At least there was that. I’d heard horror stories about telling the parents. It might have been the only positive about not having a family—I hadn’t had a closet to come out of.
“Anyway…I left school a few weeks later. He kissed me in his car at the airport, told me he loved me, and I’ve never heard from him again.”
My.
Heart.
Stopped.
“I’m sorry. What?”
“He cut me out of his life the very next day. Sound familiar?”
I cursed under my breath as guilt consumed me.
“I inadvertently heard the specifics from my friends who kept in touch. You remember my buddy Scott, right?”
“Unless this ends with he killed Shannon, I’m not sure that is a pertinent question at this juncture,” I snapped, horrified by what I’d just heard.
He chuckled and kissed my shoulder. “No. The Air Force is a small world. Shannon is a civilian contractor now. He and Scott work together these days.”
My body jerked. “Okay…now, unless this ends with you killing Scott since the last time I saw him in your fucking house, I’m really not sure this is a pertinent question.”
He laughed loudly, but I saw not one thing funny. I had to have been missing something.
“Scott doesn’t ask questions,” Evan continued. “And I was so embarrassed that I never told him the whole truth about what happened. He knew that Shannon and I were seeing each other. He knew after I left school that we broke up. And he has gathered over the years that it was nasty. He does his best to never even mention that Shannon exists. But he doesn’t know the details.”
“Neither do I!” I sat up in outrage on his behalf. “What actually happened? Talk faster.”
The side of his mouth hiked up and his eyes warmed. “It was no secret that I didn’t give a shit about school. I just wanted to fly. My parents were the only reason I was at the Academy. I would have been just as happy at a community college as long as I could fly when I was done. So, from what I can piece together, Shannon had been cheating on me with Dave, and they were both afraid that, when I found out, I’d flip and leave, taking them down with me. So the real plan Shannon devised was to get me out of the picture before I had the chance.”
“Holy motherfucking shit. That asshole!”
“Pretty much,” Evan replied nonchalantly, rolling as he pulled me back down, this time with my head resting on his arm.
“Please tell me you got both of their asses kicked out.”
“Nope. I did absolutely nothing. And that included living my life. I swore off men. Started dating women exclusively, and for the first time, I started seeing people for their gender and not the person inside.” He peered down at me, his eyes sparkling with some unidentifiable emotion. Or, at least, one I wasn’t willing to acknowledge yet. “Fast forward ten years and cue Henry Alexander.”
A rush of heat washed over me. “I hear that guy’s a real prick.”
“Nah. He’s crazy though. But he also made me laugh. And he was so fucking sexy. And, despite the fact that he was a man who happened to be incredibly famous”—he motioned a hand around the room—“and loaded, he still awakened a fire inside me that had been dormant for so long I’d forgotten it existed.”
“Evan…” I breathed as my chest tightened.
“Mmm… There it is,” he moaned, pressing our foreheads together. “Now, that’s how you say my name. Not in question, but in prayer.”
I wanted to crawl down the bed, strip him naked, and then bury myself so deep inside him neither of us would ever resurface, but my damn curiosity was killing me. “Why didn’t you go back and tell them he was gay? Get him and that other guy kicked out for the shit they pulled?”
“Henry, Shannon was a dick and he fucking destroyed me. But I wasn’t going to out him. Karma did that for me when a year later when he and Dave got caught and ultimately forced out. Scott enjoyed the hell out of ‘slipping up’ and mentioning that one.” He half smiled before getting serious again. “The point is, he didn’t cheat on me and then get rid of me because he wanted Dave. He did it because he didn’t want…me.”
My mouth gaped as it dawned on me why he was telling me about this.
Evan was just as broken as I was, and the eerie similarities were probably what had drawn us together—and then torn us apart.
Reality slashed through me.
“I’m scared too,” he whispered, his breath flittering across my lips. “And, in the beginning, I ran, throwing up every barrier I could think of to keep myself from being hurt again. But it was because of me and my demons. Not you. If I’d known you left last week because of yours…there isn’t a force in the world that could have kept me away.”
I slung a leg over his hip and buried my face in his neck. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so worried about the moment you left that I never even considered that maybe your spiral down could be a good thing.”
“I won’t leave you,” he promised in my ear.
And, for the first time in all the thirty-one years of my life, I allowed myself to believe that someone might actually mean it.
And it was Evan.
That was the highest high I would ever experience.