Walter shut his eyes, swallowing the darkness back down. No, he wasn’t telling any of that to Kelly. Funny, though, how being happy brought that crap out. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, either—moments of something this good, this unexpected and off his usual path, they always dredged up old shit, like somehow happiness came with sorrow as its anchor. In Walter’s case the chain had gotten all tangled, and the whole business came up or stayed down together. Which was why he preferred not to get involved with people, especially not like this.
Yet here he was. Involved. Really fucking involved, and he didn’t think he could walk away now, even if it was the right thing to do.
Eventually he had to give in to sleep, but before he did, he tossed out a different kind of anchor. Pulling his phone from the nightstand, he punched out an email to Williams, using the professor’s home email, not the one he used through the college.
Weird break. Lots has happened. Good I think, but I’d love to reserve some time in your garage workshop next week to talk it through. Love to the wife and kids.
Some of his anxiety bled off simply by typing that. He took a moment to breathe, to let his lungs release, then added one last line to keep the tone light and redirect a little focus off himself.
And stop worrying about your tenure. It’ll be fine.
Hitting send, Walter curled up beside Kelly, wrapped an arm carefully around his waist and slid into sleep.
Walter woke the next time to find Kelly already awake and staring at him. Smiling shyly, Kelly ran a hand down Walter’s arm beneath the sheet. “Hi.”
Walter smiled back, body still heavy with sleep. “Hi.” He bent his hand and captured Kelly’s fingers, tugging them down to tangle over his chest. “Sleep okay?”
Kelly nodded, fingers moving against Walter’s. He had a bashful look about him, and he nibbled his lip a few times before he spoke. “Can I ask you kind of a dumb question? One that makes me sound like a stupid, sappy tool?”
“You are not a stupid, sappy tool.” Walter brushed his thumb along Kelly’s wrist. “Ask.”
Kelly caught Walter’s hand. “Are we…boyfriends?”
Walter had to shut his eyes in a long, slow blink as he wiped the crazy riot of emotions that question stirred, but he didn’t do a good enough job, because when he opened them back up, Kelly looked abashed and miserable.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I told you—”
Walter let go of Kelly’s hand to stop that babble with his fingertips. “Hush. Kelly, you can’t be sorry for asking a question like that.”
Kelly’s face still radiated extreme embarrassment. “It’s just that I know you don’t do that, and I know you said you would for me, but you can’t mean it, not really, not when I’m a clueless virgin and you’re—”
Fingers weren’t enough. Walter had to stop this tide with his mouth, but part of that was because he needed another minute to hide, to get himself together. God, he thought he’d put this away in the middle of the night, but clearly not. What was he supposed to say? Kel, I’m more clueless than you’ll ever know. You could do so much better than me. I want to tell you that, want to confess all the ways I’m a mess and then some, to show you that if I wanted to, I could give you a real run for your money on that stupid, sappy tool business.
He couldn’t say that, no. So instead he whispered against Kelly’s lips, “I’m your boyfriend. That’s what I am.” When Kelly started to protest, he kissed him again, hard and fast. “No. No more fishing for compliments, not until I get something to eat. And unless my nose deceives me, there are vegan pancakes and bacon waiting for us downstairs.”
The smell of food only got stronger as they opened the door. Walter sent Kelly to take a shower first, and after a quick, silly goodbye kiss, he headed down to the kitchen. Walter could smell the pancakes—and the bacon, and he thought, perhaps, hash browns. As he approached the kitchen, the prospect of good food mingled with the bliss that was waking up with Kelly, and Walter allowed himself to savor the golden moment.
Of course, he should have known a moment was all he’d be allowed to have.
Though his mother was indeed cooking, she wasn’t the smiling, happy, let-me-make-breakfast-for-you mother he’d left waving them off the night before. She looked harried and grim, and she’d clearly spent a considerable portion of the night and possibly the morning crying. When she saw Walter, she wiped at her eyes and put on the fakest, most pathetic smile he’d seen in awhile.
“Hi, sweetheart. Breakfast is almost ready.”
She moved back to the stove before Walter could go to her, leaving him to stand impotently at the breakfast bar. “Mom? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, her voice very full of something. Yearning, mostly, if he had to guess, and loneliness. As usual, it tore at Walter’s heart. Especially as she added, “I shouldn’t bother you with my problems.”
She said this almost petulantly, as if she knew they were the right words but hated them for being so. Those were Walter’s cues to countermand her, to assure her that no, he wanted to hear why she was upset. It was a game they’d played for a long time, a game many people had tried to get him to stop playing, but he’d never been able to successfully manage it.
Until today.
For the first time in a long time, Walter didn’t play. His lack of response hung in the air, and his mother paused, waiting for them, like a cue someone had missed in a play. Walter kept quiet, feeling guilty but obstinate. He’d had the best night of his life, and a pretty damn fine morning until this. He didn’t want Kelly to see his mom in one of her fits. If Walter wasn’t supposed to hear what was bothering her, then she should keep it to herself. Otherwise she should just tell him because she didn’t care if she upset him or not. She shouldn’t make him give her permission to ruin his day with whatever had her upset this time.
