Page 63 of Perfect Storm
“Aidan, you gotta say something to him.”
“No way,” Aidan scoffed. “No fucking way.”
“He’s waiting for you to make a move, again,” Dawson said persuasively.
“If he is, he’s going to be waiting a whole goddamn year,” Aidan said even though the thought of that sounded like sheer fucking torture.
“I’m just gonna say this once. You know what this last year has taught me?” Dawson said, suddenly looking very serious.
“Don’t trust your father-in-law with your bank account?”
Dawson kicked him under the table, gently but with definite intent. Aidan shrugged, because okay, yes, he’d probably deserved that.
“I mean, yeah, that too, for sure. But also, that life is short. Happiness doesn’t last forever. You gotta take what you can get, while you can get it. Clearly Levi makes you happy. He makes you forget, even for a minute, that you’re Aidan fucking Flynn. And that’s a blessing.”
“Is it?” Aidan questioned, even though heknewit was. Just like he knew that if he’d actually been able to talk to Riley or Landry about this, they’d be saying the same thing.
“Don’t bullshit me. You know it is.”
“I just . . .I don’t know how much I want to put myself out there again. We said a year. I don’t want to make him uncomfortable by pushing him for it sooner. Maybe he’s got other stuff going on . . .” Aidan trailed off as Dawson shot him a frank look.
“Maybe he does. Maybe he doesn’t. But you’ll never know if you don’t ask.”
“I could just wait the year. Meet up with him in the offseason, in Michigan. That’d be a hell of a lot simpler. Keep him in sort of that box, you know? It complicated everything when he came here.”
“You don’t want to do that, though,” Dawson guessed correctly.Annoyingly.
He didn’t. It would have been easier, and absolutely simpler, if Levi had stayed in the Michigan box. If he’d never come to Toronto. Aidan could have waited the year, no question, and ifit had still felt right, hooked up with him mid-summer. Where there were no consequences and no additional connections.
But that wasn’t how things had turned out.
“I’ll think about it,” Aidan said. Because it was true; he was already having difficulty thinking of anything else. Only football distracted him these days, and not even that. Not that well.
“I guess that’s probably the best I’m gonna get,” Dawson said.
“You know it is.”
Dawson let out a heavy sigh. “You’re a piece of work, dude.”
Aidan knew it. He’d been knowing it for thirty-three years now. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t forget it.
“Does that mean I’m allowed to ask about you now?” Aidan asked.
“Seriously?” Dawson barked out a laugh.
“We talked aboutme,” Aidan said. And he hadn’t even wanted to.
“Oh look,” Dawson said, gesturing towards the waiter who was coming towards them, arms full of plates. “Our sushi’s here.”
Aidan was nice. He let Dawson get half a roll in before he circled back around.
“We reallyshouldtalk about it,” Aidan said reproachfully. “I’m here to listen. Anything you want to say.”
Dawson glanced up. “Oh yeah? You wanna hear how much it sucks to find out your wife cheated on you and then, when you go to get divorced, your lawyer figures out that your father-in-law’s been siphoning money out of your investment accounts for years? Andthen, if that wasn’t the worst fucking set of events you could imagine, it fucks you up so bad mentally, so you can’t even do the one thing you’re good at and you get fired?”
“Uh.”
“Exactly,” Dawson said. “It fucking sucks and there’s not much else to say about it.”
