wrong, calling it his own personal hell. He’d been through so much worse, but he was starting to feel like even the presence of Max was a hand around his neck, squeezing tighter and tighter every time he woke up next to him.
He just…didn’t know what to do anymore.
The man with the phoenix tattoo had been nothing more than a fantasy. His reality was sharper, and darker, and only slightly more hopeless. But he knew this couldn’t go on forever. He was engaged, but there was no wedding coming. There was just the inevitable end to the fork in the road he’d chosen.
He just wasn’t sure when.
Chapter One
Dear Anyone Willing To Listen,
Today sucked. I think I’m getting tired of saying that. Max came home drunk again tonight, and I told him I wanted to leave. This time he didn’t beg. He just laughed in my face and told me I’d never have the balls, because no one would ever want me, and he knew I hated being lonely, so I wasn’t going anywhere.
He was right about that last part. About being lonely. I don’t know how right he was about the rest. But maybe it’s telling that I’m still here. He’s passed out in bed next to me, snoring. He smells like old vodka, and I fucking hate it.
I wish I had been smart enough to apply to another school. But I have a year and a half left, and I can’t bail now.
Can I?
Hey universe, can I get some help? A sign? Anything?
No?
Cool. Thanks.
Love Always,
Alexander
There were occasional mornings when Xan woke up in his bed and had no idea where he was. He didn’t think that was normal considering he’d sold his parents’ old house and moved into the apartment with his boyfriend three and a half years before. It wasn’t long enough to forget what the furniture looked like, and the memory of his parents sitting at the breakfast nook in the mornings hadn’t faded.
But sometimes his life felt like it belonged to a stranger.
Rolling over, he stretched his arm out and came within inches of grazing Max’s shoulder. He didn’t touch him—Max was a bear in the morning and not the good kind. And maybe that was the problem too, because for the last year and a half—or hell, maybe even longer—his boyfriend also started to feel like a stranger. He told himself that it was fine. People grew up, they grew into different shapes as they reached new milestones in their lives.
When Xan first met his fiancé, he was dipping his toes into the professional world and learning what it meant to be an actual adult. Xan had been a wide-eyed college sophomore virgin with a half-assed idea about what the fuck he wanted to do with his major and a house his dead parents had left him after a drunk driver had killed them both.
Things moved fast, but Xan had sort of let himself get swept up with the tide, and it was a lot easier when he didn’t fight it. He let Max pick out the apartment and the furniture. He let Max talk him into shoving what he had left from the house sale into storage, and he let him pick out the car they shared and what food filled up the fridge.
Xan had long since grown out of his picky phase, so it hadn’t mattered, but lately he’d started to feel like a guest there. Nothing belonged to him. He wanted to find pieces of who he was in the dark corners and high shelves, but he realized he didn’t even know what to look for. Max had come along and eclipsed all the small pieces of what made Alexander the person he was, and now he felt adrift and a little bit blank. He had a couple of mugs in the cupboard, some tiny tea spoons, a photo on the shelf, some books for school. But none of those things added up to the picture of who he might be.
If disaster struck and only a handful of humans survived, future archaeologists probably wouldn’t know that more than one person even lived in that stupid apartment.
With a sigh, he pushed up from the bed and jumped into the shower. The line of expensive boutique soaps in their brown glass bottles lined the foggy window. He reached for one, and his ring glinted in the morning sun coming through the glass. The man who had given it to him no longer felt like