Page 8 of Another Chance
4
For once, Eric had turned down the bar. For once, he’d felt the need just to go home, and he told himself it was nothing but exhaustion. That was all there was to it. What else could it be?
True enough, he’d had a hard time sleeping the night before. True enough, he had lain in bed, his heart and mind completely full, struggling to come to grips with what he knew. Someday soon, Theo was going to be in town, Theo was going to be back in his old house, maybe?
Theo was going to be right across the street.
So no, he hadn’t slept, but that wouldn’t usually be enough for him to miss out on the near-nightly trip to the bar with his friends. There had been other sleepless nights, and more often than not, he would be at the bar anyway.
So what did it mean that he wasn’t tonight?
Eric swung out of his truck in the sunset, not without an affectionate caress to the steering wheel. This vehicle had seen him through some tough times, and he’d had it for years. As he stepped out, he saw the brilliant yellow of a cab, something which wasn’t seen all that often in a small town like this one. Eric was pretty sure there wasn’t even a local taxi company. If people needed a cab, they called for one from Seattle.
“Weird,” he murmured to himself, and then the weirdest thing happened. His eyes skimmed over whoever it was who had gotten out of the cab, and he found that the man was already staring at him, with an expression sort of like he’d been stabbed in the stomach.
Which was, to be fair, pretty much exactly how Eric felt as he saw this man. He knew who he was immediately, and all of a sudden, it made complete sense that he had skipped out on the bar and had come right home from work. In the golden light of the sunset, which burnished everything it touched, which made the man across the street seem to glow just as golden as the descending orb of the sun, he first laid eyes on Theo Savage after eight years apart.
Maybe the weird feelings, the sleepless night, should have prepared him for just how that would feel, but it didn’t. Nothing could have prepared him for this because he had never before been so utterly devastated with joy to see anyone.
His face froze, feeling numb, and his breathing seemed to slow down. Everything seemed to slow down, really, as his eyes locked with Theo’s across the street and he took in the sight of his best friend or the man which he, despite everything, still considered that way. At least on some level.
Theo was huge.
Just before Theo had left with his father, Eric had realized that the man, though younger, had grown taller than Eric. Theo back then, though, had still been gangly, slightly awkward, with arms and legs too long for his body.
Well, Theo, it seemed, had grown into himself nicely. He was obviously tall, at least four or five inches taller than Eric, who was not a particularly short man at just over six feet himself. Theo had grown his hair out a little, and it fell in messy waves around his face in a halo around his head.
Theo still had that angular face, with the cheekbones which looked like they could cut glass and the sharp chin, but once again, instead of looking gawky, almost half-starved, as he had as a teenager, his features had become absolutely stunning, striking in a way which had only been barely hinted at when he had been younger.
For what might have been an hour but was probably closer to a few minutes, given how dark the sky got in that time, they just looked at each other. Theo’s face was blank, maybe with shock? That was certainly how Eric felt, because no amount of preparing, no amount of hearing that some famous author with the same first and last name as his childhood friend was going to come to town could prepare him for the shock of actually seeing said former friend in the flesh.
In the tall, dark, strong, handsome flesh.
He was in trouble, wasn’t he? In just as much trouble as ever, or maybe more, because he had never been able to resist the boy Theo had been, and now Theo looked like this. He was going to make such an idiot of himself.
The worst part was, something about those hazel eyes glimmering at him from across the street like two hot little stars told him that maybe this time, just maybe, Theo wouldn’t react quite so badly to being kissed. Only that was ridiculous, the product of wishful thinking and nothing more.
If only he could tell his heart that. If only he could tell his body, half aroused already, that. If only he could make himself believe it, then maybe he could walk across the street in the gathering darkness and pull his former friend into his arms and this time, just not let him go.
Which made Theo possibly the most dangerous thing in Eric’s life right then, because after how hard it had hit him when Theo had walked away, run away, last time, he had crashed and burned hard. Last time, it had taken him the better part of a year to get his life back on track.
How much had he built up since then? How much more did he have to lose? He could have stood there forever, just watching Theo, being watched back, their eyes tangled together in the most hopelessly intimate way, if he hadn’t been distracted by the flash of sudden warm orange light as the streetlights came on.
It was a call back to the present, back to reality, and a very welcome one. He saw that it startled Theo, too, but abruptly, Eric turned away and walked up the walkway to his house, not looking back. If he let himself be completely honest with himself, he was terrified he would be caught again in that intense gaze, lost in the planes and angles and curves of Theo’s face, if he dared to look back.
So he didn’t. He shut the door behind himself and then locked it, as though he expected Theo to run across the street and demand entrance, and how stupid was it that he would even think about that? How completely idiotic for him to think that Theo, who had been the one to run away in the first place, would care enough to come bounding across the street for him now?
More than that. How ridiculous for Eric to think that, if Theo did, that Eric wouldn’t unlock the door and let him in in a second.
With his heart pounding, he walked through the house, his legs shaking, his knees deliberately firmed up to keep his steps as steady as possible. Theo was back. Theo was just across the street, and Eric had never been so terrified of anything in his whole life.
The only problem was, once he was inside, there was nothing for him to do. He put on some TV, but there was nothing on. He tried Netflix, but nothing grabbed his attention. His gaze kept being pulled right back toward the house across the street, the house where Theo was staying, where Eric had spent so much time as a kid.
Swearing softly, Eric slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans and slumped on the couch. He could stop being a big baby, he supposed. He could man the hell up and walk across the street and knock on the door. It wasn’t like it would be weird for him to go say hello to an old friend, right? No matter how they’d separated, no matter how badly that had gone.
That had all been a long time ago, and it probably didn’t even mean anything to Theo anymore, if it ever had. It was probably something he’d locked away in his past, just another of those small town things to put his back to.
Eric pulled out his phone, and before the impulse had passed, before his rational brain really got involved, he was typing in Theo’s name into the Google search bar. Theo Savage. He was doing something that he hadn’t let himself do in eight years, no matter how many times he’d wondered what was going on with his friend.