No sooner did he think these thoughts, however, than the guilt became too much, too acute, and he caved. “What’s going on, Mom?”
He listened woodenly to a recycled tirade against his dad—for a second he’d convinced himself it would be something new, something significant, but no, it was the same tired line about how she was always left alone, how no one cared. It made Walter angry.
“What do you want me to do, Mom? I’m not quitting school again. You might notice I came home for break. I did Thanksgiving with you.” It had been a nightmare, but he’d done it. “Apparently that doesn’t count as caring, in your book.”
Of course this speech turned out to be a tactical error, because with a smooth downshift she went from poor me to self-flagellation, and now she sobbed and carried on about what a bad mother she was, how Walter deserved better, how Tibby probably hated her too. The self-hatred was so thick Walter panicked, worried she was more depressed than he’d known and would kill herself or something equally awful.
“Mom,” he pleaded, but she only sobbed and went off to her bedroom down the hall, slamming the door. Walter could hear her muffled sobs through the barrier, and they tore at him.
Their breakfast sizzled on, giving off a scent that promised burning without swift attention. Moving stiffly, Walter took up his mother’s place, flipping cakes and turning bacon, half his focus on the bedroom, where soft crying drifted out on occasion. He felt the hard dome he all too often hoisted over his emotions in the face of his family start to rise, but no sooner was it about to lock in place than Kelly came into the kitchen, hair damp. He radiated a glow that made Walter ache and fumble at the same time. The dome of protection retreated all on its own, and Walter stood there, raw and unsure of how to behave.
With one look at Walter, Kelly’s smile died. “What’s wrong?”
On cue, Shari wailed from the bedroom. When Walter winced, Kelly came around the breakfast bar and took his hand. “Hey.” When Walter didn’t react—he couldn’t, he was so close to the edge—Kelly took the spatula from Walter’s hand, turned him around and pulled him into a tight, comforting embrace.
>
God, it felt good. Too good. “The food,” he croaked, his voice too thick to work right.
“Fuck the food.”
Walter wanted to shut his eyes and sink into Kelly. The thought of doing so made him ache even as he warned himself he shouldn’t. “It’ll make it worse, if this is burned on top of everything else.”
Not fully letting go of Walter, Kelly reached for the spatula, flipped the last pancakes onto the plate bearing the others, moved the bacon and hash browns to cool spots and turned everything off. He came back immediately to Walter, squeezing his hand tight like an anchor. “What happened?”
Walter shut his eyes. “Same shit, different day.”
“What shit? What happened? Is she okay?”
Walter snorted in derision. “No. Nobody loves her, she says. So she cries at me, and I don’t know what to do.”
Fuck, he was not supposed to say all that. Walter tensed, ready for this to go to shit because of his damn over-sharing.
Kelly held Walter’s hand a minute, then brushed a kiss against his cheek. “Let’s grab some food.”
Walter had no idea if this meant Kelly regretted asking or what, and he sure as hell wasn’t hungry, but he ate anyway, taking the plate Kelly filled for him and reciprocating by getting him some coffee with soy milk. His mother appeared shortly after they sat down at the table, eyes red but wiped clean, and she sighed as if she had handily put all her troubles behind her.
“Thanks for finishing up, Walter.” She smiled at Kelly, clearly trying to put on her best face. “Hope you like it.”
“It’s great,” Kelly assured her. Walter combed the two words for tone, nuance, trying to figure out if Kelly was really fucking sorry he’d asked what was wrong or was smoothing the waters. He couldn’t get much of a read, and it managed to kill what remained of his appetite.
Pushing away his plate, he rose. “I’m going to shower quick. We have to get on the road soon.”
He didn’t linger to hear how this disappointed his mother.
The shower soothed him a little, but not enough, and he dressed rigidly, trying not to catalog all the ways his confession had fucked everything up and failing. After chastising himself for his weakness for several minutes, he moved quickly on to admitting this whole relationship thing was a bad idea, which led to panic over how in the world he could get out of it now without making everything worse. By the time he came back downstairs, he was popping antacids to ease the acrid storms inside his gut.
Back in the kitchen, Kelly and Shari chatted together while Kelly helped her put away the remainders of the meal and organize the dishes. Kelly was at his Minnesota Nice best: polite and deferential, which still didn’t tell Walter a damn thing. Walter lingered a minute, wondering what he should do, eventually giving up and heading upstairs to pack.
He tried not to think, tried to focus on getting together what he needed for one month more at Hope, tried telling himself everything was fine, that he’d make it that way, but there was a Kelly-shaped elephant in the room he couldn’t ignore. What the hell had he been thinking, starting anything up, and with Kelly of all fucking people? He should have let him flirt with whoever he wanted at Roscoe’s. He’d have come home in a foul mood to match his mother’s moping, and maybe this would be out of his system. He wouldn’t have this god-awful ache across his arms like he was empty. Because even if he hadn’t already fucked up with Kelly, he would soon, and he’d be alone.
