I crossed the landing and opened the door. His bedroom was empty, and his bed looked like no one had slept in it for a year. A breeze fluttered through his vented window, shuffling the muscle man magazines he kept on his chest of drawers. The pages rose and fell in slow motion, and a sickening sense of foreboding washed over me.
Questioning my sanity, I backed out of his room, returned to my own, and mechanically got dressed. I’d left my phone downstairs. With Luke on his way home from the port, and Gus maintaining radio silence, I expected a blank screen, but I’d missed a call from Gus. And he’d sent me a message.
Gus: com bjmk
Frowning, I scanned the nonsense he’d sent me again, searching for acronyms and hidden meanings I might’ve missed the first time, but came up blank. I called him back, once, twice, three times, but his phone rang and rang, not even clicking through to his voicemail.
He doesn’t have voicemail, remember? The cold call messages annoy him too much.
I’d laughed when he’d told me that. Then I’d nearly cried in the bathroom when he’d drunkenly admitted on the way home from Luke’s barbecue that every unknown missed call had given him hope it was Mia telling him she was coming home, and he’d grown tired of the certainty that she wasn’t.
I knew how that felt, and I searched for that sadness now, anything to ease the rush of anxiety building in my chest, but it didn’t seem to matter how many times I told myself to calm the fuck down, irrational panic swamped me. Gus had never sent me a message that made no sense, and he wasn’t the kind of dude who drunk dialled or sat on his phone. Sometimes he forgot I wasn’t French, but only when I had his dick in my mouth, and there was nothing pleasurable about the cold flush that rattled through me now.
Something’s wrong.
No, it wasn’t. There was a rational explanation for everything Gus did. He wasn’t an impulsive drama queen like me, and perhaps that was his problem—he thought too much, and angsted too hard over shit that wasn’t his fault.
But my layman’s analysis of his mental health wasn’t enough to distract me from the agitation fast taking hold of my brain. I paced the kitchen, and then the hallways where I’d see and hear the van the second Gus came home. But what if he didn’t come home? What if he stayed out all night like he did before? I was beyond worrying about him hooking up with other people, but the prospect of waiting up all night for relief that never came drove me out of the front door.
I was halfway down the drive before I remembered my shoes.
Cursing, I went back for them, and my phone, and called Gus again while I jogged to the bus stop. It rang and rang, until it cut off. Then I called him back to an automated message telling me his number was unavailable.
The finality of it kicked any common sense I had left entirely under the approaching bus.
I threw a handful of coins at the driver and hurried to the back of the bus where I’d get the best view of the traffic on the other side of the road. There was only one way to the next town over. If Gus drove past, I’d see him. But even if he didn’t, the chances of me rocking up to an empty cottage were pretty fucking high.
Didn’t stop me pressing my face to the glass and cataloguing every vehicle that zoomed past the rumbling bus. None of them were Luke’s van, though, and by the time the bus pulled into the stop nearest the cottage—its final stop of the day—I was losing light. If Gus wasn’t here, I’d be walking home in the dark.
If he was, I had some explaining to do. Either way, I scrambled off the bus and ran the short distance to the broken-down cottage we’d been working on all week. The driveway was tucked behind a thick hedge, shielding it from the road. The fading light cast a shadow across the gravel, and at first it looked empty, but as I got closer, the gunmetal grey van glinted beneath the flickering streetlamp.
Gus was still here.
I flew up the drive and hammered on the front door. It was locked, as usual, and I thumped it hard enough to shake the hinges, but he didn’t come.
Maybe he’s not here. Maybe someone picked him up.
But my gut knew they hadn’t. Gus drove everywhere, so he had the freedom to dip any time he got flighty.
Tell you that, did he? Of course he hadn’t. But he didn’t need to. I knew him.
I fucking loved him.
The realisation wasn’t as shocking as it might’ve been without the old door standing between us. It was already marked by mine and Gus’s combined bad moods. I booted it, leaving more scars in the peeling paint. The doorframe cracked. I kicked the door again, but somehow it held.
Desperation and real fear bubbled up my throat. I let out a growl of frustration and looked around for something to throw at the window before I remembered the back door.
I dashed around the cottage to the gate. Overgrown brambles were compacted in the garden, blocking the path to another ancient door. I trampled through them to the moss-covered patio. The back door was rickety and held shut by a Yale lock that was too rusted to pick with a bank card. I kicked at it, over and over, until it flew open and clattered against the wall behind it, shattering the glass.
The noise was deafening. If Gus was inside, he’d have heard me by now, but as I crushed broken glass beneath my feet, there
