Utterly Forgettable | MM Romance | Complete

Twenty-Seven: Tell Me What To Do To Make It Better

Coming home for the first time in two weeks — since he'd awkwardly packed his bags the afternoon after the bar fiasco — Josh felt apprehensive. Not only that, he felt a coward. Sitting in his parked car, thinking up ways of delaying the inevitable, it crossed his mind for a moment to check into a hotel somewhere and not let Emery know his work was done for the time being.

It was a ridiculous notion in a ridiculous situation. How long would he stay away? A night? A week? The entire nearly six months he'd hoped he'd have? He couldn't start avoiding his own apartment because he couldn't deal with Emery wiping sauce off his face.

No, he had to go home. He walked out of the car, retrieving his bags while his thoughts turned back to earlier that morning.

Mark had matched him with a client who was supposed to have a life expectancy of three to six months. He'd been a retired teacher suffering from liver cancer, a life spanning seven countries and four wars, filled to the brim with stories that would have been worthy of a book. Emma would have loved him. He'd had two children and two grandchildren, who often called and visited, and who clearly loved him a great deal.

Josh asked himself if his client had known — he always asked himself if some of his clients could feel death approaching, by the way they changed their patterns. His client had wanted to see his grandchildren the previous night, but his son had been adamant that they'd go during the weekend, not on a school night. It wasn't supposed to happen so soon; it hadn't been unreasonable, to postpone the visit. His client had suffered a fatal stroke that morning, alone with Josh in the end.

Sometimes Josh wondered if anyone would be there for him, when it was his turn.

He was becoming maudlin. He turned his key and walked home as if he didn't dread what he'd find.

At the sound of the door opening Emery looked up from his laptop, a small mountain of papers spread neatly on the counter next to him.

It took one look, just one look at his face, for Emery to read him with the same ease Mark usually did. For someone who claimed to be terrible at subtext, that was quite the feat.

"Tell me what to do to make it better," Emery said without preamble. "Would you like me to go out and leave you alone? Call your friend? Or," he added, tone cautious, "is it within my power to help?"

All of Josh's certainties and insecurities clashed inside him, tearing pieces of everything he'd been convinced he knew, until something else emerged — a different feeling, perhaps no less bleak than its predecessors, but less suffocating: there was nothing he could do about his feelings for Emery, and if there was nothing he could do then all that was left was acceptance.

There were no magical solutions, certainly no immediate ones. He couldn't fall out of love with Emery on a whim and he couldn't forgive him, but he could... he could live with it. Accept it, embrace it even, and enjoy Emery's company for what it was: a slice of a dream that would never be his life.

Wasn't that how people managed to spend a year's worth of savings in a one week trip and not be bitter when they came back home?

Emery would never be his reality but, while he lived there, it would be foolish to let that get in the way. It would take however long it took. It would hurt and then one day it wouldn't. One day he'd be just a fond memory of someone Josh had once loved.

Josh felt peaceful for the first time in months. "You don't have to leave. I'd prefer you didn't."

Emery closed his laptop, his expression a little stunned yet determined. "Allow me to get my jacket — we're going out."