the year they’ve been together.
Yeah, he’s in fucking distress.
“I mean, there’s not someone here with a gun to my head if that’s what you’re asking. You just caught me during…you know, something.” He holds his breath because he knows how it sounds, and he hears a faint growl coming from the other line. “I’m by myself, before you freak out,” he adds.
Alejandro goes completely silent. Then, “Oh. Oh. Oh, bloody…why the bloody hell did you answer?”
Avery rolls his eyes and covers his face with one hand. “Because you called, and you never call. You accused me of not liking chocolate as though I committed some crime, then you went silent—then you called,” he adds again for effect. “Trust me, I can pick this up any time.”
Alejandro mutters something in Spanish, and once again, Avery regrets not choosing that as his language. “I’ll be home tonight, but it’ll be better if you come by tomorrow.”
Well, then. He gets a few extra hours to keep his job. Maybe he should go on a spending spree, though he won’t really need it with a million dollars on its way to his bank account. Shit. “Right. Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
His heart feels battered and sore, and it’s his own goddamn fault for letting himself catch feelings.
He waits, and Alejandro says nothing, so he checks the phone and realizes the call’s been disconnected. Typical. He doesn’t much feel like coming now, so he eases the plug out, washes up, and gets dressed. He supposes that after tomorrow all of this can change. He can take a day to mourn, then take a day to appreciate what he has. And then he can drag Shanice out and make her be wing-woman so he can hook up and finally get an orgasm that isn’t coming from his own hand.
So, not the worst, it just comes with a side of heartache because the chance that he and Alejandro could ever be more to each other is dying before his eyes.
“It’s allowed to hurt,” he whispers to himself as he tries to swallow down the ache in his chest. “It’s allowed to suck.”
It doesn’t help much, but it’s something. It gets him settled under his blanket on the sofa with the cooking show back on, and a pile of Thai take-out boxes on the table in case he decides later that he wants to eat his feelings. He has a feeling his future is going to look a lot like this for many weeks to come, but he knows Alejandro isn’t the only man on the planet worth loving.
He’s just the idiot Avery happened to fall for.
8
Rush Toward The End
Avery is a mess by the time the car arrives for him. He has a novel-length text composed to Sharice saved in his drafts, but he doesn’t think she can come to his rescue this time. There are no words of wisdom that have the magic to save him from having his heart broken by a man he knew would never, ever love him back.
He tells himself to be grateful for everything he’s gotten as the car pulls up, and he climbs in. He sinks into the leather seats, and they smell new and a little bit fake. He wonders if, like the gloves, Alejandro spite-replaced them with the expensive shit that is probably entirely non-biodegradable and worse than killing off the cows.
The gloves made him furious and tragically elated because even though he’s not wearing the stupid mittens Avery bought him, it meant that Alejandro heard him. It meant in the cavern behind his ribs, something like a heart was beating, and it showed in the way he cared enough to do something that pissed Avery off after that long lecture. And he thought it meant something—and maybe it did. Maybe it does.
But it’s hard to consider that the case now, because the world he’s been living in for the past year is about to crash down around his head, and right before the holidays. His throat is tight and he realizes with some epic mortification, he’s probably going to cry when it happens.
Shit.
Was it the chocolate that did it? Was that some kind of fucking deal-breaker? He lets that fuel his indignant anger as the car travels over the freeway and into a part of town where, even with the cool million he’s about to earn, he could never afford to live. He thinks Gwyneth Paltrow is probably Alejandro’s neighbor. He thinks if maybe he was