Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 69895 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69895 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
He couldn’t wait to tell Zachary about what he’d seen.
* * *
Bram was making dinner when Zachary knocked on his door. He knew it was Zachary because Zachary always knocked exactly twice.
“Hey, baby!” He kissed him and drew him inside. “How was your day?”
Zachary’s eyes were bright, and he was grinning. “I got the promotion.”
Bram’s heart sank as pride in Zachary bloomed.
“Congratulations!” He made himself say that before he said anything else. “How will it change your daily life?”
“I’ll be in a more supervisory role, working with other architects to assign projects and approve them. So it’ll all be very structured and orderly.” That clearly pleased him. “I’ll actually be doing less design, but that’s expected given my supervisory capacity. It’s more money. Although the cost of living in Denver is much higher than here, so it probably evens out.”
His eyes went faraway, like he was doing math in his head.
Bram had tried very hard to express his positive feelings first, but when Zachary uttered the word Denver, Bram’s whole world skidded to a stop and he sank down into the easy chair he’d recently bought.
“So you’re...you’re leaving, then? For sure?”
He thought he was probably going to cry. A lot.
Again. He was being left by the man he loved again. Maybe he hadn’t told Zachary he loved him. Maybe the circumstances were different. But Bram’s heart didn’t care about fairness or circumstance. All it felt was devastation.
“I don’t suppose you’d, um. Would you want to move to Denver?” Zachary asked.
It was so clearly an afterthought—apparently he hadn’t given even one second’s contemplation to the fact that moving would separate them—that Bram goggled at him.
“Well, I just mean, um. You moved all the way here from Washington, so it wouldn’t be a big deal maybe.”
He bit his lip.
Bram stood up and started pacing.
“I moved here because I was a total wreck. I sold everything I owned and came here because I needed someplace that was just mine. That didn’t make me think of betrayal and heartbreak everywhere I looked. Because this place felt good to me. Fresh and clean and—and nature. I don’t want to live in some dirty city.”
He could hear the panic and pain in his voice, but Zachary just frowned.
“Actually, Denver was just rated as being the second-best city to live in in the United—”
Bram threw up his hands. He realized, with an absent, this-indicates-growth thought, that he should not have kept his feelings about this bottled up for the last few days in an attempt to be chill. He should’ve sat Zachary down and told him exactly how he felt. But he hadn’t and now it was too late.
“That’s not what I meant! I can’t believe we’re...and you’re gonna just leave!”
“Well, I...” Zachary began. He looked confused and uncertain. “I...didn’t think it would matter,” Zachary said.
“Wouldn’t matter? How’s that?”
“I thought... I assumed you’d be gone by the time it happened,” Zachary said resignedly.
His tone was mild, but the words landed like a spear through Bram’s heart. He’d felt like the edges of his new life were being folded up as neatly and elegantly as origami. But no. It had been crumpled up like one of Zachary’s rejected sketches.
“I need you to give me some space right now,” Bram choked out. The tears were about to come, and Bram didn’t want Zachary to see.
“I don’t... I... Are you mad at me?” Zachary asked.
He sounded forlorn and he looked so small.
“Yeah,” Bram said. “Yeah, I’m mad and I’m really sad and I gotta cry in private now. Can you take off, please?”
Zachary slipped out of the house like a ghost and closed the door quietly behind him.
Bram swore, then his words were lost to crying. Hem, sweet Hem, stuck her nose in his face where he’d sat down on the floor and licked the tears from his cheeks. She dropped her chin onto his knee, her warmth the only thing keeping him grounded. He wrapped his arms around her and let out a shaky breath.
If he’d thought that going through two heartbreaks already this year might’ve tempered the pain of this one, he’d been very wrong.
This pain wasn’t betrayal. Zachary hadn’t really done anything wrong. This pain was pure and clean.
Bram had fallen in love with Zachary Glass and now Zachary Glass was leaving.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Zachary
Zachary was mostly numb with a kind of itch in his brain. The itch usually meant that he was missing something—some bit of information or connection required to understand something that other people seemed to understand intuitively.
Bram was sad he was leaving. That made sense. Bram was mad Zachary hadn’t told him sooner. That made sense. He could see that he could’ve been clearer.
But none of that accounted for Bram’s...he could only call it devastation.
He hated to see Bram like that. Bram, who was usually sunshine and smiles and excited energy.