Page 47 of The Call of Azure (Unexpected Love #3)

Liam

The sound of the waves and the harsh bite of salt in the air don’t comfort me the way they always have. It’s warm out. It’s still technically summer, after all, but I’ve been sitting in the wet sand for long enough that my fingers and toes have started to chill anyway.

I haven’t heard from Gabriel in three weeks.

When we parted ways after our final show, he’d hugged me tightly, his still-damp hair falling in careless waves that cooled my skin as he pressed a kiss to my cheek and thanked me for everything while warm brown eyes that looked almost sad stared into my soul before he turned away and headed toward his friends.

The next morning, he sent a very polite text letting me know how much he appreciated our collaboration.

How easy I was to work with. What a brilliant performer I am in the water.

And how he hopes that one day we’ll get to do something similar again.

I’d responded in kind, of course. Then I asked him how his day was going.

There’d been no response. Just like there’d been no response two days later when I asked if he wanted to swing by the bakery for coffee sometime.

Of course there wasn’t any response. While I’d hoped we’d be able to at least maintain a friendship, I knew that was a pipe dream.

I’m nothing like Gabriel’s friends from the stories he’s told and the glimpse I got of them when he jumped into the arms of a blue-haired man I assumed, for obvious reasons, was his friend Blue when he left me to my own devices after my final kiss.

I don’t have blue hair or tattoos. I don’t work in the arts.

I don’t laugh and touch openly and freely.

I stress and worry and panic and hide behind kitchen walls and routines.

Of course Gabriel doesn’t still want me.

Why would he want to spend time around me if he doesn’t have to?

He’s brilliant and radiating with life, while I’m beige and scared and boring.

I’ve never been anything more than a safe place for the people I fall for to pause for a time before they move on to more exciting opportunities.

I’ve always known that I’m pan. Not always, I suppose.

When I was younger, I didn’t know the term existed, but I knew I was drawn to all sorts of people rather than to specific genders or bodies.

I’ve slept with a handful of folks over the years, never caring much about what was under their clothes.

The only thing that’s ever mattered to me is the human beneath the surface. The depths of their souls.

Finding or even maintaining relationships, romantic or otherwise, hasn’t ever been top on my priority list. My life has always been too…

complicated, and I’ve only attempted three long-term connections.

When I told my first boyfriend that I was joining the Marines not long after I turned twenty, we'd been together for almost two years.

He'd smiled kindly, leaned in and kissed my cheek, and thanked me for being so sweet during our relationship.

He didn't cry or fight or say he wanted to try to make things work long-distance.

He told me that I'd been kind when he'd needed someone kind and that he'd always known we'd have an expiration date.

He was just happy that I'd essentially been the one to tell him when it had arrived.

All of which was news to me. I'd thought we were in love and we’d find a way to make it work.

When I was twenty-four, Stephanie and I somehow made something resembling a relationship work long-distance for a while.

We were stationed near one another for nearly three years, and we’d manage to get together on and off throughout.

Sometimes just for quick one-night rolls in the hay, sometimes for a few weeks of living together, during which we’d cook and laugh and pretend our lives were normal.

One night, after a particularly enjoyable couple of weeks together, she told me over dinner that she'd taken a promotion and transfer that would allow her a permanent office position that came with an on-base private residence. She thanked me for being stable and comfortable as if I were a pair of old sneakers she’d finally decided to donate as she cleared out her closet.

She'd spoken about how scary it could be to try and date as a military woman, whether or not the men she was interested in were also enlisted, and told me how much she’d always appreciated how safe I made her feel.

I had been too stunned to do anything other than return her hug and say okay when she said she'd have any of my things she found when she packed messengered to my quarters.

At twenty-eight, when I left the service with no real plan and a lot of trauma, the man from my squad I'd been seeing for a few months before the world blew up around us had simply offered me a goodbye blow job and thanked me for making him feel less alone while we were deployed together. I hadn’t really expected much more from that relationship, to be honest, but still, being let go with a smile and a thank you, yet again, was a bit hard to swallow.

Looking back, it’s easy to see that all my relationships have been a bit lopsided.

