Page 52

TUCKER

“F ar from it.” I laughed—didn’t mean to, but it slipped out so easily I couldn’t stop it, and Josh stared at me like I had lost my mind. “I held something back that day when I asked you if you would be mine, my boyfriend,” I said to him. “Van said something else to me, and at the time I knew saying it would scare you, so I kept it to myself, but today… when I got the news about what happened, it was like my entire life had stopped. All I cared about was getting here to you,” I explained, and Josh watched on in curious horror that only made me more nervous.

“Maybe now isn’t the time…” I seized up.

“Out with it,” Josh said, his voice gritty.

“I stopped myself from saying that I love you that day, that I’m not hurting anyone by loving you,” I said, my chest feeling like someone had sucker punched me. Josh’s head tilted sideways, confusion darkening his features in a way that terrified me. My heart was racing faster than it ever had on first base, and for a split second, I thought he might flip out, but he stayed eerily quiet.

“Okay so usually you’re all talk, and I know today has been rough but uh…you not talking is freaking me out so if you could, like you know… talk?” I begged him in a rambled, breathy sentence. His fingers tightened in my hair, and I winced from the pain. “Josh?”

“Say it again,” he said after what felt like an eternity, his hand curled around my face and into the hair at the back of my head. The entanglement was rough, like he couldn’t control himself from doing it.

I stared at him and I couldn’t stop the smile that curled on my lips. "I’m not hurting anyone by loving you.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought you said,” he grumbled, his eyes never leaving mine.

“I fucked this up didn’t I?” Fear gripped my muscles, and suddenly my knees felt like rubber. I wanted to sink into the floor and disappear out of his sight, but his grip on my hair was relentless; he was the only thing keeping me upright.

“Just shut up for a second, Dean.” The begging sound in his voice was unfamiliar, but it ignited some hope that maybe I hadn’t completely bombarded him with these feelings. Maybe he was feeling them too.

Each second felt like someone was tugging a cord around my heart—each moment of silence tightening it further, and the tighter it got, the more my heartbeat thudded in my chest. I wanted to open my mouth to say something to fill the quiet, but Josh had asked me so nicely that I had to obey his request.

It was just going to kill me.

My hand gripped his nape, careful not to hurt him, but my muscles were so taut that I had started to tremble.

“What do you mean?” Josh asked, and I could feel his nervousness. It rolled off him in waves alongside his confusion.

“I uh—” I cleared my throat. "I’m not ashamed to love you. I don’t feel guilty doing it,” I said. “It doesn’t hurt anyone to do it, but it’s killing me trying to pretend I don’t.”

Josh nodded, listening to everything I was saying and paused on the last bit. The muscle in his jaw ticked, and his eyebrows flickered up like he was having a conversation I couldn’t hear.

“You’re killing me,” I said in a grumbly tone. “If you don’t feel the same, it's fine, you don’t have to love me back, Josh. You don’t even have to like me, but I…after today, after feeling this scared. I needed you to know, I—”

“Slow down, Tuck,” he said, his tongue darting out over his bottom lip. “I get it.”

“But you don’t feel the same,” I groaned. I was an absolute idiot.

“Dean,” he said in a short breath and let go of me finally. I lost my balance without his touch and stepped back into the doorframe.

“It’s okay.” I raised my hands to stop him from talking.

“Don’t be dramatic. Let me finish,” he warned, that sharp tone I knew so well returning to his voice.

I rubbed the back of my neck and sank into the distant ache of my scalp from his fingers. A foolish idiot who missed a man’s painful touch, a man who didn’t even love me back.

“I don’t know how to love someone,” Josh said and looked up at me with a foreign look in his eyes. It wasn’t pain or anger. It was a neutral expression that felt so far away and disconnected.

“What?” I asked, leaning forward and moving back toward him in the bathroom, keeping the distance between us so the tension in his jaw would soften and he would stop flexing the muscles in his arms and shoulders. “You’re born knowing how to love, Josh.”

