Page 67 of Salacious Park Avenue Prince

It rang…and rang…and rang before going to voicemail, and I hung up and called again.

Where was he? I was ready to throw my pants back on and head out to make sure he was alive when, on the fourth try, he finally picked up.

“Travis? Jesus, where are you?”

“Gone. Isn’t that what you wanted?” There was no mistaking the hurt lacing his tone, but why? I’d just needed a minute to breathe.

“No, I?—”

The line went dead. Did he seriously just hang up on me? Or were we disconnected?

I tried calling him back, once, twice, and on the third attempt I cursed and decided a text would get my point across just as well.

Did you just hang up on me? I think we should talk. Text me.

I stared at the phone, willing him to text me, call me, do something. But it remained silent. The house so quiet and vast it felt like a tomb, which was appropriate, considering I wanted to die.

How had things gotten so messed up?

One minute we’d been having the time of our lives, best friends to brothers, imagining our futures and how much fun we’d have together in the years to come, and now he wouldn’t even talk to me. Didn’twantto talk to me.

Me.The one person he talked to about everything. Or so I’d thought.

That didn’t bode well for our friendship or our future.

I walked back into the living room, my eyes shifting to the rug and the pants I’d lost in a moment of stupid foolishness, and realized that wasn’t the only thing I’d lost.

I’d also lost the one person in the world I cared the most about, and I had no idea if I’d ever get him back.

TWENTY

travis

THIS WAS STARTING to feel like déjà vu.

I’d seen Caleb in class on Friday, but then he’d disappeared all weekend. Did he seriously run off again? It sure felt that way. He’d finally responded to my texts and missed calls Saturday withAt a job, and that was it. Not a word since then, and he hadn’t come home.

Not that I’d been watching and waiting. I had a life too. I just figured my amazing show-and-tell would’ve enticed him to stick around.

I kept getting it all wrong with him. It was starting to piss me off.

I might’ve taken out my frustration on a few too many orange sesame tempura shrimp at the downtown foodie festival I’d gone to with Preston, JT, and West. They were greasy and delicious and forced me to walk around for a couple hours for them to go down instead of coming back up. That would’ve been tragic. Almost as tragic as checking my phone every five minutes to see if I’d heard from Caleb.

This was bullshit. I’d thought he would’ve grown up since last time, for fuck’s sake. That he would know it wasn’t a bad thing if it felt good.

Even if it was years ago, I’d never forget the way his expression had changed from such a blissed-out high to panic and dread the next. The way he’d scrambled to get away from me so fast and disappeared without a word. All the hope had drained out of my body when I realized he didn’t feel the same. That he wasn’t coming back out to say,Never mind, that was amazing, no regrets.

His reaction was nothingbutregret, and the tears that stung my eyes had made it hard to put my clothes back on. I’d held it all in, the agony of rejection, of being ashamed of who I was for the first time in my life, until I escaped out of the building. That was when I couldn’t stop the stupid tears from falling. My chest physically hurt, like Caleb had ripped my heart out, shredded it to pieces, then stuffed it back inside and told me to get the fuck out.

I’d been such an idiot. I’d wanted to go back and erase the last half-hour before things turned to shit. I hadn’t known how to fix it, and deep in my gut, I’d known it would be impossible. It felt like a death. It felt like a betrayal. A rejection of me and who I was from the person I’d trusted the most.

I’d walked for blocks before I even realized where I was heading, and East had let me stay, no questions asked. Well, there’d been questions—I just hadn’t given any answers. I spent those hours building a wall back up, brick by brick, so that no one ever made me feel as shitty as I did that night.

Caleb had hurt me. And so I’d hurt him back, the only way I knew how.

Was it the most mature thing to do, looking back? No. But teenagers did stupid shit all the time, and I wasn’t the most emotionally secure person then.

This time around, I wasn’t letting us go down that path. We were gonna talk, whether he liked it or not.

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