Love in Tandem

by Natalie Arden

Scott shook his head, wishing for water. He wasn’t reading any of this right, was he? Because he’d definitely heard Eamon say a million times that Kevin was the guy who was still on his side at CarreSys and the guy in this interview? This guy was not on Eamon’s side.

  From the million sly little digs about their CEO’s mysterious absence, to the hints at big changes about to happen soon to CarreSys, Scott decided he hated Kevin.

  “This guy’s a fucking asshole,” he announced to the room at large.

  “Yeah?” Lennox said eagerly. “What did your boy do now?”

  “Not Eamon,” Scott said, annoyed at Lennox’s inability to keep up. “This other asshole. His VP.”

  “Yeah?” Lennox said. “Is he trying to steal your man?”

  Scott snorted a laugh. “As if. I think he fucking hates him.”

  “So he should be your best friend right now,” Lennox told him, laughing. “Me and Tones aside, of course.”

  “But he’s being a fucking asshole to Eamon,” Scott said, bizarrely offended. Eamon was a fucking perfectionist who wanted everything to be his own way: this guy was acting like he didn’t even give a shit about the company Eamon had spent years burning himself out over. At least insult the guy for the right reasons!

  “Okay?” Tony said, confused.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Scott protested. “He’s supposed to be Eamon’s guy on the inside. His one supporter. And he’s not doing that at all!” He flicked back to the page of search results, did some searching on Kevin’s name instead. It should have been harder to find, he thought, but he was only a few results in when he saw Kevin talking up some other, larger company – one of the ones that Eamon always complained about as a competitor – and then another.

  This didn’t sound like a guy struggling hard to keep independent: this sounded like a guy saying ‘hey, come get these easy pickings!’

  “I’ve gotta tell Eamon what’s going on,” Scott said, his words coming out twisted and slurred.

  Tony looked at him sideways. “What is going on?”

  “This guy!” Scott gestured at the laptop. “This fucking guy! He’s going to betray him!”

  “Betray who? Eamon?”

  “Yes!” Scott said passionately, then frowned. “I’m mad at Eamon though.”

  “We’ve noticed,” Tony said gently. “But not that mad, huh?”

  “I’m mad!” Scott protested. “But this isn’t fair! People should be mad at Eamon for the right reasons!”

  “And this guy has the wrong reasons?” Tony was definitely mocking Scott now, but Scott was too mad to care.

  “These are stupid reasons,” he insisted. “So Eamon should know!”

  “So, tell him?”

  “I can’t!” Scott complained. “The bastard fucking left town on me and I don’t even know where he is.”

  39

  Eamon

  The ceiling in his parents’ house was cream, faintly discolored by decades-old smoke, and gently cracking in one corner. It wasn’t very exciting to look at, but Eamon kept staring at it anyway, too bored to move.

  What time was it? He’d done nothing for the past few days but sit around and watch cooking shows, an endless stream of them that all blended together into a single fact: he was never going to be able to cook like that, and Scott was never going to cook for him again. Scott wanted nothing to do with him ever again.

  Eamon felt hollowed out, a shell of himself. It was as if he’d put everything he was into making that gift for Scott, and when it had blown up in his face, he’d been left with nothing. He’d wanted to show Scott how much Scott meant to him, but the only thing he’d managed to do was to show Scott his own arrogance.

  Misplaced arrogance at that. He’d rushed things with Scott because he wanted to get back to work, but work didn’t seem to want him either.

  There was no word from Kevin. Eamon had left a half-dozen messages before becoming too lethargic to care, every message holding back what he really wanted to say after he’d seen the minutes of the latest board meeting. The minutes that didn’t even mention him. Didn’t display the least bit of interest in the founder of the company and what he could do for them.

  At the very least no one could accuse him of not learning anything from his mistakes.

