“I’m not mental,” I said resentfully. No, I wasn’t ready to forgive him. “Since we’ve met, you’ve had a steady diet of sex. You can’t stop cold turkey.”
“I did give my right hand a work out. And every time I came, it was your name I moaned.”
Okay, that explained the less than copious amounts of come when we’d made love, I conceded to myself.
“Before I met you, I was too involved with work to have more than a random one night stand here and there. I didn’t get much out of them, so I stopped. And then I met you. Theo, did you think I was kidding when I said I loved you? If I can’t have you, I don’t want anyone else.”
“Really?” Okay, I was definitely going to forgive him.
“Geez, Theo. You can be such an asshole.” He fisted his hands on his hips. “Do you know what yesterday was?”
I started to say “Wednesday,” automatically, but then I stopped and thought about it. “It was a year since we met.” Since he’d walked into the ED behind Vincent.
“Yes. But more than that, it was a year since we became lovers.”
My jaw dropped. He remembered the actual date?
“What? Did you think I’d forget the night you popped my cherry?”
“You took White Bread’s cherry?” Trust Tim to overhear that, even in the middle of a quarrel with his own lover. Cris looked interested too.
Wills turned bright red, and he groaned. “Having succeeded in embarrassing myself…” He closed his hand around my arm and dragged me to the far end of the bar. One hand remained on his hip, but the other he ran through his hair. “Look, Theo. If you want to count it from the day I moved in, then fine, that’ll be our anniversary, but as far as I’m concerned, we’ve been together since a year ago yesterday.”
“You were out of town. I didn’t think you remembered.” Shit, it had slipped my mind.
“But I sent you flowers…”
“Yes. The flowers.” I scowled at him. He had to remind me what started the whole fucking mess. “Guys send flowers when they’ve done something dumb and they want to make up for it.”
“And you’d know this how?”
“I’ve had clients who called the florist while they were still in bed with me.” Being the realist I was, I’d known some of the men who’d used my services were married—okay, maybe more than some of them—and while back in the day I’d been blasé about it, now it hurt like hell.
“I’m not a fucking client! Theo, I sent you flowers because I love you and it was the anniversary of something that meant a lot to me.”
“Maybe that’s so, but…but what about the card? ‘I’m sorry. Forgive me. I was a fool.'”
“What? That’s not what I told him to put on it!”
Did he think I was illiterate? Irritated, I fished the card from my pocket and threw it at him. “Here. Read it for yourself.”
He caught it, stared down at the damning words, then looked up in some confusion. “But this isn’t what I told him to put on the card. It was supposed to say…” Abruptly, that cold look returned. “Y’know what? Fuck it. I’ve done nothing this whole year to make you think I would even look at someone else, and yet you’re willing to believe that I’d fuck any warm body just because you’re not around?”
Why wouldn’t he? There were so many men who were younger, who weren’t as used…
“We…we don’t do that in my family.” The cold look was gone, and his eyes were shiny with unshed tears. He turned away. “I’m going back to DC.” His voice broke, but he continued in spite of it. “It’ll…it’ll take me a while to get my stuff together, but I’ll be out of there as soon as I…” There was defeat in the line of his shoulders. He had lost all hope. He was giving up on us, walking out on what we had.
What we had.
“Wills.” I caught his arm, bringing him to a halt, but he refused to face me. I moved to stand directly in front of him, turned his face toward me. “What was the note supposed to say?”
He finally looked into my eyes. “It was supposed to say ‘Thank you for giving me the most wonderful year of my life.'”
“Really? I gave you the most wonderful…Really?”
“Really. I love you, and…” A single tear spilled over, but before he could brush it away, I caught it on my fingertip.
That was what we had, that Wills loved me and I loved him. I kissed the rest of his words from his mouth, and he sighed and closed his arms around me, holding on tight. His shoulders shook under my hands, and I stroked and petted him.
“I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”
“Just please don’t do this to me again.”
“No. I won’t. It’s just…” I caressed his cheek, and he turned his face into my palm, kissing the scratches left by the rose thorns.
“It’s not easy for someone in our business to have a relationship with someone not in our business.” Tim joined us, still favoring his side.