Page 156 of Checking Out the Librarian

He blinked hard and focused on the frame of his car and that grimy black seal around the door opening. It was a crappy piece of rubber no better than a bike inner tube, and if that kept rain out of his car, then what component of himself would do the job of sealing up these feelings tomorrow when he’d have to go to work. He needed a shitty piece of rubber to wrap around his chest.

Connor spoke to the ground, “I lied. I’m sorry. So sorry.”

Facing things head on was kind of its own description, so that’s what he had to do, zip the cat carrier closed and then turn his head the fraction that let him look at Connor. Look at Connor’s face. See him.

“Why.” That word was the limit of his ability to not croak.

Connor straightened, and instead of pulling at his hair, he wrapped his arms around himself low on his stomach. Dirty streaks marked his cheeks where tear tracks and field dust mixed into a blotchy mess. “I know you hate lying, and I lied, but I didn’t…I didn’t hook up.”

It seemed they were going to do this here, in a softball field parking lot, like a second-rate network television cliche. While they didn’t have an audience yet, he’d parked close to the field gates and eventually people would exit this direction. They should at least move their emotional splatter somewhere quieter, like the bus shelter.

He grabbed Kitten’s carrier and closed his car door. “Over there.”

Connor followed.

The bench was constructed of that weird plastic lumber, but at least it wasn’t dirty. He sat at one end and put Kitten’s portable palace next to him, forcing Connor to sit at the other end.

The shelter’s three plexiglass sides gave the illusion of privacy but trapped the air inside. He was hot. His shirt stuck to his back. The low angle of the sun hit his cheeks and eyes, and he was so thirsty.

Someone should say something.

Even though his mouth was dry, his chest felt close to popping like a water-filled blister and he was going to ooze all over the bench if someone didn’t say something.

“Can you hold my hand?”

“I can.” He heard his own condescending tone, that familiar shield he used to keep people away because he’d rather be judged to be a snob than to be unwanted, and writhed with the knowledge of how unworthy of an important relationship talk it sounded. But fuck if it wasn’t more comfortable to be inside that shell than poking at this gaping wound.

Connor blinked rapidly, and the corners of his lips wobbled before a tiny wisp of a word slipped out. “Grumpy.”

“Don’t.” His eyes felt so hot and scratchy and he lifted his hands to his face so he wouldn’t have to see Connor. For a brief and sweet time, they had been soft and squishy together, their two less-than-perfect selves perfect for each other.

“Why didn’t you tell me he’d visited you?” His question sounded like a thread, so thin and breakable that it couldn’t possibly hold the weight of an answer and stitch them back together.

When the bench vibrated, he lowered his hands and saw that Connor had fisted the hair above his forehead so that his wrists covered his face as he rocked forward and backward. His elbows were gathered in tight to his chest, like he was making himself smaller. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

A man who looked like that didn’t need to confess something, he needed to be comforted, maybe even be protected.

What the fuck had happened yesterday?

He didn’t think about it, just swapped places with Kitten’s carrier until he was inches from Connor, who continued to rock on the bench. Kitten mewed, but he’d do best in his safe space. Right now, Connor needed Jonathan more. “What happened.”

“I lied but I didn’t cheat, I didn’t, and I’m so sorry that I lied. It was…”

A tiny bit of Jonathan, the old, hurt, howling-deep-inside bit that he wanted to exorcise, begged to erupt, You know I hate lying. And you know why. Tell me why you lied!

But that part wasn’t looking at Connor like he was, wasn’t touching Connor’s shaking shoulder and feeling tentacles of scary dark worry tighten in his gut. That part wasn’t in charge anymore, so he settled his hand on the juncture of Connor’s neck and shoulder and managed one calmly enunciated sentence. “You can tell me anything.”

Connor dropped his arms and turned. His eyes were red-rimmed and shiny with liquid and his eyelids looked puffy, and that was the moment when Jonathan knew, as certainly as he knew the letters of the alphabet or the months of the year, that he’d made a terrible mistake.

He wanted to pound the back of his own skull into the bus shelter wall and howl with how much he hated himself, because this was the face of a man who’d already been hurt badly and Jonathan, the boyfriend who should have been his goddamn pillar of support, had pushed him away and sniped at him and even tried to run.

“Tony showed up drunk.” Connor’s gaze dropped to his twisted hands and he bent forward again. “I refused to talk to him. I told him about you. I said I have a boyfriend. But I couldn’t let him drive away. He was drunk.”

Connor’s words were skittering out, almost too fast to follow, and his tone was flat. No joking, no up and down, nothing. Flat.

He wanted to rest more of his arm across Connor’s shoulders and let the weight settle him, but he didn’t know if he should, if Connor would welcome that.

“There’s kids all over the neighborhood, the park and the bike trail, I couldn’t let him go like that. I said he could come in for a sandwich.”