Page 28 of Another Chance
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Staring at the phone, Theo realized that his attitude was a little bit like someone who was staring at a highly venomous snake, coiled to strike. Or maybe it was some sort of harmless reptile merely colored to look like a dangerous one. Theo didn’t know, and he wouldn’t know until he grabbed that snake by the tail.
This was ridiculous. He was a grown man, for crying out loud. Why was he stressing so much about this? He’d had this job dumped on him, and he was doing the best he could. If his father couldn’t see that …
… Well. Technically, the house was in his father’s name. There were things that he could do, but Theo chose not to think about them. Instead, he snatched for the phone and pressed the button which would send a call winging on the air across the continent to New York.
“What’s up, Theo?” his father’s voice came through loud and clear, and Theo sighed softly. He would much rather text, but he knew very well that his dad would never get back to him. This was somewhat urgent, he figured, and harder for the other man to ignore.
“Hi to you, too, Dad,” Theo replied, his tone just a little bit wry in the way that he knew, through long practice, he could get away with without causing World War III. Probably.
“I’m busy. What’s going on?”
Well, that was clear. Theo took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He was not going to get into a fight with his father. He wasn’t.
“The house. It’s a mess. A tree fell, and one of the walls was busted in …” Theo went through the list of everything that Eric had walked him through earlier that day, sitting outside on the front porch gazing across the way at the house in question, lying innocently just across the road.
“Shit. How long is all of this going to take?” his father asked when Theo was through laying it all out on the line for him. Theo looked at the overgrown grass on the front yard of the house and wondered if there would even be a point in mowing it. He hadn’t had to do it in years, but it probably wasn’t that hard, right?
“A couple of months, I hear,” Theo confessed. He knew his father wasn’t going to like that answer, and from the silence which fell after, he could tell that he had been right. If he tried, Theo could see his father’s face, just as though the other man stood right in front of him. He could see the furrow between his eyebrows, the way his forehead knit into a stormy cloud. He could see the tensing of his lips and the way his nostrils flared.
He could see it all just a little bit too well.
“I gotta go. Deal with it,” the man finally said, and before Theo could so much as open his mouth and draw in air to respond, the connection was dead. Cut off, before Theo could respond. Before he could ask him about getting the utilities back on again.
It was just so typical, and Theo took a moment, sitting on the rocking swing on the porch, to just close his eyes and brace his heels against the wood and just lightly rock, back and forth, feeling the cool blue of calm unfurl through his body.
When he was back to normal, more or less, he picked up his phone from where he’d heedlessly dropped it beside him on the cushioned seat, and he rose back up to his feet. It was probably getting to be time to figure out some sort of food, when he felt the buzzing of his phone, indicating that he had some sort of alert.
At first, he thought it might be his father calling back, but the phone only buzzed twice. It was a message, an email or a text, not a phone call, and Theo unlocked his phone and looked down.
A text. And from someone that he hadn’t thought about since getting here, or not for more than a few seconds at a time. How strange. There had been a time when Liam had put little flutters in his stomach, when he’d constantly been thinking about how he so badly wanted things to work between them but how they never would.
I miss you. Hook up tonight?
Well, that was to the point. Theo closed his eyes and considered not replying at all. Why should he? It was pointless, an exercise in futility, and probably not fair to either of them.
As he made up his mind, his phone buzzed again.
Or are you still in Timbuktu or whatever?
Liam would just continue to text and text until Theo replied. That was how the man operated. Once, it had seemed charming, had made Theo feel like he was wanted, but honestly, now he just found it more than a little irritating.
Washington. Not Timbuktu. Yeah, I’m here.
For how long?The reply came back right away, and it was far too easy to imagine Liam, wrapped around his phone, his long blond waves hanging around his face in a silken waterfall, thin, surprisingly sensual lips quirked up in a smirk.
A few months. I gotta go.
It was abrupt, but he had done his social obligation. He had answered the text. And a couple of months, it wasn’t entirely beyond the realm of possibility that Liam, always flighty, always jumping from relationship to relationship, would move on.
Though to be honest, Theo had expected that to happen before now. So had all of their friends. Still, the chances of Liam hanging on for a couple of months? The guy just wasn’t set up to be a long distance relationship sort. He needed constant stimulation, and Theo had had a hard enough time providing that when they’d lived in the same city.
So, before this got even more painful, Theo turned his phone to silent and slipped it into his pocket. If this kept up, he was going to have to have some sort of conversation about how this wasn’t ever going to be a real thing, especially now that …
Now that what? Where had his mind been going with that? To a certain broad, muscular, gorgeous man who looked like a male underwear model, only way hotter? To bright jade eyes and lips which would make an angel blush?
Ridiculous.
