by Riley Knight
“Let him go, baby,” Jack told Will, and there was this tone of satisfaction, of pleasure, in his voice, like he was enjoying the pain that Judah was feeling. Which was probably all Judah projecting, because his feelings toward Jack could hardly be said to be charitable. “It’s better this way.”
It’s better this way.
It probably was. It would have been nice if Jack hadn’t been the one to say it. It would have been better if Will had been brave enough to tell Judah the truth. Because Judah couldn’t help but remember that Will had been the one to ask him to come back tonight. That Will had been willing to take Judah, though he had to know what that would mean to him.
But it didn’t matter, he supposed, ultimately. It was over, and that had been inevitable for so long. He didn’t need to hear the words, and, in fact, he thought if he did he might scream, Stephen or no Stephen.
No. He couldn’t compete with Jack, with the man that Will had fallen in love with. With the man who held Will’s past. After all, the chances had never been good that Judah would be the one to share Will’s future. It had never really been in the realm of possibility.
His eyes were still dry as he walked away, and this time, Will didn’t try to stop him. Judah didn’t so much as glance back as he got into his car and drove away because he already knew that he wouldn’t be able to handle what it was that he saw if he did.
TWENTY
Not like this.
Maybe Judah was right, and this had been inevitable from the beginning. Will had certainly had his own thoughts about that, because what life did he have to offer, what could he give a man who was already really more or less married to his job?
But it shouldn’t be now. Will wasn’t done, and lately, he had even been having some hopes about it being more than just a temporary thing. Sure, maybe it couldn’t last, but there was no reason that it couldn’t last a few more months. Or years. Or decades.
Or the rest of their lives.
Even if it couldn’t, this wasn’t how Will would have ended anything. He would have gone to Judah, broken it off with him in person. It wouldn’t have been some misunderstanding, a situation of wrong place, wrong time.
It wouldn’t be because Judah had seen what he had thought to be Will kissing someone else.
The whole thing had happened so fast. Will had opened the door, and Jack had been there, and Will couldn’t even figure out how that had happened. He had most deliberately protected both himself and his son by not telling Jack anything about where he lived. But be that as it may, there he stood, and before Will even had the door fully opened Jack was speaking.
“I love you,” he’d said, the very first words out of his mouth. It seemed to be a shock tactic, and it had worked. For a moment, Will hadn’t been able to make himself speak, and Jack had taken the chance to go on.
It could work, Jack had told him. They could be together, a real family again. Jack hadn’t been ready before, but he was now, he had sworn to it over and over again. Even when Will found his voice, even when he started to break it to him that that was just never going to happen, Jack had just continued right on speaking.
Somehow, he had known, he had to get Jack away. So he had tried to reason with the man, but reason had never much worked on Jack. Very aware not only of Stephen innocently lost in dreamland but also of Judah waiting for him upstairs, Will had tried to keep it quiet, while still making it very clear that there was just no way in hell. Never. Not again.
But talking had not worked. So many times, Will had spoken, and Jack had just flat out ignored him. Had pretended, maybe, to see things his way, but it had always been just that, pretense.
It had always been hopeless, he and Jack, even before Jack had walked out on him. At the time, Will had been in denial, but he couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t talk to him.
Then, of course, the kiss had happened, and Will probably shouldn’t have been surprised by that, but he had been counting on one simple thing. Jack had never been willing to kiss him before out in the open, where someone could see. Even in the middle of the night, Jack would pull him somewhere private before he would do anything intimate, even as much as holding Will’s hand. People had thought that they were more best friends than lovers, and Jack had always liked it that way.
It seemed that, in this way, at least, people could change.
The kiss lasted only a split second. By the time Will became aware of Judah’s presence, he was already knotting his hands in the front of Jack’s shirt and pushing him away. His lips burned from the kiss, and he wanted to scrub them clean. That kiss had felt more like an attack than like any expression of intimacy.
It had been too late, though. Judah wouldn’t even look back at him, and Will wanted to go to him, to run after him and tell him that he hadn’t wanted that kiss, that he hadn’t initiated it and that he had pulled away as soon as he could. But when he moved, Jack put his hands on Will’s shoulders and held him in place.
“Let him go, baby,” Jack said, his voice just a little bit above a murmur, loud enough for Will to hear and maybe Judah, too. “It’s better this way.”
Shit.
Jack was right. It wasn’t how Will would have chosen to end it, but ending it was still the right thing to do. It was better this way, cleanly, all at once, because Will knew that he would never have been able to end it. Judah would have had to do it, and it seemed that Judah was no better at this than Will was.
Better this way, for a thousand reasons, but that didn’t mean that Will was at all happy with how this had happened. With his face feeling like it had been carved from ice and his heart a hard, tight little knot in his chest, Will pulled the door closed, grabbed one of Jack’s wrist, and brought him out into the front yard.
He would be damned if he would wake Stephen up with this conversation. He’d had quite enough of this for the night, and he went closer to the street, which was dead and quiet at this time of night. Not that it was ever exactly a bustling hive of activity.