“I might have been born knowing how to love, but I had it stripped from me, Dean… beaten out of me,” he said to me. “I’m not capable of loving someone, certainly not you.”

“You’re going to want to hit me,” I said, squaring my shoulders and bracing for his rage, god knows he had a reason to be angry today. “But that’s bullshit.”

But it never came.

“It’s not,” he quietly said.

I shook my head at him in disagreement. The sweater I wore tugged tightly across my chest and showed off every ragged breath I took. “I was hiding behind what people expected me to be, the golden boy,” I huffed. “You pushed me to be better. Called me out when I was wandering around with blinders on. You were the only person who called my bluff; well, I’m calling yours.”

“It’s the truth,” Josh said.

“It’s what you believe to protect yourself, I would know,” my voice had fallen into a frustrated territory that came out of nowhere. “I believed that if I just kept those parts of me hidden, that I could make everyone happy and that eventually one day I could live with it. Forget how shitty it felt to be alone, to never have someone to celebrate with, to watch all my friends fall in love, get married and die old with their soul mates. I believed that all of that just wasn’t in my cards, but I was playing with the wrong deck, Josh!”

“That has nothing to do with this,” he argued, and I could see where he was coming from, understanding that one thing couldn’t lead to another. We were standing in the middle of filth, surrounded by his dead mother's garbage, and I was pouring out my soul just to elicit a reaction out of him. I didn’t blame him for pushing back. He believed that he didn’t have the capacity to love me back, but he was wrong.

“You believe you aren’t capable of loving me because it’s difficult to touch me , but I don’t care about that,” I said with conviction, there was not a hint of hesitation or confusion in my voice. “You prove yourself wrong with every look, every laugh, every insult. Your love isn’t conventional, Josh. It’s barely recognizable. But I see it, I feel it.” I pounded my hand against my chest. “You know how to love someone because you figured out how to love me against all odds.”

“That’s—” Josh shook his head.

“You said whatever comes next, we deal with it,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, I meant about your parents, your career, hell even this mess but…” Josh shrugged. “I hadn’t meant about us, our…relationship…”

“You said ‘ we ,’” I snapped. “That means you’re not going anywhere. It means we do this together. And I’m holding you to that,” I threatened. “I don’t care if you don’t think you can love me back, or if you never say it. I don’t need to hear it, I don’t need to feel your touch to know it’s there.”

“Dean, that's weak, it's pitiful,” Josh clenched his jaw, hissing through his teeth. “You look like an idiot,” he snapped.

“So what?” I shrugged, my muscles rolling out as my body started to relax. It was then that Josh knew he wasn’t going to win the fight. That I’d already decided the outcome and Josh’s fear, his anger, it wasn’t a challenge I couldn’t overcome. I sank down among the garbage, proving that he would always have the control, giving him the higher ground, hoping he’d take it. I was past caring about appearances; the only thing I wanted was him.

“I’m here on my knees telling you I don’t care, I’m groveling at your feet to prove you wrong. I don’t care how pathetic I look as long as you understand that I’ll spend hours in this position if that’s what it takes to convince you, days, months, years.” I looked down at myself and put my arms out, gripping the door frame.

“I’ll get on my knees every day for you, Josh—if that’s what you need from me. I’ll worship you from a distance, memorize the sharpness of your tongue from your words, and dream about the smell of your skin just to show you what love means.”

He stared at me—my words seeping into the cracks of Josh’s heart, shining light through all the pain to reveal the love that still lingered. Scraped against the lining of his barely beating heart, it still existed; it just needed to be found.

“I can’t say it, Tuck,” he said to me, and he knew how disappointing that would be.

“I don’t expect you to,” I responded just as quickly, the honesty didn’t rattle me in the least.

“What if I can’t ever say it?” Josh asked me, his disbelief still running rampant.

“You will,” I said with a soft smile, my knees practically jello at that point.

“You’re incessantly hopeful.” He rolled his eyes.

“That’s the power of love, tough guy.” I rose from the floor and pressed my hand to his tense jaw.