  It was his temper that was the problem, now and always. He’d blown up at his employees and now he was exiled to the middle of nowhere to wait and hope. He’d blown up at Scott when Scott hadn’t taken his gift, and now Scott never wanted to see him again. He wasn’t going to blow up at Kevin – no matter how much he wanted to.

  Kevin was his last chance at getting back to his real life, something he knew he was good at. His gift to Scott might have been rejected, but it had been good work. It hadn’t been what Scott had wanted, but it had been good work. At least if he went back to coding, he might not fuck up quite so much.

  But he didn’t want to code now – didn’t have a project, hardly wanted to get up in the morning. He’d been dragging himself to the couch around noon, and staying there until he got hungry enough to go stare into the fridge at the remains of his grocery order. At one point, there had been a lot of it, because he’d been spending so much time at Scott’s house eating the food there. Now, he was about to run out of milk for his coffee, and he could barely bring himself to care.

  His phone rang, shrill in the gloom of the house. Eamon looked at it with loathing. There were a number of people it could be, but none of them were likely to be calling him now. Which meant it was either nothing, or another reminder of all of his failings. He rolled over, away from the sight of his phone vibrating on the coffee table, the ringing still loud in his ears.

  In the background, people talked earnestly to each other about flavor and texture and other things that Eamon barely cared about. Sometimes, when he forgot for a few moments that he’d destroyed his own life for the second time this year, he’d let himself get invested, find himself cheering for competitors and wanting to taste their dishes. Mostly, the noise kept away the worst of his self-loathing, and staring at the flickering images on the TV screen was better than staring at emails he was never going to send and reports that were never going to say the things he hoped they’d say.

  He’d come to Sellis Creek to get away from the world, and instead he’d found a whole new world, one that he’d never seen as a youth. Eamon wasn’t even sure if it had been there when he was young or if it had been forced out of the ground by the efforts of people like Scott, determined to make their homes better instead of fleeing them forever. They were better people than Eamon was, Eamon thought dully. He’d never tried to make his home a better place, only left it to find new homes elsewhere.

  And what good had that done him?

  Here he was, back in the town he’d abandoned, having alienated his employees, his boyfriend, and anyone else who might have cared. His parents were the only people left who might have been on his side, and they were all the way in Florida, and, anyway, barely knew what was going on in his life these days.

  He should leave town, he thought, scratching at the stubble he’d allowed to grow on his chin. Get out of here. Find some place else to be a failure. But leaving town seemed like an admission that everything he’d worked for these last few months was truly dead and gone.

  When Scott had rejected his gifts – rejected him – he’d been angry. For a moment, he’d been willing to throw his hands up and leave the best relationship of his life – leave it and burn it beyond all hope of repair. But now regrets crowded around him like a cloud of stinging flies, reminding him of the good times, the things about Scott that he still loved, the hazy summer perfection of their time together.

  It didn’t matter, of course. Scott had said he never wanted to see Eamon again. There was no point to lingering on the faint hope of nothing. But for now, Eamon was here. Still waiting on the call from work. Still waiting on the bolt from the blue that would return him to a week ago, before he’d conclusively fucked up his life. Still
waiting on enough energy to just go buy some more fucking milk.

  40

  Scott

  Deeply unfair, that’s what it was, Scott thought, as he slouched his way out of Sellis Creek Cycle Works and up the hill to the bakery. He’d grown lazy having his lunches brought to him, and now he kept forgetting to pack them in the morning, necessitating a lunchtime closure of the shop and his little trek to the Pie Chart.

  “Morning,” he said glumly, pushing his way through the front door. “The usual.”

  Monica, behind the counter, said, “Hey, Scott! Sure thing.”

  He’d already snarled at her a couple of times this week for asking about Eamon, so he was expecting her to return his usual sandwich in silence, and he was leaning on the counter lost in thought when her cheerful tones made him jump out of his skin.

  “So, did you and Eamon make up?”

  “What?” Scott sputtered. “No, we– What? Why would you even–?”

