An image popped into his head, glowing just like the grail-shaped beacon in that Monty Python movie—a bottle of bourbon. His own personal talisman for vulnerability. If I stay here, I’ll just end up doing the same shit. Even now that everyone knew he was gay. He totally had the mad skills to be a gay douche as well as a straight one.
And fuck his brother’s smirk. When they were kids, Chase used to dare him to do a lot of things that, as Tierney later figured out, the dude wasn’t willing to do himself. Jump off the roof of their three-story house for instance. By his count, he’d broken five bones thanks to that prick brother of his.
Following Chase’s advice had never done shit for him before. Following the path Grandfather’d laid out for him had gotten him here. Pick my own path.
He turned back to Father. “Okay, I’ll go hide.”
Twenty minutes. That’s how long it took for Dalton to drive to Tierney’s place, and he didn’t receive a single text during the entire journey.
There were so many solid, nonemergent reasons why Tierney might not have responded yet. He could be avoiding him, or passed out with a dead cell phone. He could be in the shower. He could be in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, or injured from a drunk-driving accident.
Or he could have eaten a bullet.
Ker-thunk ker-thunk ker-thunk ker-thunk ker-thunk. How could a heart beat so fast and yet so strongly at the same time?
Finally, coming up to Tierney’s building, Dalton could confirm for himself that there weren’t any ambulances, cop cars, or fire trucks ringing it. Just a woman a few years older than him walking out the main entrance, carrying a navy-blue overnight bag. He couldn’t swear his tires didn’t squeal when he stopped at a conveniently free parking spot next to her—judging by the woman’s sidelong look, they might have. Dalton ignored it, and in return she walked down the street shaking her head but otherwise ignoring him.
Out of the car and standing at the entry, he watched his fingers shake, hovering over the buzzer for Tierney’s apartment. What did he do if no one answered?
The door opening beside him made him leap away as the man himself came through it, wheeling a large suitcase behind him. A navy-blue one that matched the overnight bag that woman had been carrying. Dalton blinked at the luggage, trying to make it fit the story he’d created. The story that told how Tierney’d be, at best, lying on his floor, moaning and possibly in shock.
Not fully dressed at ten in the morning, leaving with bags packed and in the company of a woman.
Talk about repeating past mistakes.
“Dalton?” Tierney asked faintly, staring at him a lot like Dalton stared back.
“Who’s that woman carrying the other suitcase?” Cringe. But he had to know, because right now his brain was pinging around, thinking new things and jumping to conclusions he didn’t want to entertain that didn’t even make sense and—
“What? What woman? What are you doing here? I thought—”
“The woman I just saw walking out this door with a bag that matches yours.” Dalton pointed at the suitcase, shocked at how strident his voice had become. I sound like Andrea.
Tierney’s brows inched in toward his nose, but he didn’t seem annoyed yet. That was all Dalton. “She’s my sister-in-law. Emily. Chase’s wife.” There was the annoyance. It arrived at the same moment Dalton’s blood pressure plummeted and his legs grew shaky.
Thank God. He leaned a hand against the wall, propping himself up. “You’re all right.”
“What are you doing here?” Tierney’s voice rose. “You heard already, didn’t you? That didn’t take very fucking long. Come to see how badly I fucked myself? Gawk at me and report to your sister?”
He was forever messing up with this man. “No, I—”
“Shut up.” Tierney’s eyes had gone wild, whites flashing. “I don’t know what your game is, but I’m fine, okay? Tell everyone that—”
Dalton reached for him, took Tierney’s wrist, and pulled him into a hug. Tried to be an emotional lightning rod, safely diffusing his anger and fear. Just like in the coffee shop that time, he felt the emotions shudder through Tierney, but now much more intimately. He could track their progress through his body where they touched. “I’m sorry,” he whispered once the man was still again. “You just— You push all my buttons.”
Tierney took a shaky breath, then moved. Not away, but closer, free arm clinging around Dalton’s waist, digging his fingers in and gripping so hard he pinched Dalton’s skin. “I didn’t mean any of that, I was just . . . freaking. I can’t believe you came over here.”
Dalton responded by tightening the embrace, because he didn’t know what to say. He wanted to make promises about things getting better, and offer things he shouldn’t even be considering. Say something incredibly profound that would make everything easy. But he bit his tongue and pressed his forehead under Tierney’s ear, into his neck, listening to Tierney’s uneven breathing and smelling the day-old alcohol and his fear, both underlaid with that smell that was all him.
“Are you going somewhere?” he asked after another minute of standing there like that. In some weird indefinable clinch that made no sense logically but they both seemed to understand they needed.
Tierney swallowed, then his voice rose up from his chest. “California. To a place called the, uh, Dunthorpe Centre. Um, my family felt that I might, you know, need a little break from stress, and I kinda . . . I guess I don’t know what else to do for now. How else to, you know. Fit into my life. After last night.”
“I’m so proud of you.” It just slipped out, leaving Dalton’s breath hitching in its wake. He still didn’t even know if Tierney had intended to do it.
Tierney choked, but managed to say, “I’m not a coward.”
“I never thought you were,” Dalton whispered, stretching up on his toes so he could stand cheek to cheek with him. Feel the rasp of Tierney’s whiskers. His lips pressed what they hoped was an unobtrusive kiss near his ear.
Tierney sucked in a breath and his grip tightened. “Dalton?”
“Yeah?” He closed his eyes, because the sound of Tierney’s voice was all he wanted to focus on. That and the slide and press of his body.
Tierney turned his head, and for a split second his lips returned the caress. Then Tierney’s mouth moved against his skin. Words. “Sometimes I think that you’re, you know, attracted to me.”