Page 33 of Any Given Lifetime
He didn’t want to hurt Joshua. He’d never wanted to hurt Joshua. But the expression on Joshua’s face when Neil had made the anxiety-driven jab about Dr. Russell having never been Joshua’s lover had clearly struck at pain deep inside. Neil had wanted to swallow his own tongue, choke to death on it, andnotcome back in another life remembering everything again.
Hell, if he could only be sure of that, he’d have offed himself a long time ago.
It was exactly like he’d known it would be. Painful, awkward, and, yeah, seeing Joshua, sitting beside him, watching his face move through various emotions as he’d regarded Neil had been terrifying, so he’d lost his mind and been an ass. At the time, it’d seemed better than grabbing Joshua, kissing him, and declaring himself the reincarnation of Joshua’s long-lost lover.
Lover.
God, Neil wished he’d been Joshua’s lover. If he had those memories, too, maybe he’d have been able to cope a little better. Maybe he really could have left it all behind when that truck barreled down on him and Magic. But instead he was stuck with all of this longing. The longing that had foolishly led him to apply for the grant and then come here with Brian.
He’d been an idiot. A foolish, selfish, heartless idiot.
Neil sat on the bed, head in his hands, and stared at his shiny shoes purchased just for this trip. He remembered getting ready for the meeting, the anticipation and fear that had rushed through him in an endless loop. He’d stared at himself in the mirror, looking at the line of his nose, the angle of his jaw, and he’d wished he were somehow ten years older. He’d wondered if Joshua would recognize him, if he’d see the similarities, or if he’d just be some dorky kid.
He could admit it now. He’d wanted Joshua to know. And yet the recognition in Joshua’s eyes had been horrible to see. Joshua had looked ill, like he could barely stand to look at Neil, and that had cut. Was Joshua so desperate to forget him after all? Had he moved on since Lee’s death to mourning for his husband more than he’d ever mourned for Neil? For a split second, Neil wished Joshua had never met Lee. The thought lacked generosity and love, but it was there all the same.
Neil fell back on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and thousands of memories poured through him. Scottsville had seemed freakishly familiar when he’d driven into the town after the hour-drive from the Nashville airport with Dr. Peters. It was exactly as Joshua had described it to him all those years ago. A town frozen in time. After they’d arrived at the Barren River Resort, he’d stayed hidden in his room freaking out, waiting for the meeting to start.
The meeting that had just gone oh-so-very badly.
When he’d seen Joshua standing in the conference room, eyeing the table, with his hands stuffed into his pockets and his light-brown hair curling at the temples like it always had, Neil had thought his heart would hammer out of his chest. He’d heard people say things like that before, describing an intensity of hollow, ringing fear that he remembered from the truck accident, but now that he’d experienced it again, he couldn’t shake the reverberation of it from his body.
And then Joshua had seen him, too.
And his face…his face had said so much. Neil shivered remembering the way Joshua had paled, going green at the gills. Joshua had been horrified by the resemblance he saw, and Neil couldn’t blame him. There’d been times in the past, when he’d been hanging out drinking a coffee in the campus cafeteria, or looking up old, dusty books on reincarnation in the library when he’d seen someone who resembled Joshua. Someone with light-brown hair that hung down in their face—the way Joshua had worn his hair when Neil first met him—or someone with the same slope to their shoulders and bounce in their walk. And he’d hated that person. He’d never talked to any of them, and he never would, but he hated them for looking like Joshua, for making Neil remember in a visceral, aching way exactly the thing he could never have. The thing he needed to let go.
But he wasn’t an idiot. He recognized that he’d never had any idea how to let Joshua go or how to stop loving him. It seemed impossible. Loving Joshua was all he’d ever known.
His phone started beeping, and he pulled it out of his pocket. It was Dr. Peters, of course. He turned it off and threw it across the room. It hit the wall and crashed to the floor.
Neil rolled over, covering his head with a pillow when it kept on ringing.
Hours passed, andNeil ignored the knocking on his hotel room door and the sound of Dr. Peters calling to him through the thick wood. He couldn’t sleep, and he couldn’t do anything else, either. He just lay there, scanning through memories from another time, and trying to figure out how he was going to keep on living if he couldn’t do his work, if he couldn’t block out thoughts of Joshua by diving into nanite research and experiments.
The sound of the privacy settings of the room being overruled brought Neil upright, and his mouth hung open as Joshua walked in, with Dr. Peters on his heels, as well as a few members of hotel security behind them.
Joshua’s eyes flashed annoyance and relief at once. Neil couldn’t tug his gaze away from Joshua, but he knew he must look a mess sprawled on the bed, his shirt rumpled and his hair rubbed every which way by the pillow. His face wasn’t schooled. His emotions were showing.
Dr. Peters was talking, but Neil didn’t hear him.
Joshua swallowed and took a step forward, reaching out toward Neil. “Hey, you had us pretty worried.” Joshua looked behind him, waved the security away. They stepped outside the room, but Neil got the impression they didn’t leave entirely. Turning back to Neil, he said, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Neil tried to snap the words out, but he didn’t think he sounded especially convincing. His voice was breathy and strange. Horrified, he realized that Joshua thought he was a melodramatic teenage genius who was pouting about having lost the funding.
Joshua glanced back toward Dr. Peters, waiting to follow his lead.
Dr. Peters took several steps forward. His tired expression said it all. “Neil, I understand that you’re disappointed, but scaring us like this wasn’t necessary.”
Neil wiped a hand over his face. “I wanted some privacy. That’s all.”
Joshua looked momentarily startled, though Neil didn’t know why. But then he trained his face into an expression of concern again and stepped a little closer. “Look, I’m willing to hear you out. Things got a little uncomfortable earlier, and that was partially on me. How about we let bygones be bygones and give this another try?”
“Why?” Neil asked, standing up to try to feel more on equal footing with them both. His tongue moved and he made words, and as soon as he heard them, he wanted to grab them back from the air. “So that you can soothe the poor kid’s hurt feelings? My work will be fine. With or without you.”
Dr. Peters threw his hands up in the air and walked out of the room. Clearly, he’d had enough of Neil. Joshua watched him go but didn’t follow. Instead, he took a deep breath, shut the door to the room, and pulled up a chair. He turned it around backward and sat down. He eyed Neil speculatively from his shoes to crown of his head, and then sighed, unbuttoning his shirtsleeves and rolling them up.
Neil was speechless. He couldn’t take his eyes off Joshua’s forearms, the soft hair and skin he exposed. Memories of Joshua’s arms under his hands as they’d kissed came back to him. He scrunched up his eyes to shake those thoughts away.
When he opened his eyes again, Joshua had his arms crossed over the back of the chair, and he was studying Neil intently.