  “Well, everyone knows he left town after your fight,” she said, as easily as if she wasn’t putting Scott’s business on blast in the middle of the day in the middle of her store. That was the worst part about living in your hometown. Awesome bakeries, but run by people who’d known you since middle school and were pretty sure having four years on you meant they could tell you what to do. “But then Pam said he was at the convenience store last night, buying milk and looking a little rough.” She handed over the sandwich, taking Scott’s cash and ringing up his change on the old machine without even looking at it. “So, did you guys make up.”

  “Nope.” Scott said flatly. He barely wanted to discuss his failed relationship with his friends – drunken antics aside – and discussing them with Monica would be a million times worse. He’d almost jumped when she said that Eamon was still in town, but he’d fought that back. He didn’t know what to think of the information anyway.

  “Aw.” She made a little face at him, still smiling. “You guys were so cute together. He always worried about whether he was getting the right sandwich for you, you know.”

  “Okay,” Scott said shortly, taking his change. He knew Eamon had good sides. He’d dated him because of his good sides: his cute little worries over whether or not he was doing something correctly, his whip-smart sense of humor, the earnestness with which he threw himself into any new thing he was doing. He didn’t need to be reminded of them by someone who had no idea why they’d broken up, the kind of trust Eamon had broken when he’d turned out to be just the same as every other guy who thought that Scott could leave Sellis Creek without a qualm.

  “See you later,” Monica said and waved him off with a wink that made no sense.

  Scott trudged back to the Cycle Works with his sandwich, flipping the sign as he came in the door. Not that there was much business to miss on a cold, blustery day at the beginning of October. The casual cyclists had given up for the season; the hardcore ones wouldn’t switch to their winter gear until much later; and the people looking for Christmas gifts for their various cycling-nut friends and relations tended to turn up in December in a panic.

  He opened his calendar with a wince. Nope, nothing new. Except, of course, for the system he still hadn’t figured out how to remove from his laptop and his website. He didn’t want to break his calendar, that was the trouble. And now that he’d had a couple of people book through the new system before he could stop them, he didn’t want to just delete everything in case it deleted those appointments too. He didn’t even know if that was possible, but he also didn’t know it wasn’t possible.

  These were the kinds of questions he saved for other people. People like Eamon.

  Scott shook his head.

  That wasn’t an option anymore. Eamon was gone, probably forever.

  He stopped.

  That wasn’t quite right, was it?

  Monica was too nosy for her own good, but she was usually right about things like who was saying what in town. If she said Pam saw Eamon last night, Pam had probably seen Eamon last night. The real question was: why?

  Why was Eamon back in town? His parents weren’t here – and from everything Eamon had said about them, sounded like they were never planning to come back – his work wasn’t here, and Scott was still mad at him. Or maybe mad was the wrong word. It was all so complicated.

  He wanted Eamon to understand why he’d been so hurt at the idea that a piece of software – however easy it had turned out to be to use – could replace him, the idea that he could just leave the place where he’d built up a life for himself, where he’d built up responsibilities. And instead, Eamon had blown up at him, just the way he’d supposedly blown up at his employees, back in the bad old days.

  But the gift Eamon had given him... It might not have been the gift that Scott wanted, but it was a pretty big fucking gift. Who knew how long and hard Eamon had been working on this thing to make it so smooth and professional-looking? To have it tailored to exactly the kinds of inputs Scott needed for his job?

  There was a kind of care here, and Scott had ignored all of that in favor of getting mad. So it was half his fault.

  Not that any of that mattered when the important thing was that Eamon was going back to the city. He’d said so himself: Kevin had told him that the board was on the verge of reinstating him. And then he’d been back in Columbus forever, working at his big-shot job and probably never even thinking about Scott ever again.

  Except, of course, that Kevin was an asshole. Scott had found that several things about that evening with Lennox and Tony were a little blurry, but the one thing he absolutely remembered was that Kevin was secretly an asshole. Or not that secretly, if he was telling everyone but Eamon about it.

