Page 44 of Passion and Payback

His discomfort had returned, which told me he knew full well what I’d been thinking about after he kissed me. It wasn’t fair to expect him to talk about a subject as painful for me as Lucas so freely, but it was starting to get on my nerves a little.

“Well, it sounds like you already guessed, but yeah, I was thinking of Lucas after you kissed me. At first, I thought about how wonderful it was to be kissed again by someone I trusted completely. That it was you, the man I had dreamed about for so long, was just…an entirely different kind of high,” I admitted, smiling when I saw him warm to the idea. “But yeah, I thought of Lucas. I thought about how he died and what was taken from us. And it felt like I was stepping all over his memory.”

“I can see that,” he admitted.

“But…I wasn’t,” I said slowly, trying to make sure I said exactly what I meant so he understood where my head was on the subject. “Or at least, that’s what I halfway believe.”

“Halfway?”

“Which is far less than it was a few months ago, let alone a year ago.”

“Faking it till you make it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? Or maybe some things are just harder to understand than others. I can know, here,” I said, tapping my head, “that it’s time to move on and that I can’t spend the rest of my life mourning him, no matter how ugly his death. And…I also know he would want me to move on and not hang onto him. Trust me, he would give me so much shit for sticking to things this hard.”

“But your heart isn’t on the same level as your head.”

“No. And if it were anyone else but you, I wouldn’t bother considering it at all. But it is you, so here we are.”

“Here I am,” he said with a shake of his head. “I wonder what Lucaswouldsay if he knew we were having this conversation.”

“For all we know, he does.”

“True.”

“But,” I said with a shrug, “I knew him pretty well. I’d say I knew him really well, and in my opinion, I think he’d be happy.”

“Would he?”

“Well, he already knew how I felt about you.”

“Wait, seriously?”

“Seriously. He confronted me on it after we’d moved in together.”

“Confronted you? Shit,” Kai swore, looking worried. “What’d he say?”

I snorted. “He wasn’t mad or anything. Wasn’t all that bothered by it, actually. Even asked me if I was in love with you. I try not to think about that conversation too much, but I thinkhe just wanted me to know that he knew and was okay with it. He never gave me the feeling that he was threatened by you or by my feelings for you.”

“He never gave me that feeling either,” Kai admitted with a light shrug. “He was always fine with me. Never tried to push for friendship but…then again, maybe with what he figured out, he didn’t want to be?—”

“Too close to you, just in case I did decide to ditch him to run off with you?” I asked dryly.

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Yeah, something like that.”

“Lucas and I were a lot alike in that regard.”

“Huh?”

“He wasn’t the type to stick by something if he thought it wasn’t going to work. Just like I was able to deal with my feelings for you all these years because I assumed there was no chance, he would have left if he thought there was ever a chance I’d leave him. He was in it to win it, and nothing would keep him from his happy ending if he could stop it.”

It was the quiet confidence with which Lucas managed it that had always reminded me of Kai. Of course, everyone had a mental landscape that others couldn’t glimpse, where parts of you that you kept hidden came out to play. Kai wasn’t nearly as confident as he seemed, but he was often more confident than me, and Lucas had been the same.

I remember hearing that young girls looked to their fathers when choosing a boyfriend and boys to their mothers. It had made sense that gay boys like me would look to their fathers. Yet when it came to the man I’d fallen in love with and tried to spend my life with, I had looked to my best friend, the only healthy male role model I had known growing up.

“Look,” Kai said after a long silence, “I understand this is difficult for you. Beyond difficult. After everything thathappened when Lucas died and you…” His face gave a noticeable twitch and then stilled. I recognized the sign of him feeling something strongly but tamping it down. It was one I hadn’t seen in a long time, not since the military had drilled even more control into him. “And then, after what happened the other day. You’ve got a lot going on.”

I sighed, nodding my head in agreement. “But I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. I’ve got a business to run, a house to keep up, errands to run, a fucked-up childhood, a new horrible thing to add to the mix after the attack, blood on my hands, and a temptation to bring that sort of justice to those that hurt me in ways no one should ever have to be hurt. But life always has things to keep you busy.”

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