even though it doesn’t feel like home. I hope you think of me sometimes.
Love Always,
Alexander
Staring down at the tea in his mug, Xan let out a quiet sigh and thumbed at the journal sitting by his hand. He felt a sort of pang of regret for everything he’d left behind, but he knew if he stayed to try and clean up the mess—he knew if he took anything with him—he’d end up right back where he started.
His heart couldn’t take falling in love with Sebastion and Luca any deeper. It was shattered from his mess with Max, and after he’d spilled everything to Allie, she said maybe he was feeling that way because they’d rescued him from something he didn’t think he’d ever get out of.
And the logical part of his brain said it would be a mistake to dismiss it, even if his heart knew those two men were more important than that.
But his life sat in ruins—he’d abandoned his apartment, his things, his degree, and now he was sitting in Allie’s little flat in London, sleeping on the uncomfortable sofa, running out the six months on his passport because he knew he couldn’t get a job there. He had money—enough to start something like a life. He just didn’t know where.
Allie was his only family, and he was just now realizing that Max had systematically destroyed all tentative friendships he’d tried to form over the last four years. If his intention was to break Xan—to isolate him and shred him down to his bones—well, he’d accomplished it.
He lifted the mug to his lips and took a drink and wondered why the fuck everyone was so into hot leaf water. He was starting to feel restless, and he fucking missed Sebastion and Luca with a powerful ache that terrified him because they’d only been in his life a short time. Hell, he’d been gone longer than he’d known them.
His therapist would say time apart was good. That waiting until his powerful feelings faded to a low simmer so he could examine how he felt—so he could get to know them as people instead of the men who saved him—was the smart thing to do.
But of course, he’d burned that bridge by sneaking out in the middle of the night, taking his backpack and a single journal, and hopping on a plane to meet his cousin at Heathrow. So maybe it wasn’t Max, he thought to himself as he sipped more tea. Maybe Max hadn’t ruined his friendships with others.
Maybe, yet again, it was just him.
With a sigh, Xan pushed to his feet and walked over to the window. It was raining. Again. It had been raining since he got there, and he had a feeling it wasn’t going to stop very often. He liked that people didn’t really seem to give a shit. More people used umbrellas than he expected, but a lot of people just trudged through like it was a simple fact of the day: you were going to get wet, and you were going to be cold and miserable.
He felt that a little too profoundly, and he wondered if he’d actually be able to get through this without forcing himself to climb all the way to rock bottom. He didn’t want to be the mess of grief he was when he’d finally started seeing his counselor. He wanted to know that he could fuck up—that things could get fucked up—and he could pull himself out of it without everything burning down around him first.
And maybe he was already partway there. At Allie’s insistence, he’d sent the copy of the police report to the university and requested a leave of absence—which had been granted. He wouldn’t fail his classes, and he could keep working on his dissertation research. He’d just be set back a semester of credits, and he could deal with that.
What was four months, after all, when he just survived four years of misery.
And he was starting to realize that too—that it hadn’t been good from the beginning. There were just moments of not bad that had stretched on for longer periods of time. But now that he was away from Max, now that he wasn’t being dragged back in and toyed with and manipulated, he could see where it was broken from the start.
His stomach had twisted in nausea when he thought back to how fucking proud he’d been when he hit that milestone Nick had created. Nothing longer than six months, well ha!