  Eamon was too trusting, that was the problem. That was half the reason he got so angry when people let him down: he’d never allowed himself to imagine that they might.

  He needed to know that he couldn’t trust Kevin, that Kevin was holding some kind of grudge against him. Whatever friction still existed between him and Scott, it simply wasn’t fair that Eamon was working from this disadvantage, that he was being played by someone a million times more adept at a certain type of game.

  Scott needed to tell him. It was clear that no one else was ready to do so – and Scott could think of a few choice words to describe the rest of Eamon’s colleagues who were letting this kind of thing happen – or maybe no one else had realized. He’d let himself ignore the responsibility to be the bigger man in this scenario because he’d thought Eamon was gone, and the single time he’d called him on Tony’s cellphone, Eamon hadn’t answered.

  But if Eamon was back in town, then Scott could tell him about Kevin and probably should.

  He owed him that much at least. It would be a fitting goodbye.

  But who knew when Eamon would leave town again? Scott’s breath caught in his throat. Eamon might already be gone, or he might be about to leave again.

  He looked around the shop, making up his mind.

  There had been no business all morning. How likely was there to be business in the afternoon? And wasn’t this more important? Something Scott had to do to feel good about himself again? Something Scott could do to make things right?

  He threw down his sandwich on the counter and hurriedly swung his jacket off the hook by the back door.

  Who knew if Eamon was even home, but he had to check, he had to find out. His hands shook as he fumbled with the open/closed sign on the door, with the key in the lock, but when he took off down the street towards Eamon’s parents’ place, he practically flew.

  41

  Eamon

  The heavy sound of someone pounding on the door resonated into the living room and disturbed Eamon’s contemplation of Top Chef reruns. He scowled at nothing, shoving himself to his feet with a grimace. The grocery delivery service was supposed to text him before they arrived, and here they were pounding on his door as if there wasn’t a perfectly good doorbell right there. He’d vaguely meant to shave and so forth before they arrive
d, but that hadn’t happened and – if Eamon was being totally honest with himself – wasn’t likely to.

  They’d just have to put up with however much of a mess he was now.

  “I was coming,” he snapped as he yanked the door open and stopped the pounding in its tracks. His gaze landed on the floor of the porch, rose up, and up again until he was staring Scott in the face. “What? Where’s–?” His chest was constricting. “Scott?”

  “I know you probably don’t want to see me,” Scott said. His face was flushed, as though he’d been running, his jacket open in the chill air. Wasn’t it still the middle of the day? Shouldn’t Scott be at work? “But I have some information you need to hear.”

  Information? Of all the things Eamon had imagined Scott saying when they saw each other again, information hadn’t been part of any of them. But hope was once again rising in his breast, and Eamon found his tongue dry and speechless in his mouth. He stepped back, gesturing for Scott to come in.

  Scott looked around curiously as he entered the house, and Eamon realized just how few times he’d brought Scott back to his parents’ place. As much as Sellis Creek had become home again, the house had never come back to its former comfort or familiarity. Bringing a boyfriend back to sleep in Eamon’s old room was too weird, particularly when the boyfriend had his own place, and Eamon barely had any reason of his own to stay. He’d daydreamed, from time to time, of getting somewhere in town that was truly his own, but once he’d started spending more than half the week at Scott’s place, there hadn’t seemed any point to it.

  “Drop your coat wherever,” he finally managed to say, watching Scott standing in the middle of the hall, boots still on, looking deeply out of place.

  “Okay.” Scott kicked off his boots as well and let Eamon lead him to the living room.

  What on earth could Scott have to say that would need this much preparation, this much build up? Eamon had wanted to get out of the cold, his bare toes curling on the doorstep as the October wind blew around them both, but he’d kind of expected Scott to say his piece in the hallway, not to be here padding behind Eamon without saying a word.