To Live Again (22 page)

But maybe Rhett was right. Maybe I still had more to do before I could leave the past behind and move on in peace.

So I finally texted my ex-wife:

Can we meet for coffee? I’d like to talk about a few things.

* * * * *

Becky didn’t respond to my texts until later that evening, but when she finally did, she suggested meeting at the house instead of a coffee shop. Admittedly, I was grateful we weren’t going to do this in public. It just seemed like something better handled in private.

It seemed like a good idea until I was walking up the familiar porch steps the next morning.

I paused with one foot on the bottom step and gazed up at the house.

We needed to do this. I needed to do this. Didn’t mean it was going to be fun or easy, but what
had
been recently?

Besides being with—

Yes. Besides that.

I took a deep breath and continued up the steps. Becky let me in, and in silence, led me through the living room. The house seemed bare, semi-skeletal, without the furniture I’d removed. There were some new pieces now—a new sofa and coffee table, a different TV stand, even though I hadn’t taken the original. Had she gone shopping? Or was someone else moving in?

I didn’t let that thought stick and continued into the dining room with her. At the familiar table, where there were still two placemats set at the adjacent chairs at one end, we sat down. She brought us coffee, and we sipped it in silence for a couple of uncomfortable minutes.

Her brow pinched as she watched me over the top of her coffee cup. “How are you doing?”

“Better. I think.” Sighing, I shook my head. “I don’t know. I was seeing someone, but we…”

She stiffened slightly. “Oh. It didn’t work out?”

“No. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. This soon after the divorce, I mean.” I hesitated, wondering how far to tip my hand. Finally, I decided that as long as we were going to be honest with each other… “He didn’t want to be someone’s rebound.”

Becky’s eyebrows flicked up. “He?”

Swallowing hard, I nodded. “Yeah.”

She lowered her coffee cup and clutched it in both hands. “When did
that
happen?”

“I’ve known for a while. A few years.” I sat back and folded my hands beneath the table. “I guess after we split, it seemed like as good a time as any to figure out if I was just curious, or if I’m really into men.”

“I see. And…are you?”

I absently stroked my jaw with the backs of my fingers. “Yeah. I am.”

“So you’re gay.”

Part of me wanted to correct her and say I was bisexual. At the moment, though, there was only one person in this world who stood a chance of turning me on any time soon, and he was a man, so… “Yeah. I guess.”

“Oh.” She clicked her nails rapidly on the table. “This might be difficult for the kids to hear. They’re still dealing with us breaking up.”

I shifted in my chair. “They know.”

Her eyes widened. “They do?”

“Well, Kurt doesn’t. He’s been so stressed with school and the divorce, I didn’t want to add to it. But April and Mark know.”

“You told
Mark
?” She exhaled sharply. “Greg, for God’s sake, you know damn well he has a hard time dealing with things. Why would—”

“Just trust me, okay?” I said. “We talked. The subject came up. And he knows.”

She scowled. “How did he take it?”

Better than you could possibly imagine.

“He took it well. Really well, actually.” I wrung my hands, watching them instead of looking at her. “It gave us a reason to really sit down and talk about things.”

“Things…like?”

I gnawed the inside of my lip. I wasn’t about to out my son to his mother, so this subject was rapidly turning into a minefield. “Just life in general. I guess opening up to him gave him a chance to do the same with me.”

“Oh.” She went quiet again, the silence stretching on for an uncomfortably long time. “So.” She met my gaze, and her expression hardened slightly. Walls going up, maybe? “Well. We’re here. You wanted to talk?”

“Yeah.” I ran my toe up and down the chair leg to get rid of some nervous energy. “I’m not even sure. I guess…I don’t know, maybe I’m looking for some closure.”

“Okay. What kind of closure? I mean, what else can we say that we haven’t already?”

Nervousness prickled my spine and twisted my stomach. I pulled in a deep breath. “Well, for one thing, I’d kind of like to know…” I hesitated, forcing my voice to be soft, nonconfrontational. “How long have you and Jase been seeing each other?”