“No.” Will knew that there was only one way to go, and that was bluntness. In his anger, he was no longer even all that worried about whether he hurt Jack’s feelings. Jack had, after all, made Will lose a hell of a lot more than Will would have wished. “No, Jack. Don’t you ever try to kiss me again. It’s over. Do you understand? You and I, we never should have happened.”
“Oh, come on, Will. You know that you still love me.”
Jack sounded so sure of himself, but Will shook his head. Once, he might have even been curious about that statement. He would have had to try it on, try to mentally poke holes in it before he was willing to say that it wasn’t true. But not this. He knew his own feelings, and there was nothing that Jack could say to change that.
“I don’t still love you. I haven’t loved you for years.”
The words were cruel, and he knew it. He saw the way Jack recoiled back away from him, but maybe Will had been too worried about being kind to Jack. He had wanted to encourage him, in some way, from the moment that he’d heard that Jack had gone to rehab, but maybe that had been a mistake.
Even though Will had never wanted to get back together with Jack, and even though he had tried to make that clear to him, it clearly, demonstrably, hadn’t worked. Jack still had some delusions, obviously, so bluntness, to the point of rudeness, was the only way to go.
It was his fault, at least in part, for thinking that logic, that reason, would work on Jack. But then, Will had always had some bad habits when it came to assumptions like that.
“You don’t mean that, baby. I know I was a dick, but I’ve changed. I went to rehab …”
Will shook his head and took a step away from Jack, who had raised his hand like he might touch Will’s face. At this point, if Jack did touch him, Will sort of thought he might actually vomit. Any allure that Jack had had for Will once had worn off a long time ago.
“I don’t give a flying fuck,” Will told him bluntly, and it even sort of grimly amused him when he saw how Jack
recoiled, obviously shocked by the expression. Will was usually far too logical to say something like that. “I’m glad if you’ve gone to rehab. I’m glad that you’ve gotten better. But if you ever touch me again, if you ever come near me or my son, you will regret it.”
“Will …” Jack’s voice was wheedling, in a way that Will once would have found charming. He had often found himself doing things that he didn’t want to do because Jack asked him in that tone of voice. But in using it, Jack made a fatal mistake, and not the first one that he had made that night.
He reminded Will so much in that moment of the many times that he had acted against his own self-interest. Of all of the times that Jack had made him feel unreasonable, no fun, a stick in the mud, because Will didn’t want to party with Jack and his friends. Party, of course, having always meant drink until the world turned blurry and nothing made any sense.
Will hadn’t let himself think about it all that much, but the truth of the matter was, seeing Jack had been good for Will. Had put a lot of things, things that he hadn’t even known bugged him anymore, into perspective. Made a lot of what had been bugging him about his relationship with Jack make a lot more sense.
“No, Jack. Leave.” Will took a step away from him, back toward the house. It was taking a risk. Jack could still cause a scene, and there wasn’t much that Will could do to stop him. He would just have to take that risk. “I mean it. It’s over. Accept it and move on. You will never be a part of this family.”
Once, it was all that Will had wanted, for Jack to want to be involved. That ship had sailed, and when Jack looked into his eyes, he seemed to realize, at last, that there was no point in trying anymore.
“Call me. Just … if you change your mind,” Jack said, and there was something almost defeated in the way that his shoulders slumped. At the same time, though, as he turned away, Will saw a gleam in his eyes that was almost certainly a trick of the moonlight, or the stars, as they glistened off the lenses of his eyes.
In any case, Jack was soon gone. That was good, and Will even had some hope that it might just be forever this time. He had done the hard thing, he had outright ripped the band-aid from his skin, without mercy or compassion he had ended things with Jack. If he ever felt bad about that, he knew he could always call to mind how Jack had simply left, how he hadn’t even done him the courtesy of actually ending things.
So yes, that part was good, but the rest of it was a mess. Judah was gone, and Will had seen the finality of the parting in his eyes. In one night, Will had lost both men that he had loved, only in Judah’s case, he couldn’t even fool himself that it had been in the past.
He still loved Judah, and somehow, he was going to have to try to deal with that.
There was only one small mercy about this whole experience, and that was that Stephen hadn’t been involved. It had been the right decision not to tell him, because it was very clear to Will that nothing ever could have happened there. Jack was or had been, too desperate to make things work between himself and Will once more.
So Stephen was safe, and Will, well, he would just have to mourn alone. Wasn’t that what he was good at? What he had done for far too many years to count? He had done it before, and he would do it again.
Somehow, he would get over Judah. He had to because he knew that everything was far, far too messed up ever to work. Somehow, though, he already knew that it was going to be the hardest thing that he had ever done.
TWENTY ONE
Christmas was a month away. Exactly a month. And Judah had exactly a month to try to pull a Christmas play together, with a bunch of children who were not exactly interested in doing what he had to say.
Not since Stephen had stopped coming to church, and even to choir practice.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened. Stephen’s father, after all, hadn’t wanted him there in the first place. Judah had been so sure that they had been making progress on that front, that Will was, or had been, more and more, coming to accept Stephen’s place in the church, but that had been before Judah had walked out.
