22. Alex

CHAPTER 22

ALEX

Dylan slept peacefully on his back, even though it had taken him some time to settle in on the bruising. I watched him, leaning against the bedroom wall and shaking the ache out of my hand until he started to softly snore. He was so peaceful when he slept, so non-combative, but I understood his need to fight for control. The fear of losing it before you realized how much you stood to gain…

I wasn’t submissive—I never had been—but Beamer had explained it to me enough times that I understood the choice of walking up to the precipice and either fighting like hell not to fall or jumping off with your eyes wide open. My phone buzzed quietly in my pocket, a reminder alarm that I had lunch plans with my friends.

All of them.

Since the weekend at Boston and Ford’s farm, Kale had been making a concerted effort to be a decent human, which was unsettling half the time and welcome the other half. It was a fine line, and I recognized he tried not just for his brother or Christian, but also for himself. I was hesitant to leave Dylan unsupervised, I hadn’t let him out of my sight since he got home from the hospital, but that cry had really taken it out of him and I figured he’d be asleep until nearly dinner time.

Dylan slept like garbage at night, but I didn’t know if that was a side effect of the hospital or the assault. He didn’t want to talk about it, and that was one thing I wasn’t going to force, but I had strongly encouraged—or demanded—he start therapy. He hadn’t used his safe word, so I’d gotten him set up with twice a week sessions to start, but he’d said the doctor said they could move to once a month after another few weeks.

I also didn’t make him talk to me about his sessions. Those weren’t for me anyway. Whatever work he did with the good doctor was for him, not for me. The only thing that mattered to me was that he was whole, because the thing developing between us wasn’t fit for half a man.

Dylan let out a loud and rumbling snore, the tension between his brows finally relaxing. He was sound asleep, so I set the broken spatula down on the bedside table and walked quietly out of the bedroom. He knew I was leaving. I’d gotten dressed while he brushed his teeth, and I was relieved that his eyes didn’t spark with rebellion. There’d been a brief flicker of…something, but it was gone just as fast as it had flared to life.

Even though I told him where I was going and how long I’d be gone, I left him a note on the kitchen counter with the same information. I had half a mind to tell him to spend his downtime searching information on how to cook an egg in a cast iron pan, but it would have defeated the purpose of the whole exercise.

Dylan needed to learn how to ask for help.

For as long as I’d known him, he’d had a stubborn streak a mile wide, and if he wanted things to work with me, it would have to shrink. I didn’t want to break him of it completely, I wasn’t lying when I said I liked the fight, but he was his own worst enemy and he was too blinded by his own preconceptions about himself to see it. Helping him get there was the best thing I could do for him, whether he believed it or not.

The motivation wasn’t entirely pure, though. Because if he and I were to stay together in the ways I wanted and the ways he needed, he had to get over himself first. Even though he took his punishments as well as any other partner of mine ever had, he didn’t understand the point of them. He cried through them, the pain giving him a chance to cry out all the feelings he couldn’t express otherwise, but the fight was still against himself instead of me.

I left the note for him on top of my unfinished crossword, leaving out the internet search suggestion. He’d barely been on his phone anyway since coming home, and I doubted he would pull it out to google how to cook an egg. I made it halfway to my door before my own unease set in, the prospect of leaving him alone almost enough to make me crawl out of my skin.

“Idiot,” I said, turning back and throwing the note into my trash can.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and fired off a text to my friends.

Meet me here instead.

Ford

Where is here?

Kale

I imagine he’s home with his adopted little pet.

I’m home

Brooks

But I was looking forward to eating.

Kale

Eat Tate.

Brooks

I think I liked it better when you were being a sullen piece of shit.

I regret all of you.

But I’m not leaving, so come over or go without me.

Brooks

Do you have food?

Kale

He’s keeping another human alive over there, of course he has food.

I gathered the consensus the three of them were going to make their way over to my house, and if Dylan had been awake for the whole thing, I would have cooked them all eggs in the cast iron to prove a point, but he was sound asleep, so I settled on throwing together a salad and some sliced meats and cheeses. I carried all the trays and bowls out to the back yard, wanting to give Dylan as much quiet in the house as I could. I knew from first-hand experience, the full body releases he’d been having this week were extremely physically taxing.

Ford was the first to arrive with a paper grocery bag full of apples, undoubtedly from the farm. He shoved the whole thing against my chest and grinned, closing the front door behind him and right in Brooks’ face.

“Prick,” Brooks grumbled, brushing past him with a bottle of wine in each hand.

Ford chuckled and followed me through the house. I left the apples in the kitchen. Maybe I’d give Dylan a break from eggs and let him try his hand at apple juice. Ford grabbed one out of the bag and bit into it, holding it between his teeth so his hands were free to get four wine glasses out of the cabinet by my sink.

Tears prickled against the backs of my eyelids and I left the two of them in the kitchen so they didn’t see me cry. It wasn’t a full cry, but enough tears leaked out that either of them would have called me on it, if not both. It had just been so long since everyone had been over, since I’d bothered to invite them. The only thing missing was Beamer, and the more time and space between us, the more I started to miss him as a friend, not a lover.

“Thanks for helping,” Ford said, coming up behind me and setting the glasses down on the table. Brooks had the wine opener in his hand and I cast them both an unamused sideways glance.

“I’m hosting.”

