Page 8 of Regret Me Not

“He was premed. I was engineering.” Pierce still remembered that day—the day they’d realized it wouldn’t work out. The ache in his chest that hadn’t quit for a month, the way Loren had kept wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.

The transported, almost ethereal expression on Loren’s face as he came inside Pierce for the last time.

“So you broke up?” Hal sounded indignant, and Pierce opened his eyes and regarded his young friend with a sadness he couldn’t shake.

“It was the grown-up decision,” he said, and it sounded like a cop-out now, when it hadn’t back in school. “I had a job offer already from Hewlett-Packard, Loren had been accepted to Stanford. His parents would have cut off his support if he’d come out—”

“What about yours?” Hal asked perceptively.

Pierce wanted to shrug, but he couldn’t. “Oh, mine would have—most definitely. But I didn’t really care about mine. They were assholes. I cut off contact with them about a year later anyway. But Loren… it meant a lot to him. All of it. Med school, Stanford, Mom and Dad. I couldn’t… you know.”

Hal shook his head, looking angry. “You didn’t fight for him?” he asked, sounding forlorn.

“Oh, kid. Is that what happened to you?”

Hal turned away, his hands completely still.

“We made a decision together. He didn’t want me to fight for him. He told me himself.” Pierce remembered how hard he’d fought that. The part of him that died when he resigned himself to the breakup. “But I wasn’t happy about it,” he admitted.

Hal had perched his sunglasses on the top of his head when they’d gotten into the hot tub, and now he lowered them again before turning back to look at Pierce. No doubt his eyes were red rimmed.

“So, you would have fought for him,” Hal said, like this mattered to him a great deal.

It was on the tip of his tongue to say “No, eventually we all give up.” He hated to disillusion the kid. But he couldn’t forget Sasha, showing up at his apartment a year after school, saying she was pregnant. Pierce had fought for her, hadn’t he? Yeah, he’d apparently become a real festering cold sore since, but once, just once in his life, he’d fought for someone, and he’d made a difference.

“Yeah,” he said, because here, under the gray haze of late November in Florida, he could remember wanting to fight. The need to be with someone he truly cared about had boiled in his blood then, no matter how thin that blood was now.

“Good,” Hal said, nodding. Then he went back to Pierce’s feet, but by now the nerves were too raw. Pierce pulled away.

“Sorry—my feet are about done.”

“The tile floors, right?” Hal nodded like it was a foregone conclusion. “They’re great because you can sweep all the sand out when you walk on the beach, but they’re hell on your body.”

Pierce grunted. Just getting out of bed hurt.

“Tell you what.” Hal grinned perkily. “Tomorrow we’ll do a light workout, mostly stretching, then we can go buy mats.”

Duh. “Like rubber mats?” Hey, that had been his idea too!

“Oh yeah—the kind they have at the gym should do. You can cut them to size—they’ll make walking on those floors so much easier, trust me.” His melancholia over Pierce’s apparent failure to believe in true love had melted, and damn. The kid was offering to do him a solid.

“Sure,” Pierce said, because otherwise tomorrow was doing a whole lot of what he’d done over the last two days. “Maybe I can get a chair too.” Derrick had a small work desk in the living room, but he apparently used a kitchen chair to work there. Pierce had taken one look at that setup and known it would break his fragile, healing body. “I can start… I don’t know. Looking up jobs or something.”

“Here in Florida?” Hal asked, sounding eager.

“Naw.” Pierce shrugged. “I’ve got a house in Sacramento. It’s small, but I got to keep it and most of the furniture after the divorce.” He smiled a little, remembering the den that he got to outfit all on his own. “The bedroom is fucking pink, but the den is nice. All hardwood and paneling. A work desk and a big gaming TV.” His smile faded. It was the first time he’d thought happily of home since he’d awakened in the hospital. Sasha had come out when he’d called her, after Cynthia had stormed out of his room, and she’d met him at discharge with enough pain pills to get him on the plane, along with all the luggage she could pack.

God bless his sister. He’d paid her back so poorly.

“Oh.” Hal’s shoulders sagged. Then he perked up. “I’ve never been to California. Maybe I could visit.”

That suddenly, Pierce needed to know about Hal for a change. “Where do your parents live?” he asked, thinking the kid seemed to need to get away a lot.

“North Carolina,” Hal muttered, like the state name was a dirty word. Well, when you were young and gay, maybe it was right now. “My father’s a judge.”

Yikes.

“A conservative judge?” Pierce asked, just to make sure.