They settled into a comfortable routine, the three of them. Dane and Porter’s relationship was the unspoken factor, even though Gavin knew about it. They trusted him not to say anything, and there was a safety for Dane with Gavin being publicly known as their friend.

  It made it less likely someone might pin Dane to Porter as his “boyfriend.” They were three good friends and coworkers. Well, related industry, in Gavin’s case.

  Then Dane’s mother came to visit for two weeks around Christmas. That mostly left Porter and Gavin to hang out without him, except for Christmas Day, when Dane’s mother had them both over for dinner when she learned neither of them had family in Florida, and that they were good friends of Dane’s.

  Not that they were gay good friends, either. Just single buddies of his with no close family to speak of.

  Porter felt the wall return that day for the first time in years, the thick, impenetrable fortress around Dane’s soul. He could tell Dane felt borderline terrified.

  So Porter kept it chill and Gavin followed his lead.

  Just friends.

  Bros.

  He could tell the more he and Gavin did that, the more Dane was able to relax.

  Because Porter loved Dane, he didn’t want him to stress.

  He didn’t push.

  He would really regret that later.

  * * * *

  Porter and Dane had been in Florida just over a year when Dane’s mother told him she wanted to move to Florida from Arkansas and live with him permanently when she retired in two months. Dane showed up at Porter’s house that evening, a Thursday night, right after the phone call and close to hysterics.

  “What can I do for you?” Porter had asked.

  Porter had long ago come to accept he was never going to have an “official” relationship with Dane. In fact, he and Gavin had started hanging out a lot more and were discussing maybe playing together as Dom and sub. Dane had even suggested Porter find a boyfriend, if not Gavin. He’d wanted the two of them to date. Porter was attracted to Gavin—Dane and Gavin had nearly the identical color gorgeous blue eyes.

  But Porter didn’t want to find another boyfriend. He always worried about Dane, wanted him to know he could come over anytime he needed to. Besides, Gavin was in no condition to date, considering the emotionally abusive relationship he’d just escaped.

  The next night, Friday night, Dane showed up almost immediately after work and begged Porter to make love to him, no play, this time. They made love half the night before collapsing, exhausted.

  Dane left just after dawn the next morning. Porter was still half-asleep or he never would have let Dane out of his bed.

  Dane leaned in and kissed him. “I love you, Porter. I love you so much. I’m sorry I never told you before.”

  The first and only time he’d ever said those words to Porter.

  Porter was barely awake enough to remember catching Dane’s wrist and pulling him back for one more kiss. “Love you, too, buddy. So damn much. Please stay with me.” Porter had never said those words to him before, either, never wanting to freak him out. He’d chosen to show him his love, never pushing him about it.

  “I have to go to work now.” And Dane had smiled. That sad, Dane smile. That blue-eyed grief-tinged smile Porter had seen too many times to count.

  And then Porter promptly fell asleep again.

  Something he never forgave himself for.

  It wasn’t until later that afternoon it finally struck Porter what Dane said, and he tried calling him.

  Because he knew Dane wasn’t at work. He checked. He tried Gavin, who hadn’t seen him since lunch yesterday, when they all ate together.

  Porter didn’t have a key to Dane’s apartment, had never pushed for one. When he drove there, Dane’s car wasn’t parked in his usual spot in front of his first-floor unit.

  When Porter knocked on the front door, Dane didn’t answer. It was locked, of course.

  He couldn’t see inside the apartment because all the blinds were drawn, but he heard Dane’s cell phone ringing inside when he tried calling again, which was unusual.

  Dane never left his phone behind.

  When Porter started to leave, he spotted Dane’s car parked on the other side of the complex in guest parking, in a place he never parked and had no reason to, because both assigned spots in front of his own unit were unoccupied.

  He didn’t remember the breaking in process, just that he was on the phone with 911 when he kicked in the sliding glass door in the living room, and they caught that on the call tape.

