couldn’t stay there now. If it got worse—if Max found out where he was or who he was with—there was no telling what he’d do.
Pushing to his feet, Xan walked to the window and pulled the curtains back, staring out into the foggy dawn. The sky was starting to pale, but only just, and he felt anxiety creeping up his spine. He was torn in so many different pieces, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to put himself back together in the right shape ever again.
The day before had been hell, but the night had been a dream when he’d curled up between Luca and Sebastion and let their tender care ease him to sleep. It had been a quiet fantasy he let himself hold on to with a white-knuckled grip until Luca had walked him to the guest room and tucked him in bed.
And he hadn’t felt unwanted, but he knew he didn’t belong there. This wasn’t his home, his relationship, his marriage. He was a guest, and he was dirtying this pristine, perfect thing between these two men with his bullshit.
Taking a ragged breath, Xan slipped on his sweater and jeans, then crept out of the room. He listened for the sound of anyone awake, but when he was met with silence, he slipped out the front door and started on the path Luca had taken him with Ivy.
The neighborhood looked almost alien in the light just before dawn. A blue haze had settled over rooftops and manicured lawns, and Xan wondered what it would be like to live that life. To have all the comforts of home and love and security. All the things he’d been missing since his parents died.
He’d been normal once—whatever normal really was. He’d been loved, even when he pushed his parents to the brink of their tempers. He had plans to go to college and get a degree and meet a nice boy and start a life of his own somewhere close by. He imagined family holidays and going back to see his childhood home with his partner and laughing about old baby pictures and embarrassing stories.
The worst part was he could still picture that life. He could picture it with two sets of hands holding him and two pairs of lips pressing easy kisses to his temple. He could picture Sebastion waxing poetic about the latest medical science discovery with his dad and Luca in the kitchen cooking and charming his mother. And Ivy sitting at his feet looking up at him like she loved him as much as the other two.
The fantasy was agonizing—shredding him from the inside.
His parents were dead, Luca and Sebastion loved each other, and all he had left from his former life were the ashes from the journals Max had burned in the bottom of their tub.
His knees gave out as he collapsed on a park bench, and the sobs ripped from his chest with a fury he hadn’t expected. He managed to stifle the sound of his cries in the sleeves of his sweater, but the ache in his throat wouldn’t let up. He wanted to collapse to the ground and curl in on himself and dissolve into nothing just to make the pain stop.
How? How had he let it get this bad? What had he done so wrong that he’d driven Max to the brink?
His years in therapy told him in a quiet voice that sounded too much like his old therapist, ‘This is not your fault. You did not deserve this.’
But those words were hard to believe when the solution had been so simple. Walk away. Walk away when Nick warned him. Walk away the first time Max came home drunk, or called him fat, or laughed in his face and told him no one would ever want him, so don’t bother leaving if he didn’t want to be alone forever.
He could have walked away the first time he threatened to go. He could have stayed gone the first time he packed a bag and left.
Instead, he kept expecting Max to be different with each hollow apology—to return to a man he was never really capable of being. And now Xan was here with a busted eye and a split lip, making the lives of the first two people to really care about him in so long that much more difficult.
He needed to get out—to get away. He didn’t have a car, but he had money. He could get a hotel and wait