“Fuck off, Tuck,” Josh choked out, his hand catching my wrist roughly but his lip tugged upward into a pathetic smile. The struggle was apparent but he was trying, with each small unsteady breath he came back to me. “This place is a disaster…” he was clearly trying to avoid any more hard conversations, and I was willing to follow the conversation off the cliff with him.

“We don’t have to deal with it right now…” I said, looking around, his thumb pressed against the inside of my wrist in response. “Or we can…” I stumbled over what to do next, what he needed. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

“I need it done, I need it all gone…” he said, his breathing still shallow and his eyes shifting around the space frantically. “I can’t come back here,” he said, the tone shifting to desperation as his eyes met mine again.

“Okay, done.” I leaned in, not waiting for permission for the second time that day and stole a reassuring, tender kiss from his bottom lip. His tongue swiped out over it when I pulled away, but he didn’t seem upset about the contact. “Let’s get to work,” I said, letting go of him.

We started with the bathroom, and at some point in time, Cael and Arlo started in the living room. Josh instructed that everything went to the dump, and when Silas tried to get him to look over the stuff in question, Josh nearly went toe to toe with his brother. Once we had them separated again, Van, Todd, and Jensen had shown up with trucks, and Reyes had managed to borrow his uncle's trailer.

We loaded it up in silence, no one talking or asking questions. Just hours of silence. At some point after a massive argument, Josh finally consented to Silas and I clearing out his bedroom. He didn't want anyone else inside and was willing to leave it locked up but Silas made a case for nosy reporters and Josh was broken by logic. The room was disgusting, not because it was dirty but because it was the cleanest room in the house. It broke my heart. It was clean because it had once had to take visitors and Josh had just formed a habit of keeping it that way. It barely looked lived in.

Like a conjugal cell. There was a real bed, with a mattress a size too small for Josh to fit in and a clean dresser that was spotless except for a lamp. Silas and I cleaned it out in silence but my skin was crawling and for a split second I was glad she was dead. For doing this to him all those years. When I was finished I went out beside the dumpster and emptied the contents of my stomach onto the asphalt.

By the time the sun fell in the sky the entire team was there following directions. Josh never spoke to anyone but Silas, Cael or me but I saw his eyes wandering around from time to time. He was observing the team with silent adoration; it was written all over his face.

Midnight came and went, Silas ran for pizza, stopping for ice cream by my request, and Cael found an old stereo that still had life. It only played one horrible Backstreet Boys CD—and skipped during the last tracks—but it made some of the guys laugh. Jensen nearly put out his shoulder carrying out the old furniture with Arlo and Dougie. While Cael complained that we should just toss it out the window from the seventh floor.

The apartment was completely bare by two am, and we all were lying around on the tile, stuffing our faces with pizza in silence. Josh sat beside me with a box of pizza at his feet, but he hadn’t touched any of it. I cradled a tub of ice cream in my palm and held it out to him, but his eyes remained in the distance, somewhere far away that I couldn’t reach him.

“You should eat.” I nudged him gently, and he nodded but didn’t move to touch the food. Instead, he pushed off the floor and stood up with his shoulders pinned back tightly and a dark look on his face.

Everyone watched as he worked up the courage to say something to them. It was extremely out of character to address them at all, but for the second time that month, Josh had reason to.

“You didn’t have to come here tonight,” Josh said, and the team listened, everyone setting down their food and drinks to give him their full attention. “And I know that I’m not always the easiest person to get along with, but I need to say thank you. For showing up and for having my back.”

Josh shifted on his feet, clearly unsure of his next move, but then he lifted his fingers and tapped the space over his heart twice. I looked over at Silas, who was staring up at his younger brother with a set jaw, but there in his eyes was so much pride that it was seeping from his typically stoic features. My chest ached for him as the rest of the team followed in succession, each of them tapping their hearts in a show of unity.

Josh lowered back to the floor without another word and slumped against the wall. “Very cult leader of you,” Cael whispered across the gap—and any other day, Josh might’ve smacked him for it, but a smile spread across his face, and he reached out for a piece of pizza.