Don’t do it. Don’t do it. But idiot that I was, I tapped on the icon anyway, and the incoming messages called to me like a twisted lighthouse leading a ship to the rocks.
I clicked on them.
hey man
jus checking in after last night
call me soon
take care
What the actual fuck? I zeroed in on the second message, specifically on the last two words. Last night Gus had been MIA for hours, then he’d come to a house full of coppers. He’d never given a blow-by-blow of where he’d been, only the implication that he’d somehow lifted Keane’s dog from his house and spirited her away.
He’d never confirmed it, and then...well, I’d been too caught up in him to ponder the details.
But fuck if I wasn’t wondering about them now. I scanned the messages again, searching for any detail I’d missed that would let me know I was being a paranoid, possessive piece of shit, but all I saw was the stomach-churning possibility that Gus had hooked up on Grindr, then come home and fucked me too.
No. He wouldn’t do that. My gut told me it wasn’t true, and common sense that it wasn’t even possible if he really had rescued Jessie, but logical thought had never been my strong suit, and my gut had let me down before.
I tossed the phone without reading the hundred million other messages he had stored in his inbox, and backed away from the counter, nausea creeping up my throat with every step I took. I bashed into the shelf by the kitchen door. The ashtray Gus kept his keys in fell to the floor. It didn’t break, and the urge to pick it up and hurl it against the wall was so strong it choked me. I needed to get out before I smashed the whole place up, but before I could make my escape, the front door opened.
Gus was home.
There’d been moments in my life when I’d felt in control of myself, and most of those moments I’d spent with him, but as his footsteps approached the kitchen, a bolt came loose in my brain. The switch flipped from the Billy that Gus probably believed me to be, to who I actually was.
I grabbed his phone and whizzed it along the counter. It flew off the edge as he stepped into the kitchen and hit him square in the gut.
He caught it on the rebound, on instinct rather than reflex. “Hey—”
“Fuck off. Your Grindr messages are waiting for you. Have a nice life.”
“What?” Gus blinked as if he was half asleep, but I was already pushing past him, and I was out the door before he called my name.
Chapter Twenty-One
Gus
The front door banged hard enough to rattle the walls and bounce back from its hinges, springing wide open again. I stared at it, wondering if I was asleep in my bed, alone, and dreaming of all the bad things that could happen if I had sex with Billy and faced up to my feelings for him. Of the complications and weirdness I was nowhere near equipped to handle.
But I wasn’t asleep. I was awake, and three seconds ago I’d been so relieved to be home again with him I tripped over my own feet trying to get into my house.
Now, I was confused and so deflated I felt like crying. My head hurt too. It had come on while I’d been listening to the homeowner drone on about bi-folding doors and solar panels, and I’d driven home caught between the urge to vomit and a desperate desire to pull over and fall asleep at the wheel. It had worn off the closer I got to being home with Billy, but it still took me far too long to dash to the front door and call his name.
He was already gone.
And I had no idea in which direction.
Dazed, I shut the front door and returned to the kitchen. I was still clutching my phone, and Billy’s snarled words echoed in my head. “Your Grindr messages are waiting for you.” They made no sense. I hadn’t been on Grindr in weeks, except to touch base with an old friend to give me an alibi for stealing the dog. If I had messages in my inbox, I hadn’t read them. Or even wanted to. Billy had eclipsed my life so entirely, I’d forgotten Grindr existed.
With shaky fingers, I opened the app and scanned my messages. The usual dross was there—the creeps who hit you up with a dick pic the second you came online, but there was nothing else of any significance, only a couple of pings from my dude, touching base after the garbled phone conversation we’d had last night.
I read through them, my brain dragging behind, like how an elderly wolf trailed the pack. The seconds ticked by, and then minutes, until the implication of the friendly messages dawned on me.
...checking in after last night. Five words that could mean a thousand things, and Billy had run with the worst.
Shaking my head, I called him, but his phone rang from the charging point in the hallway. He’d left it behind, and perhaps it was for the best, as I had zero clue what I’d say to him. It cut me to the bone that he’d think I’d been hooking up on Grindr the whole time we’d been wrapped up in each other, but I couldn’t swallow the knot of frustration forming in my throat. He’d been through my phone and slammed out of my house without giving me a chance to speak. Did he really think so little of me?
Or was it that other people had let him down so badly that my betrayal made perfect sense to him?
Either way, the whole thing made my aching brain vibrate in my skull. Coming home to him had been my endgame the whole afternoon. I couldn’t deal with the fact that it had all been a pipe dream. That it