She bristled, her fingers tightening around her coffee cup. “What does that have to do with anything? You’ve been seeing someone too, so—”

“Becky.” I didn’t raise my voice. Didn’t snap. I was too damned exhausted for any of that anyway. “Just tell me the truth.”

She leaned back in her chair and pushed out a long breath. “Greg, I’m sorry. I thought about telling you the truth, but by that point, I was hurting you enough by telling you I wanted a divorce. It didn’t seem necessary, and definitely not kind, to throw that in your face too.”

I wrung my hands in front of me. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

She turned her head, setting her jaw as she gazed out the window. “I met him last year. In a…on a forum.”

All those hours of sitting on the couch watching television while she used her iPad beside me…had they…?

“We met in person in November,” she went on. “And we…” She shook her head. “Look, there’s no point in dissecting it. We were friends, and then we were more.”

“For how long?” I asked as calmly as I could.

She pressed her lips together. After a long, long silence, she whispered, “About six months.”

More heavy, uneasy silence.

Finally, I asked, “Why?”

“Why?” She tilted her head. “Why him? Or…”

“Why anyone?” I struggled to hold her gaze, but managed. “What changed between us?”

Becky looked away and focused intently on something outside the window. “I don’t know. Honestly. All I know is that it did change.”

“But…why didn’t you say anything? If I had known…”

“I tried, Greg. I… God, I tried.” Jesus, but she sounded exhausted. As if the words took all the energy she had.

“You did?”

She nodded, slowly turning her head toward me again. “I tried to talk to you. I suggested going to counseling.”

“But, when I said we should see that counselor—”

“I know.” She sighed. “There was always something else. One of the kids. The baby. It…” Another sigh, and this time, her shoulders sagged as if under a real, palpable weight. “We just never made it happen. I don’t know whose fault it is. Or if it even matters. But I just… I realized one day I didn’t want to make it work anymore.”

She might as well have punched me in the chest. And the worst part was, I believed her. Looking back now, the pattern was there. The fights were fewer and farther between. The suggestions of seeing a counselor dropped off around the time we were down to one kid left in the house. She’d checked out. I’d checked out.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “The affair, it…it wasn’t what I should have done. And I didn’t tell you about it because I didn’t want to hurt you more than I had.” She swallowed hard. “I do still love you, Greg. But what we had, it’s over.”

Hesitantly, I reached for her arm and rested my hand on it, making contact with her for the first time in weeks. “I know it is. And I still love you too. I guess I just…wanted to know.”

She nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

* * * * *

I’d been driving this car for four years, and I couldn’t help but stop and stare at it now, parked in the driveway in front of my ex-wife’s house. It was the same plain old sedan with the dent below the door handle where Kurt had smacked it with the passenger door of his mother’s car during one of those teenage emotional blowouts. It didn’t look quite right between the slanted white lines of my apartment complex’s parking lot instead of tucked into the two-car garage that always seemed to need cleaning.

It was things like this—the things that hadn’t changed at all—that made me realize how much my life had changed recently. I had the same old job, which I drove to via a whole new route in the same old car.

Numbly, I drove back to my place, parked, and trudged up the steps to my empty apartment. Inside, I lounged on the couch with a cold beer but didn’t taste it. I wasn’t even sure why I was drinking it. For something to do? Some alcohol to make my muddled brain even foggier? Something cold? Fuck, I had no idea. Couldn’t think of a reason
not
to drink it though, so…bottoms up.

So this was my life now. My marriage hadn’t been what I thought it was. My sexuality wasn’t what I’d always believed it was.

Though everything had changed, it was all settling. The ink was drying, and the shock was rapidly turning into old news.

But the one thing I couldn’t accept was the empty space that would be beside me in my bed tonight.

And it wasn’t Becky I was missing right now. She had pulled the plug on something that, I realized after the fact, had died a long time ago.

But what Sailo and I had, it wasn’t dead. My feelings for him sure as hell weren’t. Being with him meant tearing open emotions that were tied to my ex-wife. Feeling them with him and letting go of them with her. And yet it meant all new feelings that were for him and him alone. And they were completely different. Completely alien.