Which had left everything a mess, he thought. The kids, of all ages, had adored Stephen, had looked up to him. Both Jesse, who was playing one of the three Wise Men, and Ruby, who was, of course, starring as Mary, were barely paying attention in practice anymore, and they seemed lost, forlorn, without the leader of their little group there with them.
The younger kids had all demanded where Stephen was many, many times, and Judah had had to tell them that he didn’t know for sure, but that no, he didn’t think that Stephen was coming back. Which made him the bearer of bad news, which didn’t exactly make them seem to want to listen to him much.
If work could possibly be the answer to a broken heart, Judah knew that he would be better in no time. Stephen had mostly taken over the Christmas play, leaving Judah free to do the other things which his job entailed. Now, he had all of that on his plate again, and neither Ruby nor Jesse was suited in temperament to take over. Ruby was too domineering, Jesse too easygoing. Either would spell disaster.
One more disastrous rehearsal down and Judah slumped in the pew as the children swarmed around him into the waiting arms of their parents. He was exhausted because, on top of all of the work he had to do, he wasn’t sleeping very well at all. In the hubbub, he knew that no one would notice if he just took a brief break.
Or so he thought. Until he felt someone’s weight settling beside him on the padded pew, one of the children, he figured, at least until he opened his eyes. No. Not one of the children, but definitely a familiar face.
Isaac, one of the openly gay men in town, one who was married to another man. Isaac and his husband, Ben, had been coming to church for a while now, which Judah had always taken as a sign of success. They had been made to feel at least welcome enough that they would come, and that meant something to Judah.
“Hello, Isaac,” Judah greeted him, trying to force a smile onto exhausted lips that did not want to cooperate. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“I just came to pick up Ruby,” Isaac told him, and Judah nodded tiredly. He still wasn’t quite sure that he understood what the relationship was there. Ruby looked far more like Isaac than like Ben, but Isaac didn’t seem old enough to be her father. He had been curious, but now, he was too tired, too worn down, to care. “But then I saw you sitting there, and you looked like you might need someone to talk to.”
Judah sighed softly, but a faint smile did come onto his lips in response to that.
“Isn’t that my line?” he asked because he was the minister, the pastor, the counselor. It was his job to offer to talk to people, not to talk to anyone else, and those were lines that he had always regarded as being very firmly etched. He knew his role.
“I understand if you don’t want to tell me what’s wrong, but I can tell when someone is worn out, and you’re almost there.” Isaac’s voice was earnest and, much to Judah’s shame, it made his eyes prickle, way at the back, in a way that he wasn’t at all comfortable with.
“I’m just tired,” Judah told him, and it was only half a lie. He was exhausted, way down to his bones, and he knew that he would sleep like a baby if only he could lay in bed with Will beside him. But that wasn’t going to happen, and he was going to have to get used to it. “I lost one of the children that I was counting on.”
“You mean Stephen,” Isaac told him, and Judah blinked and looked at Isaac thoughtfully before nodding. “He hasn’t been around much, has he? Ruby’s been pouting about it. She only sees him at school now.”
“Yes,” Judah said the word, though it hit him with an impact like a sledgehammer to the stomach to think of Stephen and, by extension, Will. “It’s given me a fair bit more work. Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Maybe I can help,” Isaac said, his voice thoughtful, and Judah arched an eyebrow. How could the local bartender help, he wondered, and that must have shown in his face because Isaac tilted his chin up proudly. “I forgot. You
don’t know my past. In this very church, before the Baptists sold it to the Methodists, I used to help out. My father was the pastor here.”
Judah hadn’t known that, and he suddenly looked at Isaac with quite a bit more attention.
“What makes the son of a Baptist preacher become a bartender?” he asked, and Isaac gave a tiny little smirk and a shrug before he answered.
“Ben was a bartender, so when everything went to hell, I joined him. He gave me a job, a life. My parents kicked me out, and then my father, it turned out he was stealing from the church.” Isaac had his chin raised, as though expecting Judah to disapprove somehow—like he was bracing himself for it. “He got a local girl, just a teenager at the time, pregnant. Ruby is my half-sister. And then, when he was caught, he ran away. He’s the reason that the Baptist church couldn’t regain a foothold in this town, no matter how they tried.”
Oh. Well. That cleared up a whole lot of Judah’s questions. He searched Isaac’s face, saw the kindness in his brilliant blue eyes. This was a good man, just as Ben was. This town was full of good people.
And he had been so scared. Now that it didn’t matter anymore, now that he had no chance of anything with Will, he could admit to himself that he probably could tell the people of his town that he was gay, and they would accept him. They had, after all, accepted Isaac, who’d apparently had a pretty crazy father.
“Did they, your parents, kick you out because you realized that you were gay?” Judah asked, and Isaac nodded a little. Sighing, Judah dropped his gaze away from the other man’s eyes, and he spoke words that he didn’t usually say to anyone. “My parents would if they knew about me.”
Isaac was quiet, but Judah felt the weight of a hand settling on his shoulder, just a light squeeze, but it somehow made everything come into focus. He had just told someone in the town about his secret, the one that he’d been keeping for ages, and he knew that Isaac had understood.
