Heartbeat Repeating - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,15
they were married and he was forced to arrange his life around them. Like when he had to throw out entire dinners because Alejandro was convinced there was something wrong with the food. Or getting up at two in the morning to rearrange the furniture because it felt incorrect, and Alejandro couldn’t sleep thinking that the wrongness might hurt Gabrielle.
Connor’s strength failed though, when her death kept Alejandro from getting out of bed. From eating, from sleeping, from remembering that there were other people around him, just as hurt, who needed his love and support. His burden became too much for Connor to bear, but it was nothing unexpected.
Sixteen months of intensive therapy which ended in divorce.
Connor always looks better, whenever Alejandro sees him—like he’s free. He looks better now than he did even before they had Gabrielle. That crushes him a little, what small pieces of his heart he has left. And it’s seeing what Connor has become—seeing what he might have been the entire time, if he’d never met Alejandro—that keeps him from being brave enough to take what he wants from Avery.
Because he won’t ruin another person the way he nearly ruined Connor.
Avery feels some pain now when Alejandro dismisses him—and maybe even a little heartache. But he won’t be destroyed when it’s over. He’ll be rich, and maybe a little more jaded, and probably a lot more careful who he trusts with his heart, which is exactly what Alejandro wants as his parting gift for the younger man.
“You should try to sleep,” Louis says after a while, bringing Alejandro back to the present. “I have a feeling you haven’t gotten much.”
Louis is well aware of Alejandro’s cyclical decline during the anniversary of Gabrielle’s passing, and usually he gives him space and sends him expensive scotch and lets him wallow. Sometimes, when Alejandro goes too far, Louis he shows up to dig him out from the rock-bottom hole and provides a soft place for him to patch himself back together.
And Alejandro loves him for it, even as he hates his brother for all the things he has that slipped through Alejandro’s fingers in a single, devasting year.
He doesn’t answer him, though. He just pushes the little button on the side of the chair that sends it into a recline. He won’t sleep because flying makes him anxious, and he can’t relax as he deals with the dread of what’s coming after they land. He doesn’t want the gentle soothing tones of his mother or the memories his father will want to share of Gabrielle’s short life. He just wants to feel the jagged edges of this profound loss, which feels like no matter how much time passes, still has the power to reduce him down to a silent, terrible, ragged scream that won’t escape his lungs.
He closes his eyes though and lets himself pretend he’s resting, and Louis lets him get away with it. The plane continues the flight, and the minutes continue to tick by, and he presses his hand against his pocket again to feel the outline of that orca.
He thinks about Avery for a moment. “I know we don’t talk, but if you need to…”
He’s been tempted before, but that was the first time he’s ever come close to breaking his promise to himself, and he knows he needs to do better.
The jet lag is real, and Alejandro can’t stop rubbing his eyes or yawning when the car pulls up in front of his parents’. He hasn’t lived in England for more than seven years, but nothing ever really feels like home until he takes a breath of the familiar winter air. The clouds are fat and lazy above them—a sort of dark grey promising sleet and eventually the snow he’s been missing so far this winter.
The driveway is more over-grown than normal, but his mother insists on doing all the gardening herself, and he knows the cold weather is hard on her aging bones. She had kids young—barely eighteen when he was born and nineteen when she gave birth to Yvette. She and their father had come from Spain for university—both with big dreams and high hopes and a small loan that turned into something big and important after they graduated.
It’s an empire now—full of new technology that he’s had to adapt to because he’s still a child of ink pens and loose paper. And now everything is carried on a tiny little screen. Even the lingering evidence he has of his marriage