The easiest thing would be to write off our fling as a rebound, an experiment, some infatuation gone bad, and move on. It was quick, it was intense, and now it was over. In the past. Done and dusted. At least then I wouldn’t have to risk hearing him say good-bye twice.

Except I didn’t want to walk away. I wanted to walk right back to him, even if all these emotions threatened to tear me to ribbons like no other feelings I’d ever had.

All these years later, I still remembered what it was like to fall in love with Becky. Time had done nothing to fade the memories of staring at the ceiling at night, with a stomach full of butterflies and a mind full of that gorgeous woman who I couldn’t wait to see again.

And yet, that had nothing on what I felt for Sailo.

Falling for Sailo…
hurt
. Maybe because he was gone, but I could’ve sworn it was already painful before he’d said good-bye. It hurt in the way I imagined getting a tattoo hurt. Intense, almost unbearable, but exhilarating at the same time. Like a temporary sting that would be over soon, but the mark it left behind was there forever.

If this had been a rebound fling like he thought, then the pain would be over and the endorphin rush would be gone, and I’d be able to see clearly that he was right. But the pain was the only thing that remained. That endorphin rush was long gone. Sailo hadn’t been a part of my world long enough to feel so permanent, but his absence was driving me insane. Like everything else could smoothly assimilate into this new reality except the lack of his body heat beside me, the absence of his tattoo beneath my fingertips, the low timbre of his voice in the darkness.

In my empty apartment, in between wondering how drunk I should get tonight, I went through the conversation I’d had with Rhett, the one with Becky, and the last one I’d had with Sailo. Rhett was right. Becky was gone. And Sailo…

I pressed my drink against my forehead. Well. What was I supposed to do? Sit here and think about how fucked up this was, or try to do something about it?

Couldn’t hurt to try, I supposed.

I pulled out my phone. Hesitating with every letter, I wrote out the message, and then my thumb hovered over the Send button for a solid minute. This was pointless, wasn’t it? Sailo had made up his mind and said his piece. And he was right that rebounds and first times were nearly always doomed to failure, so I was probably deluding myself if I thought I could convince him this was any more than a novelty. Anything more than stupid infatuation.

But Ethan and Rhett were right too. If I didn’t talk to him, then I’d never know. If I did talk to him, there was a good possibility nothing would come of it, but at least I would know.

So I steeled myself, held my breath, and hit Send.

Can we talk?

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I checked my phone constantly after that. All evening. A few times throughout the night. During my stop-and-go drive to work. At all those points during the workday when his texts usually broke up the monotony.

Nothing.

The message was clear—he wasn’t interested in talking.

Maybe texts and phone calls weren’t the way to handle this. He’d given me the courtesy of letting me go face-to-face.

Fine. I’ll go down to Wilde’s. And we’ll talk.

Or not.

I cringed as I picked up my keys off the kitchen counter. It was entirely possible he’d tell me to leave, or have one of those ex-Legionnaire bouncers pass the message along. Or maybe sic that surly assistant on me—Evan hadn’t been thrilled with me the night Sailo and I crashed into each other, and he probably wouldn’t mind telling me to get lost.

Still, I had to try. It was worth a shot.
One
shot. I wasn’t going to be that asshole who kept coming back again and again when it had been made abundantly clear that the relationship was over.

One shot. I’d say my piece, or at least try to, and be done with it. If he wouldn’t talk to me tonight, then I’d call it a loss and move on. Delete his number, stay away from Wilde’s—done. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy, but it had to be done or else I’d drive myself insane trying to win back someone who wanted nothing to do with me.

So, I got in the car, drove up to Broadway, and parked outside the club.

Wilde’s,
I thought as I walked up to the tinted glass front door
. We meet again.

Hand on the door, I hesitated. One shot. It wasn’t unreasonable to ask him to hear me out
once
. Right?

Here goes nothing…

I took a deep breath and went inside. After I’d paid the cover, I walked past the intimidating bouncers and up to the bar. The bartender wasn’t one I recognized—Chris, according to the tag on his shirt.