It would have been better not to have ever started anything with Kelly. Better to have left things as they were.
Even though it had nearly killed him, watching those other guys mack on Kelly.
Even though watching a Disney movie together and holding him close while they slept had been better than any sex Walter had ever had in his life.
Gripping the clothes in his hand, Walter shut his eyes and made himself draw slow, steady breaths until the searing pain across his chest was little more than a dull ache.
When Kelly came up to pack also, Walter tensed and got the lies about being fine all prepped and ready to roll off his tongue. Kelly didn’t inquire how he was, though, only put his few belongings back in his backpack and asked Walter if he needed any help packing. When Walter shook his head, Kelly touched his arm, a brief, sad brush of fingers, and went back downstairs.
Walter wanted to throw up.
Trying like hell to get that dome of indifference back in place, Walter hurried through the rest of his packing, loaded the car with their stuff and kissed his mother without really looking at her. She was going to play for more sympathy or reassurance, and he couldn’t do that, not right now. Not when everything felt like shit.
When they got to the car, though, Kelly threw him a curve ball by climbing into the driver’s seat before Walter could.
Kelly held his hand out for the keys. “I’ll drive.”
Walter didn’t hand them over, only glared at Kelly as he stood in the propped-open door on the driver’s side. “You hate driving in traffic.”
“I can survive.” Kelly kept his hand out.
“You don’t have to do this.” Walter knew he was a little curt, and he cared about that, but he was about done with shit he wasn’t expecting. What was Kelly trying to pull?
“Give me the keys, Walter.” Minnesota Nice had left the building, and there was an edge to Kelly’s tone now that said don’t fuck with me, Lucas.
Fine. Kelly wanted to drive? He could drive. Walter tossed the keys in his lap and muttered to himself as he went around the back of his car to the passenger side. Even as it felt weird to sit there, he had to admit it would be nice to do nothing but drown in his chaos, rather than do that and drive too.
Except he knew Kelly really hated traffic, so he felt guilty for not insisting he at least drive out of town. He still didn’t know why Kelly was doing this, what had brought it on, what it meant, and what it did to the two of them.
Fuck, he was going to throw up.
Kelly had pulled the GPS out of the glove box and was affixing it to the dash. “I don’t suppose you have Hope entered in here?”
Walter did, because sometimes he let the computer route him around thick traffic or construction. Instead of saying this, though, he pulled the faceplate to himself, punched in the coordinates for Hope and frowned. “This is routing you over to the expressway, which isn’t something you want to experience. Here.” He nudged the path farther west with his finger. “You’ll take 294, then 88, then 355, then 55. That’ll take us all the way down to Springfield, where we’ll catch 72 over to Danby.”
Kelly scanned the GPS monitor, then nodded. “Four and a half hours, this says.”
“Yeah, that’s if we never stop. Figure we’ll get there around five or six, depending on how we lollygag.” He cast a sideways glance at Kelly. “You’re not driving that whole way.”
Kelly glanced back at him, an odd, almost suggestive look that made Walter shiver. “I might. You never know.”
Walter wanted to surrender to that teasing, which was why he pushed back. “I can drive.”
“Me too,” Kelly replied, and pulled out of the garage onto the street.
Chapter Seventeen
Kelly drove like a grandmother, which made Walter crazy, but whenever he tried to get Kelly to pull over, the request was met with such a sharp rebuke that finally Walter gave up and retreated into his seat. When traffic got hairy and Kelly’s shoulders started to tense, Walter did what he could to help by turning around to check lanes, keeping an eye out for exits, and to frequently say inane things like, “You’re doing fine,” and “God job, babe,” which he couldn’t tell if Kelly appreciated or not, but it made him feel like he was doing something, so he kept it up.
For his part, Kelly said next to nothing, keeping all his focus on the road ahead of him and on the GPS. There was one tense moment when Walter knew its directions were wrong and he had to manually guide Kelly into the right exit lane, but that went more smoothly than he’d feared, and soon they were ou
t of the worst of the snarls. When they finally made it onto I-55 and much, much easier traffic, Kelly sank back into his seat and visibly relaxed.
“Okay,” he said, his voice shaky. “I should have let you drive.”
Walter wanted to ask why he hadn’t, but he could feel talking coming on, and he had a feeling it was going to be a nightmare. He stared out the window, hoping he was wrong, knowing he wasn’t.
“So,” Kelly began, getting some of his composure back by degrees. “Talk to me about your mom.”
His mom? That wasn’t what he’d expected. Walter shifted in his seat. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know why you got so upset this morning. You said it was more of the same. Except you’ve never told me about her. You’ve said your family is a mess, but I didn’t get how seriously you meant that until now. I want to understand. Because you left the bedroom happy and lit up, and ever since you’re…I don’t know. Withdrawn. Upset.” He slid his hands to an easier position on the wheel. “I can tell you don’t want to talk about it, but you were upset, Walter. It made me upset. I don’t want to make you bring up stuff you’d rather leave alone, but can you…I don’t know, fill me in?”
Love Lessons Page 17
