Page 55 of Sucker Love (Sugar Pill Duet #1)

Alone? He expects me to live here alone like some dirty fucking little secret of his when he’s done playing happy family with his wife, and I don’t care if it’s platonic or not. The truth is she’ll be getting all the best of him and I won’t be getting shit. I’ll be second fiddle. I’ll be nothing.

“Postponing the divorce will make it easier on everyone,” he’s saying. “Our families, too.”

It dawns on me, then, what he’s really doing.

It’s his deadliest flaw: that he doesn’t want to be out and he’s never wanted to be out.

He would’ve never come out if his wife hadn’t wised up.

He was content to live the way he had forever, because what he’s always wanted is what he told me on the beach: a big, happy family with lots of kids.

Never having to stand up to his piece of shit dad and never having to assert himself in any way.

He’s going to use this as an excuse to go back to the closet.

And he’s going to drag me in there with him.

No .

“You lied,” I whisper. “You fucking lied . You said you would always pick me over having a family and now you’re sidelining me for it.”

“Noel, no. I?—”

“No, fuck you. Fuck you. ” I back away from Luca and bang my shin on the coffee table.

I almost kick it over but I’m still backing away because he’s still encroaching.

This man who would rip my heart to fucking shreds for a baby he didn’t even know existed until today, with a woman he doesn’t even like.

He will destroy my entire being for this.

This is not a compromise. Fuck him. Fuck him.

“Noel.”

My back hits the wall. “Don’t touch me!” I snap my teeth at him. “Don’t you dare fucking touch me. You absolute piece of shit. Get the fuck away from me.”

But he doesn’t. He stops reaching, but he doesn’t move away, doesn’t give me the space to escape.

He is still so close and I hate that I love that he’s close, that I could just touch him, take him in my arms, be taken into his, could kiss him and all the rest. But he’s gone, he’s left me.

He’s still here, but he’s gone. He’s been leaving me since he walked in the fucking door. It’s a decision he’s made without me.

“You always pick the easy way out, don’t you?” I say. “You really are a fucking coward.”

“You think this is easy for me?” And he puts on such a good, sorry show.

His beautiful green eyes are so sad and pale.

Maybe they’re even a bit shiny with tears.

Throat working as he swallows, and that’s a whole show, too, moth wings fluttering on his skin.

“You think having a baby with someone I’m not in love with is easy? ”

“It is for you,” I hiss. “Infinitely easier. Means you don’t have to change a single damn thing. All you have to do is put me in a graveyard. Then you get to go back to living your life the way you always have.”

“It isn’t like that.” He sounds so pained, the words being ground out of him. “Noel, please. It’s not. We can still make this work. We can.”

“You know what’s really hard?” I snarl at him.

“Being gay every single day of your fucking life. Living your fucking truth even though everyone hates you for it. Even though people call you an it and they can’t decide if you’re a boy or a girl, or if you should live or die.

Just because of how you look and how you act and who you love, unapologetically.

That’s hard. But playing house with your wife and doing exactly what your daddy wants?

Treating me like some clandestine affair you’ll get around to once in a while?

That’s the easiest fucking thing in the world for you.

And that’s why you’re going to do it. Because it’s easy. ”

I’ve struck a nerve. He doesn’t even argue against anything I’ve said.

That woeful face twitches and morphs into something very close to fury.

“You have no fucking clue,” he spits. “No idea how much it hurts to choke it down, every single day, for everyone but myself. Do you think that makes me fucking happy? I wanted it to just be me and you forever and now it can’t. ”

“You’re the one making yourself do it!” I cry. “You’re putting yourself in that cage! You’re your own jailer, you fucking idiot. It’s so insane that you can’t see that. ”

Luca’s broad shoulders sag and that brief fight goes out of him, just like that.

He drops his head, and it comes to rest against mine, which is unbearable—his touch—and I can feel it, the sob welling up in my throat, expanding it to impossible and excruciating proportions until I feel like I might vomit.

“Please,” he says. “Please don’t do this.

” His face nestles into mine. “I don’t want to lose you. I can’t.”

