I told him that I’d see him when I got home. He glared at me, and said he wanted to spend the entire evening with me, not the leftovers.”

“Ooh,” Tibby said. “That was direct. And harsh.”

“Yeah, so I said, well, no, I can’t, or something like that, and then he went off.”

“What did he say?”

I thought about it. I’d been shocked. Graham was normally so calm about dealing with emotions. But he’d yelled. One of the things he’d said rang with clarity in my head.

“Don’t you try to placate me! You’re never going to tell your family about me, about us! Do they even know, for real, like, without a doubt, because they’ve heard it from you, that you’re gay? That I am a lot more than your roommate? The last time your dad came here, he treated me like someone who was lucky that you were letting me live here! Like I was a charity case!”

My dad had been kind of a jerk. Well, a big jerk. I winced. There was no way I’d ever stop feeling bad about that.

“I’m just not—”

“Whatever, Bryant. You’re never ready, even though it hurts me, hurts us, and it hurts you. I’ve been waiting and hoping that you’d finally demand the decency your family should give you. That you’d finally decide it was okay to be honest with yourself about who you are.”

I cut him off. “What the hell does that mean? I know who I am! I’ve always been honest about it! I never lied to you!”

“Yeah, but does your family know?” He grinned at me, and I could see we’d moved way past a normal argument between couples. This was the grin of someone who wanted to draw blood, wanted to win. Who didn’t care how much blood was left on the floor.

“That’s what I thought. You deliberately keep them in the dark, because it would disrupt your life, this cozy, perfect, well-ordered life of yours. Can’t upset the Higgs, can we? Oh no, not that! Well, I’m done with this shit.” He took a breath, looking out the window.

“Either you take me with you tonight, and you tell them the truth, or we are done.”

“What?” I said. I couldn’t believe he’d just laid down an ultimatum.

“You heard me. You’ve had four years to find some courage. So it’s now or never, Bry.”

In my nickname, I heard all the love we’d shared, and our history, and the life we’d built. He didn’t want this, no more than I did.

“I just need some time, Graham. I’m ready, I think.”

His lips tightened, and it was like a wall went up between us. He stared at me for a moment—an eternity—and then said, “Goodbye, Bryant.”

“So that was it,” I finished, looking at Tibby. “He left. He was ready. He had suitcases packed, and he went down the stairs and there was someone waiting for him. I asked him to marry me, and after he said yes, he said no and left.”

“He called a cab? When?”

I shook my head. “No, it was a friend, or something. I didn’t recognize the car.”

There it was. The shiver of fear I’d been avoiding since I saw the car that night. That not only had Graham dumped me, but he’d also set things up so he could leave with a clear conscience, and that worse, there was someone else.

That was the real reason I hadn’t let Dhameer float out of my living room last night. Because if I could get what I wanted, what I feared couldn’t be true.

There couldn’t be anyone else if we were meant to be together. Otherwise, what good would it be to promise me that I’d get my wish?

“Wow,” Tibby said. “Well, I guess he knew what you’d say, didn’t he?”

“You don’t just spring that one someone,” I objected. “But I can understand why he did it. He was frustrated.” Now I was defending Graham?

I didn’t want things to work out with us and then there be weirdness between him and my friends. Because my friends were my family.

“Although I don’t know why he worries about them so much. You guys are the family I really care about.”

“No,” Tibby shook her head. “No, we’re the family that knows you and loves you, and accepts all the things that make you, you. Your blood family doesn’t do any of that, and in spite of you choosing your friends as a family, you still spend a lot of time with your actual family.”

“I do not,” I said, almost automatically.

“Yes, indeed you do. They are more important than you give them credit for. You have dinner at least once a month, and there are a million birthdays that you go to. I don’t know how that’s possible, since there are not a million of you, but it is. You’re with them a couple of times a month, and you go out with Granddad more than that.”

“Do I really see them that much?”

She nodded. “So that’s at least two, if not more, things that Graham doesn’t get to go to. Let me guess,” she rolled her eyes. “He’s just the roomie?”

“Yeah,” I sighed, feeling deflated. “The last time he was over, my dad was pretty shitty to him.”

“I hate to say this, because you know I love you, but I kind of understand why Graham said and did the things he did. Not the whole proposal thing!” She added. “That was shitty. But he mentioned his frustration to me. Not a lot!” She took my hand across the table. “But he was honest enough that I knew what he meant.” She let go of me and took a sip of her drink. “Why don’t you just tell them?”

“No one gets this! You know them, Tib!”

“I know. They wouldn’t kick you out, and if they did, who cares?”

“Because they’re my family!”

“I thought your friends were your family that mattered,” Tibby said slyly.

“Damn it,” I muttered. She’d caught me in my own web.

As annoying as it was, my family was important. And Graham had seen that. I looked up at her, feeling extremely sorry for myself. “He was right to push me, wasn’t he?”

She nodded.

“Damn it,” I said again.

Well, at least now I had a better idea of what I needed to do. Well, I’d kind of known, but this solidified it.

“I guess I need to see who’s up for dinner next weekend,” I sighed.

“It’ll be better to get it out in the open, once and for all. Who wants to spend their life hiding?” Tibby asked.

Who, indeed?