Page 41 of Touch of Innocence
NINETEEN
It was the middle of the summer, only a month until Sam had been hoping to go back to school. The sun was up most of the day, shedding heat and light all over the place, warming everything until the ground was baked and hard and there was not even a hint of moisture in the air.
So then why did Sam feel so cold?
It had been more than a week, closer to two, since Sam had ordered Gunner off of the property. He had meant it, too. There was no way to fix what had gone wrong between them, and Sam wasn’t going to try. He and Gunner were both too different.
And he’d been right to do it, too. Yes, he felt alone and lonely like he could never remember feeling, but that was just to be expected since he’d gotten used to having Gunner around. He felt cold, right down to his center, almost dead inside, but that would get better with time, wouldn’t it?
He’d made the right choice, that was the thing. And he held on to that even as he told his family nothing more than that Gunner had left. He could at least be loyal enough to Gunner to keep that secret for him, even if Gunner hadn’t been loyal to Sam enough to tell him.
Life went on. Ruby pouted, and Isaac looked concerned, and Ben looked grim. Even Shadow seemed to be listless and sad, drooping as he lay in whatever shade he could find, though Sam tried to tell himself that was probably more to do with the heat than anything else.
Nothing changed, not for that whole time. No more cops came to the door, and Sam didn’t stop waking up in the morning half expecting to find himself in Gunner’s bed, with strong, sure arms around him. Nothing changed, not until it had been twelve days since the last time Sam had seen Gunner, peering at him through the window as the other man turned back and then walked away forever.
“His bike is ready.”
Mike had been even more taciturn than ever, even though his car had been fixed and Sam had paid for all of it. It had taken a decent chunk out of his savings, but he had taken care of it. But Mike seemed to be in a weird place.
No. That wasn’t it. Mike was mourning, and so was Ruby, and Isaac, and Ben, and Amanda, and even Shadow. They were all in mourning, for the deep, profound effect that Gunner had had on their lives. All of them, even in such a short time.
But Sam knew better. And Sam was going to lead the way. He was going to move on and show them how it was done. That was really the only answer, and he was doing good with that, or so he would have thought.
Until Mike said those words, just four words, five syllables, that knocked down whatever fragile walls that Sam had managed to put up around his heart. He hadn’t even been thinking about Gunner, he would have told himself so in an instant, but that was revealed for the lie that it was.
“Gunner’s bike?” Sam asked, super casual like it didn’t really matter to him. Mike shot him a look that was full of pity mingled with annoyance, but at least he didn’t call Sam on his bullshit. At least he let Sam pull whatever tattered shreds of his dignity that he could find around himself like a cloak. It might be pitiful, but it was all that he had.
“Yeah. Gunner’s bike,” Mike told him. “Do you know how to reach him? He won’t answer his phone.”
Sam shook his head. What did he know? Gunner had mentioned that he had a job waiting for him in Austin, at a bar, Sam was pretty sure that he had said. It hadn’t seemed to matter much at the time, because Sam had already been toying with the idea of getting Gunner to stick around.
“I have the same cell number,” Sam pointed out, and then he turned to look at the bike, huge and gleaming black. It was so easy just to squint a little bit and fool himself that he could see Gunner, strong legs straddling the bike, a taunting little smirk on his handsome face as if to say that he knew how irresistible he was, and almost daring anyone watching to even try to resist him.
It was Gunner’s bike. It practically screamed out for its owner, for the one who had built it, put so much love into it. The bike would roar if Gunner spurred it into life, then settle into a low, throbbing purr, trapped securely between those thighs.
Mike was looking at him curiously, though, and Sam turned away from the bike, fighting off the urge to blush. How much did Mike know? How much did everyone know, and how long would it take for people to forget that Sam had been seen with Gunner?
Probably Mike didn’t know anything, though. Otherwise, he would certainly seem less worried about Sam, and Gunner, and more inclined to judge them. Same went for the rest of the town, too. No one could understand, other than maybe Ben, what Sam was going through.
Without a word, Sam turned his back on his boss, a man who was very much like a friend, albeit an older, wiser, and sometimes irritable one. He turned his back on the bike, and on the phantom image of Gunner that he could almost see, and he walked out of the shop and into the late afternoon heat.
Not thinking about Gunner. Never again would he allow Gunner to get into his heart. It had been a dangerously close thing even as it was, and he couldn’t let himself be hurt by a bad boy on a motorcycle. He couldn’t allow his life to be derailed by something so dangerous.
He’d walked that path before, and no matter how much his heart still leaned toward Gunner, no matter how much he missed the guy, he couldn’t let himself go there. He couldn’t let his feelings get in the way of his future, not again.
* * *
But what would it have been like if Gunner had stayed? If they had worked things out, if Gunner had come to him openly and told him about his past, and if Sam had found some way to accept what he was being told. After all, hadn’t he thought that he knew Gunner, the man inside?
A crime committed years ago, a crime that Gunner had paid for, maybe that would have been okay. Maybe. Even Sam couldn’t be sure how he would have reacted. But if he had accepted it, and if Gunner had stayed, would Sam really have been okay with going off to Harvard and leaving this brand new thing? The only relationship that Sam had ever attempted that had made any sense to him at all?
No. So what would he have done? Sam thought about it all the way home, and when he got to the house, he stayed in the car, on his phone, doing research. Just checking out his options, not that it mattered, of course, since he didn’t have Gunner around to hold him here, but it couldn’t hurt to know.
What he found staggered him. He stared down at his screen, his eyes wide. This whole time, he had been killing himself to try to save room and board and tuition for Harvard, which would take all that he had managed to scrape together and more. Five minutes of poking around online shared some pretty harsh truths with him, truths that Google could have told him in a second if he hadn’t been so stubbornly fixated on his own plans.
There was a University of Texas at Austin, and the tuition there was less than half of what it would cost for him to pay for Harvard. And that wasn’t even considering the fact that he wouldn’t have to pay room and board if he went to school right up the road. With what he had, he could pay for several years of school.
But what did it matter? He wasn’t going to do it. Harvard was his dream. Harvard was the school which everyone would be the most impressed by, the one which would show beyond a shadow of a doubt that Sam, the man with the strange family, the one with the mother in jail for dealing drugs, had really made it. That Sam wouldn’t be a tragedy, but one of the rare success stories.