I feel like an insane person, I love him so desperately.

Want to infuse him with all of this love somehow, give him the strength to just do this.

I want him to realize that he can still be a good dad and be all the way with me, if he would just let himself.

It isn’t so black and white, wrong and right.

I could scream my throat raw trying to make him understand this and it doesn’t matter because I know he’s made up his mind already.

But he is a fucking liar.

None of this meant anything to him.

And all of a sudden this is intolerable.

His nearness, his touch, his quiet grief and desperation.

All of it self-inflicted and completely fucking avoidable.

I cannot take it anymore. I plant my hands on his chest and shove, hard as I can, until he staggers backwards in half-shock, and then I dart away into the kitchen.

He’s calling after me and I don’t care because I need this off me too, this fucking tattoo, this brand he put on me back when he fucking wanted me, or thought he did, or I thought he did, but either way I don’t want it.

I don’t fucking want any reminder of him on me or around me, I need it all gone.

I seize a knife out of the block and by that time he’s caught up with me. “Noel!” he shouts, panicked, and before I can fillet my thigh with it he grabs my wrist. “Noel, what the fuck are you doing?”

I try to fight him. “Let go of me!” I’m screaming. “Let me go! Go away! I fucking hate you!”

And we’re both screaming in each other’s faces and his grip is like iron and I know he doesn’t want to hurt me but he is.

He’s grinding all those fine bones together trying to get me to drop the knife but I won’t, I fucking won’t.

I almost grab it by the blade with my other hand and only the very small and sane rational part of me says no, don’t, you can’t, you need your hands while the rest of me is crying out who cares?

There won’t be anything after this. I can’t see it.

This future I’ve built up in my head for myself, for us has been torn in pieces.

There’s nothing left. Oh god, there’s fucking nothing.

It’s all disappeared into the black hole. I’ve swallowed it all up.

Luca manages to take me to the floor and we lie there on the linoleum, his hand still clamped about my wrist and my hand still clamped around the knife.

His chest heaves against my back. We’re both panting and sobbing, incoherent.

He presses his wet face alongside mine and his stubble scrapes and burns. I’m going to miss that.

“Please don’t do this,” he whispers. “Don’t do this.

You promised me you wouldn’t. Do you know how it would kill me if anything happened to you, Noel?

If you keep hurting yourself like this?” I can feel him trembling.

His grip is fatiguing. So is mine, but I can push through it.

My tolerance for pain is so, so high; my limits are fucking boundless.

I’ll do this all night if I have to. “You have to stop. ”

“I hope it does kill you,” I say, viciously. “I hope it hurts like a bitch.”

“Stop.” He rubs his face against the side of mine. “Just...stop.”

Why should I? What do I owe him, the man who has ripped everything away from me? Who lied?

“I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have to. If there wasn’t a baby. You know I’m not in love with Demi. I’m in love with you.” So weirdly intimate, this. Him pressed up against me and being the one thing keeping me from carving my leg to ribbons. “If I could have both?—”

I don’t bother pointing out that he can. I already tried. Why should I keep fighting for someone who doesn’t want me?

“You’re so young.” This rhetoric again, repeated in his soft, husky voice that I once adored so much but right now I am repulsed by.

“You have so much ahead of you. You’ve got that job—that’s amazing.

You’re going to go on and do incredible things, I know you will.

You’ll have accomplished so much by the time you’re my age. So much more than me.”

“I hate you,” I whisper.

“That’s okay,” he whispers back. “I love you anyway.”

“Then why won’t you keep me?” And I despise how heartbroken I sound. How small and shattered.

“Oh, baby,” he murmurs, nuzzling me. “I do want to keep you. You’re my heart.”

“Then why ?” I drop the knife and roll over to face him. “Why won’t you? Why won’t you just try ?”

“I am trying.” He holds my gaze, and it’s impossible to look away, even though I want to. “This is me trying, Noel. We can still be together, it’ll just be different.”

