Moments of Disarray Read online

  “I’m sorry,” Luke said.

  Alex held up his phone. He was breathing too hard and hated himself for letting this guy get that level of a reaction out of him. “Who calls me and what they want from me is none of your goddamned business. Who I take home and fuck, also none of your business.”

  “I know. I know. I’m sorry,” Luke repeated, then again, softer.

  The two beers Alex had during dinner had given him a warmth close to a buzz, but he was far from drunk. He had no excuses for his tone or his words. He was an asshole, simply that. “You’re nobody to me.”

  Luke didn’t argue the point. He took two steps back. In the flash of light from the streetlamp, his mouth had gone thin and pinched. His fists clenched at his sides.

  “I picked you up in a fucking country bar,” Alex continued.

  In his hand, his phone rang again. Jamie, again. He wanted to turn and throw the phone into the river as hard as he could. Watch it sink, still ringing.

  He didn’t realize he’d walked to the edge of the concrete wall overlooking the water, phone raised, until Luke appeared beside him. He grabbed Alex’s wrist, but gently, and lowered it. With his other hand, he took the phone from Alex and tucked it into Alex’s front jeans pocket.

  They stood close enough for Alex to smell the beer on Luke’s breath and the undertone of his cologne. Something frat boys would wear, Alex thought, shaking with anger. Shaking with something, anyway.

  When Luke put his arms around him, Alex didn’t fight the embrace. He pushed his face against the side of Luke’s neck to breathe in the warm, male scent of him. He closed his eyes. Not crying, nothing as stupid as that.

  “You don’t even know me,” Alex said.

  Luke’s hand came up to thread through Alex’s hair, resting on the back of his neck. “That’s okay.”

  “I’m not asking you to come home with me tonight,” Alex said.

  Luke just squeezed the back of Alex’s neck and stepped back with a smile. “That’s okay, too.”

  Chapter 7

  The leads Alex had on the freelance consulting stuff had panned out in a big way. He wanted to think it had everything to do with his resumé and not the tight pants he’d worn to the meeting or the flirting he’d done with the head of HR, who he knew for a fact was unhappily fucking the guy who’d interviewed him. He knew that because Patrick, the lawyer he’d met in Japan before everything had gone to shit, had kept him up on the gossip chain. In the end, did it matter? Not when it got Alex some work. He would owe Patrick, though, and he didn’t like owing anyone anything.

  He hadn’t spoken to Luke since the Tuesday they’d spent at the Mütter Museum and the argument they’d had after. They’d shared a cab, dropping Alex at his hotel and taking Luke on home to wherever he lived. They hadn’t kissed goodbye, but that might have been because Alex was still being pissy or because Luke didn’t want the cab driver to see him kissing a dude. It was hard to say, and Alex was irritated with himself for even thinking about the reasons why.

  The messages from Jamie had started off lighthearted but gotten darker. He’d been drinking. Alec could hear it in the growing slur of his words and the pleading tone in his best friend’s voice.

  “You don’t have to come home,” Jamie’s last message had said. “Just tell me where you are. I’ll come there.”

  Alex had not yet returned his friend’s call. He wasn’t sure what he could possibly say. He couldn’t talk to Jamie the way they’d always done in the past. That had been in what Alex would now always think of as before.

  Before Anne.

  Now he was in the after, and only time was going to make any of it better. Maybe not even that. Every day he woke up thinking he might stop thinking about her, might stop aching, that she would slip from his mind as easily as the turning of a page in a book he wanted to finish.

  Anne was not a page in a book. She was the entire fucking novel, a story without a happy ending, and not even Alex was dumb enough to reach out to her husband and try to pretend that none of it had happened.

  Jamie never mentioned Anne in the phone calls. That was unexpected. Jamie typically was a rug sweeper. That he was saying nothing meant he knew exactly how much had happened and what it all had meant. He never even spoke her name, not even in passing. Jamie knew it all.

  Alex had checked out of the hotel to spend a few days traveling to Pittsburgh for some consulting work, then to follow up on the offer for a multi-month gig not so far from Philly in good old Chocolatetown, USA. Hershey. The money was nice, and the work would keep him busy. Hershey was a small town in the center of Pennsylvania, a couple hours from Philadelphia, a couple from Baltimore, DC, just a few longer to New York City. Even if he only spent a short time there, it would be enough, he thought. Enough to get him back on his feet. Enough to get him on track. To settle him. So far, though, he hadn’t taken it. He did, however, go back to Philadelphia.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Kennedy.” The front desk clerk’s broad grin held no hint of flirtation, something Alex appreciated. “Your luggage was taken up to your room. You’re on the sixth floor this time.”

  “Great. Thanks.” Alex took the fresh keys and made his way to the sixth floor.

  The new room was identical to the old room, except reversed. He laughed at that, thinking that if he were to get stoned or shithammered drunk that he would end up pissing in the trash can at the side of the bed instead of the toilet. Getting stoned or shithammered suddenly sounded like the best idea he’d had in the past week.

  Do a little drinking. A little smoking. Maybe some pills. Get drunk, get high, get laid. A perfect Friday night, one guaranteed to erase any guilt he felt about not answering Jamie’s messages.

  In the shower, Alex bent his head beneath the hot spray of water and closed his eyes. He’d taken a couple shots from his almost empty bottle of Jameson before coming in, and his head was pleasantly buzzing. His hands moved over his body, assessing it. A little thicker here, in the places he pinched. Muscled unexpectedly here, from walking so much all around the city. His face, scruffy with the bristle of beard he’d been letting grow in, although he almost always preferred to be clean-shaven. His hair, too, had grown overlong, but he felt no urge to cut it.

  Beneath the water, he got on his hands and knees. Eyes closed. He wanted to cry, but couldn’t find the tears. He didn’t deserve them, he thought. He didn’t deserve the release of weeping. He opened his mouth to let out a scream, but nothing came out except a hiss of air.

  He was never going to see her again.

  He had walked away from her because it was the right thing to do. He had broken her; he had slaughtered himself. It was the right thing to do. The right and best thing. The most awful thing.

  He loved her, and he would never be with her, and he had chosen that when there had been the chance for something else. A moment in time when if only he’d had the courage to be happy, everything might have changed.

  Everything changes, Alex thought.

  If he could turn back the time, if she could forgive him, he thought, then maybe he could learn to…what? What could he learn? To feel? To trust? To fucking love, the way other people did? He would never be good for anyone but himself, and he couldn’t even be counted on to be that.

  The whiskey had hit him harder than he’d thought it would. An empty stomach. Melancholy. Emotions surged over him, and he gave up to it a little because of the hot shower and his sudden and utterly brutal loneliness.

  He loved her, Anne Kinney. His best friend Jamie’s wife. Jamie had invited him into their marriage, but Alex had been the one to take advantage. To step too far. He’d been selfish and greedy in his love. It had never been meant to become so much, but oh, God, it had, and now he tried so hard to weep and found nothing but an empty and barren desert where his tears ought to have been.

  Alex got to his feet. He tipped his head back to let the hot water fill his mouth. To wash over his eyes, still closed. His hands moved over his body. Between his legs, to h