None of my partners have been bad people who were deliberately misleading or using me for their own gain, but what we had wasn’t really romantic love in a lot of ways.

It wasn’t passion and possibility. It was familiarity and comfort, and that’s okay.

A lot of folks are happy in relationships like that.

I was happy in relationships like that; I just hadn’t realized that’s all they’d been at the time.

I'm glad that I was able to offer them a place to feel safe for a time because I know all too well what it's like to not have that. Even at thirty-four, I don’t really have it. I know that Aunt Mar will always be there for me, no matter what. But she’s a free spirit, and she raised me to follow my own path.

I know that I could likely turn to Lilith if I needed a shoulder to cry on or help burying a body, but we’ll never be the type of friends who live together and share late-night Chinese food and secrets.

In truth, I don’t know that I’ve ever had someone offer me what I tried to give my past partners.

A truly safe space to let go and be completely myself, no matter what that entails.

Until Gabriel, I never knew what it was like to be on the other side of that dynamic.

Some part of me wonders if that’s been intentional.

After all, if I don’t depend on anyone else, then they can never let me down.

One of the worst things about being moved to a new group home or foster family was the way people and places and routines in my life would simply disappear in the blink of an eye, to be replaced by new faces and rooms and schedules.

In the Marines, it was the same. Sure, the basic routines were the same.

Wake up, follow orders, eat, follow orders, try to laugh in the face of horror, sleep, repeat.

But there, too, everything could be pulled out from under me without warning at any given moment.

Depending only on myself, knowing that if I needed a moment of peace or love or comfort, I had to find it on my own, meant that when everything around me disappeared, I could survive.

If I had gone to school for psychiatry, maybe I'd say that being shuffled around and never knowing where my next meal would come from or bed would be, that endless years of waiting for someone to notice me or love me - something that never came - fucked me up in a way that’s left me deliberately hiding from the world.

But I'm not a shrink, so I’m probably way off base.

All I know is that no one has ever felt like Gabriel.

No one has ever carved out a permanent place in my heart the way he has.

I don’t really know why he feels so different.

Why I trust him so innately. Why he’s turned the scent of coconut into longing and tranquility.

Why his laugh and his touch, his warm brown eyes and his ridiculous fake swears feel like floating in warm rhythmic waters.

I’m drawn to him, like tides to the moon or moths to the light.

I want to be around him always. I want to hold and be held, laugh and listen, support and be supported. I just want…him.

In any of my other relationships, when we were apart, we were simply apart, and it was fine.

Being apart from Gabriel isn’t fine. It doesn’t matter that he was only ever my performance partner and a two-time one-night stand.

Because he was never only those things. I was those things for him, but he was always more for me.

From the moment we met in that club bathroom, he felt like joy and fate and kismet.

He felt like life and love and eternity.

Sometimes it felt like if I just tried hard enough to be the man he needs, if I could just get him to let go the tiniest bit, then there might be…

possibilities. The way he touched me when he tied me.

The light and laughter in his eyes when we performed.

The peace in his body as he held me the night I was lucky enough to lie in his arms. In those moments, I was able to see just how deeply he feels.

Just how much he treasures joy and wants to be loved.

If I could just have been brave enough to tell him how I felt, to beg him to consider keeping me…

just maybe. But those moments would always fade, and he’d shift back to hiding behind his smiles.

The hope that flickered in my chest would burn out once again, and I’d be back to realizing that if I told him how I felt, he’d just have left sooner.

I wish I could be strong enough to deserve him, to fight for him.

There is so much loneliness hiding behind his eyes sometimes, so much longing when he talks about Ethan and Blue’s relationship.

I don’t actually think that he even realizes it.

I’ve been a source of safety for my previous partners, and I know I could be that for Gabriel too, if he’d let me in.

I know that’s already what he is to me. He’s safety and peace and home.

He’s more a part of my soul than the sound of the tides and the embrace of the water.

He’s everything I’ve never believed possible, all wrapped up in vibrant, bouncy snark.

None of that matters though. I’ve made it three weeks without any type of contact in response to my attempts to reach him. I suppose that’s my answer. He won’t ever be mine. Now I just have to make it through the next…oh…fifty-some-odd years without him by my side.