Page 51 of The Call of Azure (Unexpected Love #3)

What in the ever-loving fuck just happened?

One minute, I’m driving out to meet Mar’s new boyfriend, complaining the entire time that I’m even less up to being social than usual while she tells me that he “has some very nice boys around my age,” so it will do me some good to get out of my depression-over-Gabriel cave and pretend to be human for a couple of hours, and the next… chaos.

I didn’t bother telling Mar that, at thirty-four, attending birthday party playdates with “nice boys my age” doesn’t mean the same thing it did when I was sixteen.

Not that I would have had all that much in common with normal boys my age then either.

I also deeply regret telling her over dinner a couple of weeks ago about everything that’s happened with Gabriel.

Oh, she knew that I was taking part in a collaborative performance, of course.

We’re pretty close and always do things like send each other random texts and try to have dinner a couple of times a month to catch up.

Prior to two Sundays ago, however, she didn’t know I’d managed to land myself in a giant pile of unrequited love feelings for him.

I didn’t mean to tell her even then, but I’d found myself yet again lying on my couch in a pathetic, sleepy, depressy trance, which has been pretty much par for the course for me the past month.

This time, though, I lost track of time thoroughly enough that I missed our dinner date and scared her half to death.

When she walked into my sad little apartment and found me half-asleep on a pile of laundry that I couldn’t tell her was clean or dirty, she manhandled me to the kitchen table, made me hot chocolate - because that’s what hippie adoptive mothers do when they’re worried you’ve been turned into a zombie, I guess - and forced the entire story out of me.

Probably using witchcraft. Gabriel may have gotten that one right, even though he clearly used the word in a terrifying and derogatory way instead of the actual communes with nature and talks to bees and makes lovely teas and specialty candles way that Mar practices.

She’d responded to my tragic tale just as she always has, by making me cheesy pasta and hugging me and telling me that she’s sure the universe will allow everything to work out the way it’s meant to.

When I was a scared, angry teen, that sentence used to piss me off.

As a broken, grown-ass man who always seems to be the butt of the universe’s jokes, it just makes me a bit sad.

But I’d hugged her back and eaten my noodles and sat curled up in a chair while she folded my - clean enough to call them clean, according to Mar - couch laundry.

All the while, trying my best not to wonder why my life has been filled with so much loss and hurt and chaos if the universe really does give a shit about people.

I’ve spent my life smiling and nodding along with Mar when she talks about fate and the universe and magic, just to make her happy.

Doing so wasn’t hurting me or anyone else, even though I’ve always firmly believed that the universe has no grand plans for any of us.

As far as I’ve always been concerned, it really doesn’t give a fuck.

Right now, though, right now I am absolutely one hundred percent at a loss.

Gabriel is here, in Mar’s boyfriend’s house.

Or he was here until he slapped a hand over his mouth in wide-eyed panic, turned around, and plowed through his cluster of friends and family as he ran away from me yet again.

And from what I think I’ve pieced together from his frenetic ranting is that Mar read his cards, told him he’d find a merman, then he ran into me.

Which he seems to think is the universe playing some kind of joke on him because, apparently, the entire time we were working together and I was falling madly in love with him while believing there was no way he’d ever consider dating me, even if I begged, he was falling in love with me too.