  The 911 tapes also recorded his agonized wails as he dropped his phone when he found Dane hanging in the closet in the master bedroom and desperately tried to get him down and revive him with CPR despite him being cold and blue, his body rigid.

  * * * *

  Porter always awoke when he had that nightmare, usually—thankfully—just before he opened the closet door.

  When the nightmare happened when Gavin was with him, he’d pull Gavin into his arms and cry. Because, somehow, on that bleak and black afternoon, he’d managed to call Gavin after the cops had arrived and forced Porter to go back outside.

  It’d been Gavin who’d held him, held him back, as he’d sobbed and wanted to be inside with Dane.

  He hadn’t wanted to leave Dane alone.

  How he’d begged them to let him hold Dane one more time.

  And it’d been Gavin who held him all those darkest nights while he cried, and who was a pallbearer with him at the funeral in Arkansas, both of them trying to pretend Porter had been nothing more than a good friend, coworker, and former roommate who was so obviously distraught because he’d been the one who found Dane.

  It’d been Gavin who stayed sober and let him get sloppy drunk on tequila that night in the hotel after the funeral, and sob himself to sleep in Gavin’s arms. And as they grew closer, when Porter and Gavin spent nights together as friends, at first, it was Gavin who walked into his bedroom and joined him in bed to console him whenever he heard Porter having the nightmare.

  Porter had to move four months later, into a house a little closer to work, because he couldn’t stop seeing Dane everywhere in the place, everywhere they’d made love, all of it.

  Fortunately, as Porter and Gavin grew closer, from best friends and playmates into friends with bennies, and then into more, the nightmares grew less frequent.

  After Gavin left for Costa Rica, Porter had an immediate resurgence of the nightmares for the first couple of weeks, sometimes with the additional “fun” of Gavin meeting with some sort of accident that permanently took him from Porter.

  Tonight, he awakened to find himself drenched in sweat and lying on his side and holding a pillow the way he used to hold Dane.

  And Gavin.

  No, even if Gavin didn’t want to be in his life, Porter could adult and deal with that.

  A world without Gavin in it at all—that was a world he didn’t want to live in. Because there were definitely worse things than someone ghosting him and not telling him why they were angry with him.

  Far worse.

  Chapter Nine

  That Monday morning, Gavin awakened with and struggled against a headache that felt hell-bent on squeezing his damn eyeballs right out of his head.

  Still, after chugging a Mountain Dew and three ibuprofen before he even had his coffee, he went to work.

  He refused to admit it had anything to do with him waking up crying in the middle of the night after more dreams about Porter, and Dane.

  About that afternoon.

  He definitely didn’t want to admit he felt guilty about doing this to Porter, because fuck him, that’s why.

  He damn sure wouldn’t call off sick today. This was the start of week four working there. Unless he was running a high temperature, or crapping or puking his guts out, he wasn’t going to call off work that soon into his employment.

  It was a hot, muggy Sarasota morning, even that early in the morning. At least it was cooler than Costa Rica. As he wiped sweat out of his eyes he tried not to think about Lakeland and how he could look down the apron if he was standing out back to work on a bird and see Porter’s building.

  Tried not to think about the mornings they rode into work together.

  Tried not to think about that oppressively hot afternoon outside Dane’s apartment.

  But as he worked all that morning, Porter was never far from his mind, and he was still struggling not to break down and call him again.

  I can’t.

  He couldn’t get dragged into an emotional tug-of-war. He wasn’t strong enough, and he’d been on the losing end of this before.

  I need to get my head on straight, is what I need to do.

  It was close to lunch time. He was about to take a break, but he wanted to do this one damn thing first. He was trying to loosen a nut on a cable bracket in the engine compartment when the wrench slipped and he skinned the knuckles on his first three fingers because he’d taken his glove off to try to get a better feel for the damn thing and his glove kept catching.

  As he sucked the raw, wounded digits, he took a deep breath and held it for a moment.

