Page 58 of Ache for You (Slow Burn 3)
“Go be with your mother. She needs you more right now than I do.”
Dashing away the water springing up in my eyes, I turn and start to walk away. Matteo takes hold of my arm and turns me back.
He drops his head so we’re nose to nose. “Did you just say you need me?”
I frantically try to recall the specific words I just spoke, but with him so close and his damn delicious, brain-melting scent in my nose, and the scream trapped in my throat, and the tears filling up behind my eyes so fast, I can’t.
I whisper, “I don’t know what I just said. This is the worst day of my life. Last week I had the second worst day of my life, caused by that douchebag waiting for me at the end of the driveway. My brain isn’t really working right at the moment.”
We stare at each other until he exhales. He looks at my mouth, then briefly closes his eyes. When he speaks again, he sounds exhausted. “Let me get your other shoe.”
He leaves me standing there while he fishes my shoe out of the bushes. Then, when he comes back and kneels down in front of me in the gravel, it’s all I can do not to fall flat on my face.
He gently takes my ankle in his hand and slips my foot into my shoe. Then he looks up at me.
And my heart stops. It just stops, like you hear stories of when people first glimpse the love of their life . . . or in that split second after they stepped off a curb and realize they’re about to get hit by an oncoming bus.
Yeah, probably more like the second one.
Matteo kneels at my feet with his big warm hand wrapped around my small cold ankle, and just looks at me while I stare back at him with a nonfunctioning heart and a barely functioning brain and try to remember how to breathe.
His voice thick, he says, “No matter what he says, remember who you are.”
Before I can ask Who am I? Matteo has risen and is walking away with stiff shoulders and his hands clenched into fists.
I watch him until he disappears into the house, then I turn and walk down the driveway to where Brad awaits. He’s pacing again, kicking at the gravel like a four-year-old.
I stop ten feet away, fold my arms over my chest, and send him a death glare.
He exhales loudly. “Okay. Okay, um . . . you’re mad. I know you’re mad. And you probably never want to talk to me again.” He’s still pacing. Pacing and wringing his hands, which is so unlike him I frown.
He glances at me, quickly glances away, then shakes his head and laughs. It’s a horrible laugh, the kind that isn’t funny at all. The kind that bursts out of you like a groan or a bark, or like the sound an animal makes when it’s in pain.
Honestly, it freaks me out a little.
“Brad, stop.”
He stops in place and looks at my feet. He inhales, his chest heaving, then finds the nerve to meet my eyes.
I’ve never seen anyone with that wild, awful look in his eyes. It’s similar to the look he had when I was walking down the aisle toward him at the church, but there’s more than sheer panic there. Now I see pain and fear and visceral dread, like someone being tortured.
Like someone about to die.
“You could’ve just written me a letter.”
“You would’ve torn it up.”
He has me there. I definitely would have torn it up. Then lit it on fire. Then stomped on the ashes and sent them back to him in a box marked Fragile: Broken Heart Inside.
“You have sixty seconds to tell me what you need to say. Then we’re never going to speak again. Go.”
He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and shoves his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. He squints up at the sun, closes his eyes, and releases a pent-up breath.
Then he looks me dead in the eye and whispers, “I’m gay.”
It doesn’t hit me right away. I stand there waiting for him to say something, until I realize he did say something . . . and what it was that he said.
Slowly, I repeat, “You’re gay.”