I leaned across the bar and shouted over the music, “Is Sailo here tonight?”

The bartender glanced at the stage where another deejay was performing, and then looked at me. “I’m not sure. You want me to pass a message along to him?”

I hesitated. It would be easy as hell for Sailo to send back a secondhand
fuck off
, but at least then I’d have my answer. “Could you tell him Greg needs to talk to him? For like ten minutes?”

“Sure.” Chris shrugged and headed toward the back of the club. Well, that was promising—Sailo hadn’t given all the bartenders instructions to tell a guy named Greg to kick rocks.

The bartender disappeared into the back. I gulped, wondering if I should’ve had him mix me a drink first. I wanted to believe I was ready for whatever happened. Just like when I’d sat down with Becky, and moving on separately had been a possibility from the start, I was strong enough to take anything that might come from this conversation. Even when she’d hit me with a gut shot, admitting to the affair I’d never once suspected, I’d been all right, and I’d be all right this time too.

And then he appeared out of the crowd, materializing as if from thin air, and it was all I could do not to run for the door.

No. I came here to talk to him, and I was going to see this thing through, no matter how hard it was to face him.

He stopped an arm’s length or so away, eyebrows up. “This is unexpected.” Was that sarcasm? Or an actual observation? He was impossible to read, and the noise around us wasn’t helping.

“I just want to talk. For a few minutes.”

Sailo scowled. He opened his mouth to speak, but then glared at the crowd around us. Meeting my gaze again, he sighed as his shoulders dropped, and he gestured for me to come with him.

Well. That was promising.

I followed.

And two steps later, I knew exactly where we were going.

God. No. Not there.

But yes…there. He led me into the back, up the stairs, and to that familiar door. His keys jingled like they always did, and the lock clicked. In tense silence that seemed to thump harder than the bass downstairs, we stepped through the door.

Did it have to be here? Of all places, did we have to do this in the Wilde’s VIP lounge?

“All right.” He faced me, leaning against a table and resting his hands on its edge. “You wanted to talk.”

“Yeah.” I gulped. “Look, I think you might’ve been right about a few things. I know things moved too fast. And that was my fault. And yeah, you’re right—I was in love with being alive again. But…that doesn’t change what I feel about you.”

He stiffened, lips pulling tight. “The ink isn’t even dry on your divorce.”

“No, it isn’t. And yeah, I’ve still got some shit I need to work through.” I paused, certain with every breath that he was going to run for the door at any moment. “I get why you left. I do.”

His eyebrows rose a little.

“It was too much too fast. I get that.” I hooked my thumbs in my pockets just for something to do with my hands. “Something finally felt right, and I pushed it until it went wrong. I own that, and I’m sorry.”

He shifted his weight, but didn’t say anything, and his expression still offered nothing.

I cleared my throat. “I know the timing is shit. And there’s nothing I can say to convince you that I can give this what I’d give a relationship that didn’t happen right after a divorce like that. The only thing I can do is ask you for the chance to prove it.”

“Do you hear yourself?” He pressed his hip against the table and folded his arms. “You want me to take a gamble like that? You didn’t even know for sure if you were gay until recently—you don’t even
know
what you want yet.” Expression hardening, he added, “And I don’t want to be there when you realize it isn’t me.”

“That’s just it. Yes, I’m still finding my footing. And myself. Yes, my divorce still hurts.” I took a deep breath. “But the whole time you’ve been gone, I’ve been thinking about you. Not finding some other guy. Not my ex-wife. Not…not any of that.
You
.”

His lips tightened, but he didn’t speak.

I closed my eyes, exhaled, and met his gaze again. “The night we met, I was just looking to get laid and forget about my divorce. I wasn’t even thinking about getting into another relationship. And then I quite literally stumbled into you, and…I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since.”

“Because I was the next thing that came along.” He sounded exhausted, as if it took all the strength he had to speak loud enough for me to hear him. “That doesn’t mean there was anything between us besides some sex and being friends.” He exhaled. “How can you know you love me when you don’t even know who you are?”