“Because you didn’t want to leave.” Brooks’ stare flickered up toward my bedroom window on the third floor.

“He’s asleep,” I said. “We had a long morning.”

“How are you dealing with that?” he asked.

Ford took one of the wine bottles out of Brooks’ hand and poured us each a glass before sinking down into one of the chairs and stretching his legs out in front of him.

“I forgot how nice it was here,” he said, taking a drink of the wine and smacking his lips.

I looked at him, looked at Brooks, looked at my home…

“So did I,” I said, clearing my throat. “And I’m dealing with that the best I can. With him.”

“I don’t know a single thing about this little pet of yours,” Ford said.

“He’s not a pet,” I corrected, even though he very much was. I didn’t want my friends to get in the habit of reducing him to a stray when he had the potential to be so much more.

“About this Dylan of yours,” Ford corrected.

That wasn’t much better, but…

“He’s Tate’s best friend,” Brooks answered.

“In over his head with life a bit.” I didn’t want to give his whole story away, but after we’d hijacked Kale’s plane and fled the farm the weekend before, Ford deserved as close to the truth as I could get without betraying confidence. “He can tell you whatever he wants whenever he wants.”

“Happy to see you’re tightlipped as ever,” Ford teased.

“Didn’t we just talk about letting people have their own shit?” Kale’s voice rang out crisp and clear from behind me, and I swiveled around to see him standing in the doorway with an amused grin on his face. “The door was unlocked, so I let myself in.”

“Happy to see that even with everything that has changed, some things never will,” Brooks muttered, pouring a fourth glass of wine and sliding it toward one of the empty seats at the table.

“How’s Dylan?” Kale asked, taking the seat beside Ford, whose shoulders tensed for half a second before settling back to their normal positioning.

“Asleep,” I said.

“And still you couldn’t bear to leave?”

“Let him be,” Brooks warned.

I swallowed, throwing him a sidelong glance. Of the four of us, Brooks was the only one who knew the details of what happened last time I’d left Dylan alone, when I’d let my own pride get the better of me. Sometimes at night, while Dylan slept soundly in my bed, I wondered if it had been my shortcomings as a dominant or my shortcomings as a man that had caused me to safeword on him that day and send him on his way. If I’d been more levelheaded, less emotional…I struggled to find the source of the flaw.

“Stop it,” Brooks said under his breath, just to me.

I forced a smile that settled into something real enough, then chased my own doubts back with a drink of wine.

“Tell me about the farm,” I said, swiveling to face Ford. “I want to hear all about how rural life has domesticated you.”

“It helps now that Brooks brokered a deal with Lang over the soup kitchen.”

I bit my lips together between my teeth, Dylan’s father’s surname not lost on me.

“What happened there?” I asked.

“He owns the place Boston had been levering most the donations to,” Brooks explained, “and taking donations would have ruined the way he was cooking his own books to evade taxes.”

“Boston was insistent, though,” Ford picked up the explanation. “He’s friends with the manager, and that was where they wanted the produce to land.”

“We got him in the end.” Brooks and Ford clinked their glasses together.

It was impossible for me to not think about how those negotiations could have just as easily had Dylan on the other end of the table from my two best friends. It was his passion for creating music, for living his life for himself, that had kept him away from his father’s dealings for so long.

I finally understood the absolute desperation he must have felt. That he must still be feeling.

“Where’d you go?” Kale asked me, titling his head to the side while Brooks and Ford lapsed into a conversation about whatever scheme they’d used to get what they wanted out of Dylan’s dad. I wondered if they knew who they were talking about…

“Just thinking,” I said, raising my glass.

Kale exhaled and rolled his eyes, taking a drink of his wine.

“You look…happy,” he said. “Happy, but tired.”

I shrugged.

“I have to be honest, Alex.” Kale grabbed the bottle of wine and topped off both our glasses, ignoring Brooks and Ford entirely. “I’ve always been a little jealous of you.”

I scoffed. “Jealous? Of me?”

He glanced up at the top floor of my house, the shadow of the roofline washing the yard in shade.

“I like things handed to me.” He smiled, a little coy. “If they’re not freely given, they’re freely taken.”

“Are we talking about your kidnapped prince?”

“Hey, now. He came on his own accord.”

Kale was insufferable on his best day.

“I bet he did.”

“It wasn’t a sex joke, though…” He chuckled. “I meant that I’m a lazy, spoiled man, and you’ve never been afraid to work for it.”

I followed his stare up to my bedroom window.

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“I think we both know it is,” he said.

At the same time, Ford reached for the bottle of wine, making an outraged sound when he picked it up and found it empty. Kale laughed at him and took a drink, leaning back comfortably in his chair and turning his attention to the small fountain against the back wall.

I hadn’t looked at my relationship with Dylan as work, but that helped put it in a new perspective for me. That was really what he needed, after all. Someone to show up for him and fight for him when he couldn’t do it for himself. I was a man of many means and resources…it was the least I could do.

My showing up had nothing to do with my feelings. It was too soon for that.

“You’re so greedy,” Brooks said to Kale, twisting the corkscrew on the second bottle of wine. “Alex would give me the shirt off his back if I asked for it and you won’t even leave me a drink of wine on a hot spring day.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but Kale shot me a knowing look, one brow raised.

There wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for my friends. And even less that I wouldn’t do for Dylan.

Maybe it wasn’t as soon as I thought.