Page 5 of Chasing You

It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t ideal. But it was something, and Kash could live with that.

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ADELE

He wasn’t an unreasonable man.At least, that’s what he liked to tell himself. He set normal, everyday expectations for both himself and his friends and family. But he did expect to have some answers about what Kash was going through. In spite of both physical and emotional distance between them over the years, Kash was his best friend. No, he was more than his best friend. He was his soulmate. They didn’t keep secrets, so it was killing Adele that he’d been keeping this from him for God only knew how long.

He wanted to push. He wanted to pin Kash down to the couch cushions and dead-eye stare him until he cracked. He could too. That was how he’d wriggled all of Kash’s secrets out of him over the years. But he knew this was too big and too important to fuck around that way.

He’d already screwed up badly enough as it was with the airport thing. He hadn’t told any of the guys what he was planning—which, in hindsight, had bitten him in the ass because all of them would have told him what a bad idea it was to pretend-kidnap someone at an airport.

Or at all, really.

It hadn’t even been the near arrest thing, which was bad. It had been the sheer terror on Kash’s face that made him regret every decision he’d made that day. Maybe if the circumstances had been different, Kash would have found the whole thing hilarious, but he’d been frightened.

And when he calmed down, it was obvious that he was exhausted and in pain, and Adele had only made that worse. He might have still been beating himself up over it, except Kash could sense he’d gone into scolded puppy mode and, over burritos, told him to get his head out of his ass.

“I’ve forgiven you for worse,” Kash reminded him, which was true. “You were a dipshit—nothing new there. It’s over with.”

“And I won’t do it again,” Adele vowed.

Kash snorted, almost choking on his guac, and shook his head. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, darling. We both know who you are.”

And that was true. No matter how much time had passed or how many years apart they’d been living, Kash still knew him better than anyone. Adele could only hope now that the same was still true for him. Kash had been keeping secrets, and Adele knew whatever this was—this whole stiff legs and walking with a cane thing—it was bad.

He just didn’t know how bad. And he had to wait until Kash felt ready to tell him everything he knew.

Unfortunately, Adele learned the next day everything Kash knew wasn’t much.

After a solid twelve hours of rest and recovery from the long flight—and three lower-limb massages that Adele selflessly and with no agenda of his own had given Kash—he finally spilledhis guts.

“All I have is weird tightness, stiffness, and weakness in my limbs and no answers at all. It started a few weeks after the incident,” Kash told him quietly the next afternoon as they sat out on the deck. “I thought it was related to the concussion, but the more doctors I saw, the more questions I had, and no one could tell me what was happening. They’ve thrown around a few ideas, but all the tests have been negative. There are a few specialists here—neurological ones—and I have referrals to see them, and hopefully, they can figure it out.”

“And that’s it?”

Kash sighed quietly. “That’s it. For a while, I thought things might heal up on their own. I’d go a week without a single incident, and I thought I was getting better. Then suddenly, I’d wake up with my toes curled, unable to move my feet, and it would last for days.”

“When did you quit?” Adele asked softly.

Kash turned his gaze to the side. “About a week after I got back. I was put on medical leave, but it’s obvious I can’t do the job anymore.” His voice was shaky and thick. “I, uh, I’ve been avoiding retiring. The pension will be good, but I don’t want to risk losing my medical coverage.”

“Yeah,” Adele said very softly. “What did your chief say?”

“To take care, and if shit got sorted out, he’d write me a golden letter of recommendation to you. I laughed myself sick when he said that.”

Adele couldn’t help his grin. “I don’t know. It might be helpful. I’ve gotten strict over the years.”

Kash sipped his iced tea with one hand and flipped Adele off with the other, sending them both into a laughing fit. Swiping his mouth, Kash shrugged. “Anyway, that’s aboutall I’ve got.”

“A disorder with no name and retirement looming on the horizon,” Adele voiced aloud for the both of them.

“One doctor called it dystonia,” Kash admitted. “But without a root cause, they have no treatments. They gave me a prescription for some orthotics, which I should be better about wearing, and I bought a cane off Amazon to get me around. One guy gave me some really strong muscle relaxers, which are nice, but they leave me in a fog. And yeah, that’s about it.”

Adele had no idea what to say about that, so he said nothing at all. What could he do except be there? At least that was something he was good at. Kash was home, and he was safe, and for the moment, that was all that mattered.

Of course, Adele was also the guy who never let anything go, so at his next single dads meeting a week after Kash showed up, he cornered Renato after dinner to grill him on whether or not he knew about dystonia and if there were any super-secret treatments the doctors weren’t telling Kash about.

“I’ve treated patients with it,” Renato told him, staring at him over a glass of Malbec. “But it’s not something I treat, and to be honest, there’s not a lot that can be done about it.”

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