I flinched. “Look, you’re right. I haven’t figured out who I am yet. I’m not sure if I’m gay or bi. I just don’t know. But what I do know is that I love you. Whether or not I’m attracted to women doesn’t matter, because I know I’m attracted to men, and I know—” My voice tried to crack, but I quickly cleared my throat again. “I know I love you, Sailo.”

He started to speak, but I put up my hand.

“Please,” I said. “Let me finish.”

His lips tightened, but he nodded.

“I don’t know if this will work out,” I went on. “There’s no way to know. But the way I feel when I’m with you, I’ve never felt like that with anyone.” I hesitated. “Not even my ex-wife. With you, it’s this feeling like…like I can take whatever life throws at me, and I can roll with anything, because at the end of the day, it’s going to be you, me, a couple of beers, and whatever stupid movie is on TV.”

He lowered his gaze.

“I know I love you,” I said. “The thing is, they’re feelings. They are what they are. But it doesn’t mean we have to speed things up or start talking about moving in together or any of that. I don’t want to force anything from this. I’m not after some kind of commitment. All I want is to be with you, give this a chance, and see where it goes.” I swallowed. “Because I’ve never felt like this for someone. And even if it means taking the risk of falling flat on my face down the line, it seems…it seems like whatever this could turn into in time is worth taking that risk.”

Sailo held eye contact for a long moment. Then his shoulders sank, and he lowered his gaze. “This does feel pretty different from anything I’ve ever had too. I won’t argue with that. I think that’s what scares me.” Still avoiding my eyes, he rubbed the back of his neck. “The last time I got this close to someone…”

I watched him, and abruptly, the pieces fell together. “The one who left. For someone else.”

He winced, but nodded. “I’m terrified of getting close to you like I did my ex. There are just so many ways this thing could fall apart, and then when it all goes to shit, having to put on the strong face for my kid when all I want to do is break…”

My throat tightened around my breath. I fought the urge to reach for him. “Was your relationship with your ex a rebound?”

“Not for him, no.”

I raised my eyebrows. “So…it can happen even when it’s not a rebound relationship?”

“Of course. But the odds aren’t that great when it is.”

“The odds aren’t great anyway,” I said gently. “It’s a gamble no matter what. There are no guarantees. And that’s coming from a man who had his marriage pulled out from under him after twenty-five years.”

Sailo chewed the inside of his cheek and avoided my eyes again.

“I know this is terrifying,” I said. “Believe me, I know.” Cautiously, I took a step closer to him. “We have two choices.”

He looked at me through his lashes. “Stay or go.”

“Yeah. But it’s a bit more than that. We can walk away now and wonder for the rest of our lives if anything might’ve happened. Or we can give it a shot.” I pushed my shoulders back and took a deep breath. “I know damn well there’s a chance we’ll get hurt if we try it, and I’m well aware of how much it could hurt. But the only thing that scares me more is what we might miss out on if we walk away.”

Sailo lifted his gaze. “It’s not that I don’t want to. But I don’t think you realize what you’re asking for.”

“I do,” I said. “I’m not asking for a commitment. We’re not moving in together. Or meeting each other’s parents.”

“What exactly
would
we be doing?”

“We keep doing what we’ve done so far.” I tentatively touched his face, worried he might recoil. “We have sex. We talk. We go out. We be friends.” He didn’t pull away, so I rested my palm against his cheek, the warmth of his skin raising goose bumps all over mine. “And we see where this thing goes.”

He still didn’t pull away, but he didn’t come closer either. “But…you’re dealing with your divorce. And we’ve both got kids to think about.”

“Yeah, and I’m pretty sure our kids want us to be happy.” My heart jumped into my throat. “And I don’t know about you, but when we’re together, I
am
happy.”

Sailo’s gaze was intense, as if he were searching mine for something, anything, to tell him I was wrong. Or right. Or somewhere in between. My heart was going crazy as I waited for him to speak.

Are we? Aren’t we?

Am I walking out of here alone tonight?

He didn’t say a word, though.

He closed the space between us.

Put his arms around me.

And kissed me.