He swallowed hard as he quietly zipped his suitcase, giving me a tight smile afterward before gesturing toward the door.
He wasn’t crying, so that was a good sign, right? That meant nothing could be so bad. Maybe I should text Boogie and ask him once we traded phones.
I headed down the hall in silence, down the stairs the same way too. At the bottom of them, I stopped and glanced over my shoulder at the tight, strained face that was busy focusing on the floor. His cheeks looked hollow, that light pink mouth thin. “Do you need to talk to anyone before you leave? Or kick everyone out or something?”
The man I had known looked up with eyes that were more distressed than kind at that moment, his forehead furrowed. “No.”
All right. He knew what he was doing.
I nodded before handing him his cell, which I’d stuck in my back pocket while he’d been talking to his mom. He took it with a dip of his chin, then handed mine over. We kept going, and I couldn’t ignore the stares from the strangers in the house as they watched Zac carrying his carry-on suitcase around and through them. If I’d expected some expensive luggage with initials and designer logos all over it, I would have been disappointed. His suitcase was black and looked like it had been around the world a couple of times.
Maybe it had.
“Hey, man, where you going?” one guy asked him as we walked by.
He looked familiar….
“Out. See ya,” my old friend responded distractedly.
I really did need to know if there was any news on Paw-Paw.
Neither one of us said a word—in my case, I didn’t know what the hell to say—as we left through the front door, a couple more people calling out greetings to Zac that he answered vaguely and in that weird voice that sounded like it belonged to another human being—a human being that was weighed down by a concrete block attached to his feet.
Down the street and at my car, I popped the trunk so he could drop his suitcase in it. He closed it as I watched him, those high cheekbones straining against his skin. Upset and worried were stamped along the surface of them. Years ago, I had known just how much he adored his grandpa. The same way I’d adored my mom’s mom, my Mamá Lupe.
Completely and totally, because that was exactly how they’d loved us.
I could never forget how I’d felt when she’d had her heart attack. Helpless. Desperate. Like the world had been kicked out from under my feet.
Maybe Zac hadn’t been my friend for almost a third of my life, but he had been there for me time and time again for the first two-thirds. When Mamá Lupe died, he had hugged me while I’d sobbed against him, worried about what I was going to do from then on. And I could never forget that he’d cried too. He’d cried over the woman who had babysat him for a decade. Who had kept on making him birthday cakes even after he’d gotten so busy with after-school activities that he didn’t need another set of eyes keeping tabs on him. I couldn’t forget that he’d promised me then that I’d be okay.
I knew what my grandma and my cousin would want from me. I knew what they would want me to do for someone they loved so much. This wasn’t about me and what I wanted and needed.
So I did it. I offered the only thing I could then, what they would want, but braced myself to get rejected just in case.
“Hey,” I said to him, telling myself again to prepare for a hell no. “You need a hug? You can say no.”
The lean, beautiful man in front of me—with the weight of an entire solar system bearing down on his shoulders it seemed—stared at me for a moment.
Then he nodded.
It was me who cut the distance between us until I was staring up at him, like I had so many times while I’d been growing up. I would have smiled if this had been any other circumstance, but his grandpa was in the hospital, I wasn’t sure what his mom had told him, and he may or may not know what he was doing with his career now that his NFO—National Football Organization—team had signed someone else to his position. On top of all that, I was confused and hurt and relieved all at the same