I’m shaking now, too. “But we won’t really be together , will we? You’re going to pretend you’re still with her so your dad and everyone else is happy. I won’t get introduced to the family. I won’t get to be there for everything. I won’t even get to meet your baby. Will I?”

He doesn’t say anything, but he averts his gaze and I know I’m right.

“I would give up so much for you.” My whisper is tremulous. “But this?”

He sighs softly. The lines between his eyebrows are so deep.

“I love you, but I can’t go back in the closet for you. I can’t . I need to be with someone who is actually proud to have me. Someone who’s gonna love me in the light of day, not just in the dark.”

“You deserve that,” he tells me. “All of that and more. I want to be those things, I just can’t right now.”

I move away from him and sit up. The knife is still on the floor, and he makes a grab for it, but I’m not interested in it anymore.

I look at the man before me and feel my heart shattering in real time, the pieces ricocheting around my ribcage.

I take a deep, shuddering breath, but when I speak, my voice is almost steady.

“If you’re going to leave, then I want you gone tonight,” I say.

“And if you walk out that door, I never want to see or hear from you again. Ever.”

Luca sits up, too. “Noel. . .”

“I’m not going to be your secret. I won’t. ”

A heavy silence. “My stuff?” he finally says.

“Hire some movers or something.”

“Alright.”

We stare at each other. “You can’t hide what you are for the rest of your life,” I say to him. “And you know it.”

He closes his eyes like he is tired. “I know.”

Amelia’s toes tap the floor as she approaches us, tail wagging uncertainly. The yelling’s all died down, and she feels safe to come check it out. I push my face against hers as I rub her ears, and she licks the salty tears from my cheek. “I guess this is goodbye,” I whisper to her.

I stand at my bedroom window and watch Luca open the door of his pickup truck.

He tosses his sole packed bag inside, then takes Amelia into his arms and lifts her gently into the back seat.

The darkness within the cab swallows her and all of her little white smudges.

He is doing it, he’s going. He’s made his choice and I’m the fucking idiot for ever believing otherwise.

Look at me, Luca. Look at me.

And I almost hope he doesn’t. I hope he disappears into the night without a backwards glance and no regrets.

I hope he’s fucking happy with his decision, since I’ll never be.

If one of us has to be broken beyond repair, it might as well be me because without him I’m nothing, I’m fuck all, and he’s got everything. He is everything.

I press a hand to the pane.

If you still want me, look at me .

He turns around like he senses me there, and he looks directly into the window.

Into my face. My eyes. And even from here I can tell he’s still weeping.

He stands there and stands there looking up at me, his hands in his pockets and his hair clinging to his face and I want to scream.

There is a moment where I think he might do it, come back, claim insanity and run back into the building, up the stairs and meet me at the door and take it all back. Take me back.

He doesn’t, though. He lifts his chin at me and turns away, getting into his truck. I watch it drive off until the taillights disappear from my view.

I don’t remember much after that. There’s sobbing and there’s teeth and there’s no one to stop me, and I do take the knife and make one big cut across the center of the tattoo, and that’s sort of ameliorating.

Like slashing a canvas with a butcher knife.

It’s probably ruined now, and it’s only hurting myself, but that’s for the best, anyway.

Despite it all I still love Luca, even though I wasn’t good enough for him.

I block him everywhere, once I’ve gotten the bleeding to stop and I’ve covered the gouge with enough gauze.

I want him to stop existing to me. I want him to fade from my memories to a painful blip and maybe he will.

Or maybe he won’t. Maybe, if and when he comes to his senses and realizes that neither one of us can live that lie, I might even still be here. Waiting for him.

But for now I’m alone and I can’t stand it, so I call Danika, and when she picks up, I’m already in tears again. “Don’t say I told you so,” I say.

“What? What’s wrong? ”

“It happened. What you said. He went back to his wife. They’re having a baby. ” I swallow a sob. “Don’t fucking say it. Just don’t.”

Her gasp is audible. “Oh, Noel. I’m so sorry.”

She lets me bawl my eyes on the phone for the next hour and a half until I’m so exhausted I fall asleep without hanging up.

And I dream of him.

…To be continued in Swallow