Page 29 of Good Friends
It’d been Gavin who’d held him, held him back, as he’d sobbed and wanted to be inside with Dane.
He hadn’t wanted to leave Dane alone.
How he’d begged them to let him hold Dane one more time.
And it’d been Gavin who held him all those darkest nights while he cried, and who was a pallbearer with him at the funeral in Arkansas, both of them trying to pretend Porter had been nothing more than a good friend, coworker, and former roommate who was so obviously distraught because he’d been the one who found Dane.
It’d been Gavin who stayed sober and let him get sloppy drunk on tequila that night in the hotel after the funeral, and sob himself to sleep in Gavin’s arms. And as they grew closer, when Porter and Gavin spent nights together as friends, at first, it was Gavin who walked into his bedroom and joined him in bed to console him whenever he heard Porter having the nightmare.
Porter had to move four months later, into a house a little closer to work, because he couldn’t stop seeing Dane everywhere in the place, everywhere they’d made love, all of it.
Fortunately, as Porter and Gavin grew closer, from best friends and playmates into friends with bennies, and then into more, the nightmares grew less frequent.
After Gavin left for Costa Rica, Porter had an immediate resurgence of the nightmares for the first couple of weeks, sometimes with the additional “fun” of Gavin meeting with some sort of accident that permanently took him from Porter.
Tonight, he awakened to find himself drenched in sweat and lying on his side and holding a pillow the way he used to hold Dane.
And Gavin.
No, even if Gavin didn’t want to be in his life, Porter could adult and deal with that.
A world without Gavin in it at all—thatwas a world he didn’t want to live in. Because there were definitely worse things than someone ghosting him and not telling him why they were angry with him.
Farworse.
Chapter Nine
That Monday morning, Gavin awakened with and struggled against a headache that felt hell-bent on squeezing his damn eyeballs right out of his head.
Still, after chugging a Mountain Dew and three ibuprofen before he even had his coffee, he went to work.
He refused to admit it had anything to do with him waking up crying in the middle of the night after more dreams about Porter, and Dane.
Aboutthatafternoon.
He definitely didn’t want to admit he felt guilty about doing this to Porter, becausefuckhim,that’swhy.
Hedamnsure wouldn’t call off sick today. This was the start of week four working there. Unless he was running a high temperature, or crapping or puking his guts out, he wasn’t going to call off work that soon into his employment.
It was a hot, muggy Sarasota morning, even that early in the morning. At least it was cooler than Costa Rica. As he wiped sweat out of his eyes he tried not to think about Lakeland and how he could look down the apron if he was standing out back to work on a bird and see Porter’s building.
Tried not to think about the mornings they rode into work together.
Tried not to think about that oppressively hot afternoon outside Dane’s apartment.
But as he worked all that morning, Porter was never far from his mind, and he was still struggling not to break down and call him again.
I can’t.
He couldn’t get dragged into an emotional tug-of-war. He wasn’t strong enough, and he’d been on the losing end of this before.
I need to get my head on straight, is what I need to do.
It was close to lunch time. He was about to take a break, but he wanted to do this one damn thing first. He was trying to loosen a nut on a cable bracket in the engine compartment when the wrench slipped and he skinned the knuckles on his first three fingers because he’d taken his glove off to try to get a better feel for the damn thing and his glove kept catching.
As he sucked the raw, wounded digits, he took a deep breath and held it for a moment.
Jet fuel. Aviation fuel. Exhaust from the planes large and small taking off from SRQ. The tangy, sweet scent of Sarasota Bay not far away from their current locale and blowing to him on a western breeze that kept the feels-like temperature down by at least ten degrees.