  Jet fuel. Aviation fuel. Exhaust from the planes large and small taking off from SRQ. The tangy, sweet scent of Sarasota Bay not far away from their current locale and blowing to him on a western breeze that kept the feels-like temperature down by at least ten degrees.

  Not his dad’s cigarettes as he’d lied one more time about where he’d been and what he’d been doing despite Gavin having seen his car in the motel parking lot earlier that afternoon after following him and the woman—who wasn’t his mom—there from the restaurant he’d seen them at earlier.

  Not the first woman he’d caught his dad fucking over the years.

  Not the sickly-sweet cloud of Geoff’s vape juice as the man looked him in the eyes and flat-out lied about where he’d been and who he’d been with, yet again, and told Gavin he was simply imagining things.

  He closed his eyes and forced back the stinging tears as he held his wounded hand cradled against his chest.

  I’ll be okay.

  He’d survived everything else he’d gone through in his forty-one years of life.

  I’ll get through this, too.

  It would hurt like a motherfucker, but life would go on. He kicked himself in the ass he didn’t spend the whole weekend at Kent’s a couple of weekends ago and fuck someone, or at least let himself get fucked. Had he done that, it likely would have allowed him to force Porter out of his mind for a little while and maybe find someone else for the night to help him start the process of letting his emotional wounds scab over.

  He’d even looked up the website for the local BDSM club in Sarasota, and spotted there was a munch the previous weekend.

  He almost attended that until he chickened out. And he didn’t attend any events there this weekend, either.

  No, he wasn’t quite ready for prime-time yet.

  Maybe I should hit Grindr and line up someone to meet me at the Toucan this weekend. The two of them can fucking go to hell. I can be an extra bitch, walk up to them with a new guy, and burn that motherfucker down.

  Or, better, he could show up, and if they weren’t there he could march his mystery new guy around and pretend to all his friends there wasn’t a damn thing wrong.

  Porter? Porter who? Fuck that asshole, and the asshole he’s fucking, too.

  Jayce had tried calling Gavin last weekend and after sending it to voicemail, Gavin blocked his number.

  Porter didn’t call again, though.

  Fortunately, Jayce didn’t have Gavin’s e-mail address, and Gavin hoped Porter wouldn’t give it to him. He’d already blocked Jayce on all his other social media accounts.

  He finally got the nut loose, then headed inside to go wash his skinned hand and bandage it, because his middle knuckle was still bleeding a little.

  While he was doctoring his hand in the break room, he heard the door chime for the front door go off, and Morris speaking to someone out in the lobby.

  When he emerged from the breakroom, he walked down to the lobby. “Are those my parts?”

  “No—hey, wait,” Morris called to the FedEx driver.

  The guy turned. It wasn’t their usual driver, either.

  Morris held up a package. “This is for Addleson, not us.”

  The driver took it and looked at it. “Oh, dang it.” He punched something into his electronic scanner and scanned it. “Thanks.” He headed out.

  Morris walked over and handed Gavin one of the small boxes. “That’s probably yours.”

  “Thanks.” He looked around. “Where’s Della?”

  “Lunch, and errands. Always check the packages while the driver’s here, if you can.”

  “Why?”

  Morris hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the front door. “Our street number’s nearly identical to Sunbay Aviation’s address. We get each other’s stuff all the time. You’d think the drivers would learn by now.”

  “Oh.”

  Gavin headed back out and realized he should just grab lunch, too. He turned around and told Morris he was heading out and climbed in his truck.

  He was still learning his way around the area. Unfortunately, if he went over to 41, he’d hit horrible freaking traffic. It was still snowbird season, but worse, they had the dang highway all torn up with construction. It could take twenty minutes just to go less than a mile.

  So he headed out the back way, drove east along Tallevast, and hit a sandwich shop over on 301. There, he sat in the air-conditioned restaurant and went through his e-mail on his phone. His headache was still throbbing but not as bad as it’d been earlier.

