He followed me, pulled out one of the barstools, and sat in it, watching me.
I’d be a liar if I tried to pretend that his companionship was making me feel so happy I could burst.
As I opened the freezer, the cold rush of air came out to caress my body.
“So… can we talk about what happened at the lake?” Luke asked, studying me pointedly.
“Of course!” I said, shutting the freezer and feeling the warmth of the house back on me.
He sighed heavily and sunk against the counter. “I’m so sorry you had to see that.”
“Don’t apologize,” I said, sticking the scoop into the hardened vanilla ice cream. “I’ve had panic attacks before, they’re not pretty.”
He sat back up, his full attention on me. “You have?!”
I nodded.
It felt good to finally tell someone about them, other than my therapist. “There was something that… that happened a little while ago, and for a long time after that, anything that reminded me of it was…” I paused to think. “Stressful.”
Luke leaned in, listening intently. “Like your body thinks you’re getting chased by a dinosaur or something,” he smiled slightly.
“Something like that,” I said, dropping bulbs of ice cream into a bowl. “It’s like… I don’t know. I could think clearly and felt like I had control.”
I opened the fridge to retrieve some chocolate fudge. “Until I couldn’t.”
“That’s what it feels like for me too!” Luke said, his eyes filled with excitement. “I’ve never been able to talk to someone who also gets them!”
I smiled at him sadly. “Mine got better over time.”
I let that hang in the air. We both knew what it meant.
Luke cast his eyes downward in shame.
“Luke, there’s nothing to be ashamed about. Have you tried to get help for them at all?” I asked gently.
He sighed. “I used to see a therapist because my mom made me. He was this old man that just rambled on about himself the whole time.”
“That’s not okay for a therapist to—”
“—oh, I know, I told my mom and she was horrified. So then she sent me to this other woman, who kept asking me questions about why I was gay.”
My eyes widened in horror. “What?! That’s not okay!”
Luke smiled at me and nodded as if I was just beginning to catch on.
“So I refused to keep seeing her. After that one, she sent me to—”
“Alright, alright, I get it. You don’t trust therapists.”
“You betcha,” he said weakly. “And then finally, my mom took me to our family doctor who wrote me a script for Xanax.”
I became aware of the pain in my hand. I loosened my grip around the ice cream scoop handle.
“That’s… addicting stuff.” I said, thinking of the addicts to pain meds that plagued the town. Every day, the local jail was filling up with more and more people dying to get a fix.
“I’ve heard,” Luke said, resting his head on his hand.
“But if they help, if you’re getting these anxiety attacks every single day—” I fixed my eyes on him. “Luke, that’s no way to live.”
Then he slammed his fist down on the table and I jumped.
“No! It’s no way to live under my mom’s thumb all the time. It’s no way to live being drugged up and my body is so relaxed that I don’t really care about anything. If I have to keep going through these panic attacks to keep my clear head, I’m going to do it!”
Tears were beading at the corners of his eyes as his anger faded.
I came around to the other side of the counter and wrapped him in a big hug.
“I’m sorry I pushed,” I said gently.
He rapped one of his long, delicate hands around my forearm to reciprocate my hug. “No, it’s all right. I get it; you just want to help me, like everyone else.”
As I pulled away from him, I asked, “Have they always been this bad?”
A shadow crossed his eyes. “No. They got worse when I was at school.”
I wondered if I was pushing, but I had to know. So I decided to probe. “Did you miss being at home? The familiarity of it?”
He looked away. “No, nothing like that…”
Then he turned his eyes to me and opened his mouth to speak, but my phone lit up on the counter. Nudes after nude from Brian were showing up one after the other like they were marching single-file into my life.
I looked at Luke.
He narrowed his eyes ever so slightly. He’d seen.
I plucked the phone off the counter and tucked it into my pocket.
“Luke, it’s—”
“No, it’s fine,” he said with an eerie nonchalance.
There was an uncomfortable silence that hung in the air, then he said, “I want you to take me home now.”
11
Luke
I was sitting in the passenger seat of the big truck once again, cruising through the night. My arms were crossed over my chest, as if they could shield me from this pain I was feeling inside.
Though I knew it was unwarranted — Adam and I hadn’t made any commitments to each other. We had never promised each other any kind of loyalty. He was an extremely attractive guy in his thirties — plus, he was a Dom. There were bound to be guys throwing themselves at his feet.
The truth of it was, I didn’t have a stake in his heart at all. I was probably just another fling to him, the same as any other.
But wasn’t that what he was to me?
No, my inner voice answered for me.
Didn’t I just use him to forget about my anxiety earlier on the beach?
My inner voice was silent at that one.
Even though we’d never discussed anything around taking this thing between us further, I still felt like we had something more than just a fling. This went deeper than that.
He felt like more.
And every time I thought about those flesh-colored messages that showed up on his phone, I felt jealously swirl in my gut.
Maybe it was just because I’d overheard his conversation with
