Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 68293 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 341(@200wpm)___ 273(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68293 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 341(@200wpm)___ 273(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
A tiny warmth kindled in his stomach when he saw he already had a text from Wes. He opened it excitedly, then his stomach seized.
Wes: I can’t do this. I’m sorry. We have to be done.
“Wait,” Adam said to no one. “What?”
He read it again because clearly he was missing something.
But no. That’s all the text said.
Adam called Wes but he didn’t answer.
“What the hell.”
He texted: You can’t just text me that and then not answer the phone, Wes. PLEASE pick up. Gus is asleep and I can’t leave.
He waited a minute, then called again. This time, Wes answered. His voice sounded strange and croaky.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“What’s going on? Are you okay? I don’t understand. What do you mean we’re done?”
Adam could feel the tears flooding his eyes and knew that soon his voice would sound squeaky and emotional. He’d come to terms with being an emotional person a long time ago, but he still resented that when he got angry he cried.
“I’m so sorry,” Wes said again. “I just can’t. I thought I could be... I thought with you I could... But I just can’t. It’s too much. I’m... God, I’m so sorry.”
Then he hung up.
Furious, Adam called him right back. He picked up but didn’t speak.
“Wes, come on. What happened? You can’t... We had... What the hell is going on?”
Wes sighed and when he spoke again his voice was choked. Desperate.
“Please,” he said. “Please just leave me alone.”
The line went dead and Adam let the phone slide from suddenly numb fingers.
Outside, the lights still lit the night cheerily. The fire still crackled merrily on the television. Gus still slumbered sweetly in her bed.
But everything was different now.
Adam was alone again. And this time he didn’t even know why.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Adam
Adam woke on the couch, fire still blazing on the TV, neck crooked painfully, with Gus standing over him.
“Can I have waffles with faces?” she asked excitedly, then crowed, “It’s almost vacation!”
Adam’s eyelids felt like they were made of sand, and his mouth tasted like he’d licked stamps in hell. When he managed to sit up, his skull protested by splitting in two and running in opposite directions away from his cringing brain.
Oh, right. The wine.
After Wes had destroyed him with sentence fragments like shrapnel he’d opened a bottle and attempted to play Sherlock Holmes with his life.
With a physical form that made him long for death and nary a clue to show for his investigations, Adam concluded that there was a reason Sherlock was more into cocaine than white wine.
“Um,” he said intelligently.
“Great!” Gus said, and skipped into the kitchen in her red-and-white-striped pajamas, like the world’s loudest candy cane.
Adam disagreed with the word on principle at the moment, but if there was one thing he would not do it was ruin Gus’ mood with his own heartbreak. There’d be time enough for that later, unfortunately.
So he scraped himself off the couch, instructed his emotions to stay coiled acidly in his stomach, and dragged himself into the kitchen to slice strawberries and arrange them in smiling faces on his daughter’s morning waffles.
* * *
Work was a nightmare. Adam was not good at keeping his emotions inside. Even customers so oblivious they asked where the hammers were while standing in front of the hammers asked Adam what was wrong. When Marie told him his “Nothing!”s were scaring the customers he switched to, “Oh, just a bad day. Now what can I help you with?”
But it was a losing battle. By the time he left work early to pick up Gus—something he’d planned weeks ago to celebrate the start of her vacation—his eyes were red with unshed (and some shed-in-the-bathroom) tears and his lips bitten red.
He knew what he really needed was a couple of days on his own to cry his heart out and watch old movies while he ate cookie dough from the tube, but he didn’t have that luxury.
Instead, he blasted Christmas music on the radio, rolled the windows down, and scream-sang along at the top of his lungs as the freezing wind reddened his whole face to match his eyes. There was a kind of exultant frenzy to it that made Adam feel better enough that he arrived at Gus’ school in a state that could easily be misread as pre-vacation sugar high mania, rather than heartbroken despair.
So that was good.
Gus ran to the car with her arms full of papers and her scarf streaming behind her, and immediately began to chatter excitedly about a science project she wanted to talk to Wes about.
That...wasn’t.
* * *
Adam and Gus lay on the couch, legs interlaced, staring blankly at the marathon of old Christmas movies on TV.
Gus had taken the news that Wes wouldn’t be spending Christmas with them hard. At first, she’d asked if he decided to go visit his parents after all, and Adam had dearly wanted to say yes and avoid the entire conversation. Have their Christmas and hide his feelings from Gus until after. But that would only delay the inevitable. Besides, he was terrible at hiding his feelings.