Page 77 of Haunted

“All I want is to make sure you’re prepared for this.”

“I know. And I appreciate it. But I need you to hear me when I say: I’m never going to be yours to command. When you were learning to obey at all costs, I was doing the exact opposite, and it suited me fine. So whatever you’re trying to do right now, I want you to stop.”

The apartment is very quiet. I can hear the fridge humming. Through the window, the campus is golden, and people are walking dogs and living lives that don’t involve sitting across from the person you love most while they calmly explain that you’re broken.

“Okay,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Be aware.” He stands and comes around the table and puts his arms around me from behind. I feel his chin on the top of my head. “You’re going to have to unlearn some of that if this is going to work.”

“I know.”

“And I think you should talk to someone. Not me. Someone trained.”

“I hear you,” I say. “I do. I’ll think about it, I promise.” And then, because it will not sit down in me: “I just can’t bear the thought of you out there on your own, unprotected, in that goddamn country, without me. What if something had happened to you?”

“Sure,” he says, easy. “Got robbed in Varanasi. A guy followed me through a night market in Chiang Mai once. Bar fight in Goa I didn’t start. It happens. Bad luck can happen to anybody.”

“It isn’t only bad luck I’m worried about,” I say. “Nash is here. He turned up at my door two weeks ago, and he does not take no for an answer. I lived with him. I am telling you he is definitely capable of hurting you.”

“I take care of myself, Lance. I always have,” Jonny says. “The very few times that I was ever in a bad situation was because I was unlucky, not because I was foolhardy. I need you to trust me. He doesn’t know me, Lance. He’s never met me. He has no reason on earth to do anything to me.”

Bad luck. I pull out of his arms and turn around so I can say this to his face. “You went alone. Into countries where you didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the exits, didn’t have a soul who’d notice if you didn’t come back—and you’re calling it bad luck.” I hear my own voice flattening into the register I used on nineteen-year-olds who didn’t check their gear. “That’s not bad luck, Jonny. That’s walking into a threat environment with no plan and no backup and calling it a lifestyle. You could have been killed. You could have disappeared and I would never even have—” I stop. Too late.

And there it is. His face sets, and every bit of the warmth goes out of it. “I already asked you once,” he says. “Two minutes ago. I’m going to say this one more time: I am not one of your Marines. You do not get to debrief me on how I survived the last ten years without you. I did survive them. Alone. Unprepared, by your standards, and alive anyway.” He picks the towel up and turns to do the dishes. “Go take a walk, Lance. I’ll be here when you get back.”

I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. I get my running shoes and think about how easy it was to slide into that mode—the interrogation, the escalation, the need to break him down so I could build him back up. That’s not love. That’s training.

I watch as he runs the water for the dishes and I lace up. The air is warm and the campus smells like cut grass. I run the loop around Black Lake—the same path where Alice walked every morning, the same path where everything changed—and I think about what just happened.

I was seventeen when I decided I was going to be strong enough to protect Parker Bishop. I joined the Marines to become the man he deserved. And somewhere along the way, I stopped being a protector and became a handler, and I didn’t know the difference until a man with a smoky voice and a phoenix tattoo sat across from me and said, in the gentlest possible way, that I was doing it again.

He didn’t just leave. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. Parker would have left. Jonny went into the bedroom and shut the door.

Oh God. What if he’s packing his bags?

I don’t know if I can handle that. But as I round the far side of the lake and see the boathouse in the distance, still wrapped in police tape, I think about what Jonny said: “Be aware.” Not “be different.” Not “be better.” Just: be aware.

Maybe that’s where it starts.

I run the second lap faster. I don’t know if I’ve blown it. I don’t know if the man in my apartment is packing a bag while I run circles around a lake. But I know that he told me to come back, and he’s never told me that before. Every other time—every single time—he was the one who left.

By the third, my lungs are burning and my legs are screaming, and I feel something loosening in my chest that I didn’t know was clenched.

I acted like his commanding officer instead of the partner he needs me to be. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I do need help, and maybe I’ve needed it for years. Maybe every single person who ever tried to tell me that was standing exactly where he was standing.

I’ll do whatever it takes. Just please let him be there when I get in.

Chapter twenty-seven

Lance

Neither of us slept well. We lay in the dark for a long time after I told him, not talking, not touching, just lying next to each other while the streetlights made patterns on the ceiling. At some point he rolled toward me and put his hand on my chest, and I covered it with mine, and that’s how we fell asleep. When I wake up, his hand is still there, but the rest of him has turned away.

I make coffee. He sits at the table and holds the mug without drinking. The roses on the windowsill look too bright for the mood.

“I keep thinking about the portrait,” he says. “In the lobby. I walked right past it. I looked at that face and saw Elliott, and the whole time it was—” He stops. “He’s been right there, Lance. For years. And he either didn’t know I existed or didn’t care enough to look.”

I don’t have an answer for that. I sit down across from him. “What do you want to do?”