Tobias shut the door and opened his mouth and was promptly interrupted.
“I don’t want to talk,” Sullivan said.
For a second, Tobias almost accepted it. He almost lied: good, I don’t either. He almost told himself that if he just gave Sullivan the silence he so obviously wanted, things would be better. Tobias might feel horrible, but Sullivan would be happier, and then Sullivan would stay.
And that was everything he’d been trying to stop doing. It was everything he’d never had to do with Sullivan and damn it, he wasn’t going back to that.
“Tough,” he bit out. “You’re not the only person in this relationship, and you’re the one who told me that communication was key anyway, so we’re going to talk.”
“Communication is key when we fuck.” Sullivan whipped his T-shirt off for a clean one, then tugged sleeping pants out of his Rubbermaid drawers. “Since we’re not fucking, it’s not an issue.”
“It is an issue because I can tell you’re mad.”
“I’m not mad.”
“Please don’t make me say ‘are too’ like we’re in first grade.”
Sullivan shut the drawer a little too hard. “I’m not mad at you.”
“But you are mad. Is it because of what you had to do to Spratt? Or is it me? Did I do something?”
“Can we go to sleep?” Sullivan asked through his teeth. “I don’t want to do this.”
“Will you tell me what I did wrong?” Tobias held his breath for a second, intending to wait for Sullivan’s honest answer, but almost instantly lost his nerve. “I’ll apologize. Whatever it was that I did, I’m sorry. You know that, right?”
“It’s not anything you did.” Sullivan sighed and corrected himself with, “It’s not anything specific. I’m not happy with where I am at this point in time, that’s all. It’s...it’s shitty. I want a lot of things to be different, and none of them likely will be, and talking won’t change anything, so what’s the point?”
“But if the problem is me, maybe if we talk about it—”
Sullivan was already shaking his head. “I don’t think that’s going to help.”
“This isn’t fair. You don’t get to decide for both of us,” Tobias said, and Sullivan’s jaw worked. He stared unblinkingly at the floor, then abruptly stood up.
“Fine, you want to do this? Let’s do it. Get your bag. I’ll drive you right now.”
“My bag,” Tobias repeated, his head filling with a kind of electric, painful buzzing. “I need my bag because you’re—”
“I’m taking you back to the motel.”
“But—”
“Hey, you’re the one who wanted this.”
“I want to talk,” Tobias said, bewildered as Sullivan shoved his sockless feet back into his shoes. “This is the opposite of what I want.”
“We both know where this is going. We’ll talk, probably for an exhausting hour and you’ll say how grateful you are for my help, and that you’re sorry I was put in an awkward position and that you really care about me but that you have a lot on your plate right now, and that’ll be it, it’ll be over—for now, you’ll say—but that’s still over, and I’ll take you and Ghost to your motel and you’ll kiss me on the cheek and you might even mean it when you say we should get together after this whole thing is resolved, but we both know where your energy’s going to be, and phone calls rescheduling dinner will turn into text messages rescheduling coffee, and it’ll be pretty damn clear what your choice is, and I’d really like to skip to the fucking end right now if we could.”
Sullivan was out of breath when that long, ridiculous sentence finally ended, but it didn’t stop him from grabbing his wallet and his keys from his jeans. He looked dopey in his fuzzy sleeping pants and ancient running shoes and faded orange T-shirt promoting a Mexican restaurant, his brown eyes hard, his bony, handsome face tight with temper and misery, and Tobias’s heart thumped hard enough that it had to be audible.
“No wonder you didn’t want to have that conversation, that’s an awful conversation—” Tobias began, but Sullivan apparently wasn’t done steamrolling over him.
“Come on, get your things together.”
“I’m not—”
“We still have to wake up Ghost, so—”
“Ban m zòrèy mwen!” And Tobias officially sounded like Manman when she got fed up with her children.
Sullivan stalled out, confused, and Tobias made a mental note—Kreyòl might be an effective way to interrupt Sullivan’s doom-and-gloom spirals in the future, too, especially since the equivalent of “be quiet” in English wasn’t likely to make much of an impact.
“Not to be rude, but for a generally cheerful sort of guy, you can be really pessimistic,” Tobias pointed out. “I suppose that’s from years of detective novels and tracking down child support evaders. Your dirtbags are in your head, Sullivan. You’ve let them make you cynical. Maybe you speak that language, and maybe it’s good for you to have that ability at work, but you’re right, it’s not the language I speak and it can’t be the one we speak together. So that whole horrible conversation you were describing? That’s not the one we’re going to have. I’m not leaving, either. I love you.”
Sullivan’s words dried up before he could make a sound, and he stood there with his mouth open like a fish for a good three seconds before he snapped it closed.
“That’s better,” Tobias said, pointing out Sullivan’s stunned-stupid expression. “This is already a big improvement on the awful talk you had lined up for us.”
Sullivan sank slowly onto the bed.
“It’s fast, I know.” Tobias rubbed his hands on his jeans—his palms were sweaty. He wished he had time to think of better words, but he didn’t think it would be long before Sullivan’s brain came back online, and it might come back online full of doubt, so he hurried