  While he sat there, he checked Facebook despite his better instincts.

  Porter had posted no updates.

  At all.

  Which wasn’t totally unusual, but when he skimmed through some of their mutual friends’ posts, which Porter would frequently like, he saw none from him.

  Odd.

  His finger hovered over the unfriend option and he still couldn’t make himself do it.

  Shouldn’t I be more angry at him than at Jayce?

  Except…he couldn’t. How fucked up was that?

  Which is more proof that the last thing I need right now is a relationship.

  * * * *

  By the time he headed home that afternoon, his headache was still there, but with more applications of ibuprofen, and a two-liter’s worth of Mountain Dew, it had eased back enough he could mostly ignore it.

  He stood under his shower with the water turned cool and beating on his head, and that helped, too.

  I miss him.

  His eyes popped open. He’d done a pretty good job not thinking about Porter for most of that afternoon while he’d been working. He’d finished the job he was working on and would start the next one in the morning, when the parts for it should arrive.

  I need to work this weekend.

  That was part of his problem. He’d allowed himself too much downtime. His brain did bad things to him then. He could work, get himself into a routine, and eventually reach a point where he wouldn’t be thinking about Porter-fricking-Hutchinson every damn time he turned around.

  When he climbed out of the shower he dried off and didn’t bother getting dressed. All his blinds were closed, so it wasn’t like anyone could peep in on him. He was heading for the kitchen to make himself dinner when his phone rang.

  He groaned as “It’s Raining Men” blared.

  Fuck.

  He answered it, knowing he couldn’t put it off. He’d sent her an e-mail last week telling her he was living in Sarasota and giving her his new address, but she wasn’t on Facebook, so he wasn’t too worried about her spreading the news there.

  “Hey, Mom.” He propped the phone between his cheek and shoulder and opened the fridge. “What’s up?”

  “Your grandmother was asking me about you this morning. Wants to know if you’re dating any girls. You could try calling her every once in a while. I don’t know what to tell her.”

  He silently groaned. “Oh, I’m fine, thanks. How are you? Yes, the new job’s going great, thanks for asking.”

  He heard her tsk through the line. “Don’t be a smart-ass, Gavin.”

  “I’d rather be a smart-ass than a dumb-ass, Mom. What do you want? I’m standing here buck-ass naked in my kitchen and about to make myself dinner.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Why? I just had a shower. I’m clean. And you know damn well I’m gay. Tell her that.”

  “I’m not telling her that.”

  “She knows I’m gay. Just because most everyone else in our family wants to ignore that fact doesn’t change it.”

  “Then you have that conversation with her. I told her you’re back in the States. She’s upset you didn’t come visit her.”

  “I’m not going all the way to Vermont to visit a woman who told me I should go to church and pray for forgiveness when I came out, Mom. Just like her suggestion you go pray for Dad to stop being a narcissistic asshole wasn’t going to change him, either.”

  “She’s your grandmother.”

  “She’s also sitting on a pile of cash she more than made clear to me she was never leaving me a cent of since I’m gay. She wants to see me so badly, she can fly her wrinkled damn ass down here to Florida. She paid for all her other grandkids’ college educations, and I had to work two jobs along with landing a scholarship to go to tech school. She can go fuck herself.”

  “Watch your language.”

  He fought the urge to slam his fridge shut. “If this is the only reason you called, Mom, I’m hanging up.”

  “Steve’s getting married in three weeks.”

  That was his younger step-brother by her latest husband, John. “Is that an invite? I thought John told me fags weren’t welcome in his house?”

  “Gavin!”

  “Hey, Mom, newsflash—I am one, so I can use the word. How’s that pre-nup treating you, anyway?”

  She hung up on him.

  He chuckled and set his phone on the counter. That was a record, even for him. When he hit thirty-one, he finally realized his family, while not slit-his-throat violent, were never going to embrace him for who he was.