“Jacob—” Linc reached for him then, placing a warm hand on Jacob’s chilled arm, but he shrugged it off.
“Unless you’re about to tell me that I’m all wrong, don’t Jacob me.” Please tell me I’ve got things wrong. Unspoken wish clogging his throat, he stared off into the cold, dark night.
Not surprisingly, Linc said nothing. Still, though, his silence sliced through Jacob, made it hard to take his next breath.
“About what I figured. I’m done here.” With that, he jumped the porch rail, not even wanting to brush by Linc to use the steps, not caring as he stumbled on his way to the truck. He heard the sound of his name, but he didn’t turn around. Couldn’t.
Once in his truck, he spent several long minutes with his head resting on the steering wheel. Long minutes where Linc could have come after him but didn’t. Instead, when he finally looked up, the porch was empty. Fuck. How had this gone so south so fast?
As he drove home, his brain kept churning with that question, replaying their last two arguments, trying to figure out how they went from sneaky and happy to...nothing at all. Shattered pieces of an illusion. The only real conclusion was that it had all been fake. He’d seen what he’d wanted to see, believed Linc capable of more than he was, read more into things than was real. And even if it wasn’t fake, it didn’t matter. If Linc didn’t care enough to fight for them, it didn’t really matter what he felt about Jacob. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. And that meant that all Jacob’s certainty for years that there was something potent and important between them was now a lie. It wasn’t simply a matter of getting Linc to give in to their attraction. Not enough. It all came back to that. Jacob and what they had together wasn’t enough for Linc and fuck all what the reasons were.
His insides had been sandblasted, everything dry and crackly, one stiff breeze away from turning to dust. His eyes, too, burned, and only muscle memory ensured that his truck actually made it to his trailer in one piece. The clock flashed an absurd hour, a reminder of how they were supposed to be sleeping so they could—
Work. Damn it. Somehow he was going to have to drag himself and his half a heart into work in the morning, face Linc again, and try to not crumble with the force of wanting someone who had never been his to begin with.
Chapter Eighteen
Sunrise was a little after five, a lightness to the sky that Linc took as permission to give up pretending sleep would come and to go check on his plants. The garden would produce most of its bounty in August, when the tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers came on, but there was still watering to be done, weeds to pull, herb seedlings to coax along. It was mindless, methodical work, the sort he could do in his sleep. Or in his sleep-deprived, grief-riddled state with only the faint light for company, as the case might be.
He’d had the notion that the weeding might center him enough so that he could start his shift without the worry of falling apart the second he saw Jacob. But maybe falling apart was inevitable because the more he worked in the vegetable beds, the less together he felt, skin and bones rattling like an old Ford on a gravel road. The dogs had come with him to check on things, giddy with the freedom outside their run, sniffing and wagging and generally making pests of themselves, but even they weren’t enough to replace this heaviness in his heart.
Letting Jacob go had been the right call. He was sure of it. Continuing on meant an even greater likelihood of hurting him. Jacob said it himself—he wanted everything. Everything that Linc wasn’t sure he could ever offer anyone, let alone Jacob, with whom he wasn’t supposed to have anything, let alone the everything Jacob apparently wanted. Jacob, who wanted a future. How had he put it? Memories we make together.
Linc already had too many memories burned into his neurons. Jacob’s birthday. Building the play set. Their first kiss. Each one after that. The satisfied tilt to Jacob’s mouth after really good sex. His playful smile in the shower. His furrowed forehead when he concentrated, trying to help cook. His too-long eyelashes on his pale cheeks when he slept. The smattering of freckles on his shoulders. More memories than his heart could hold right then.
And he had an obligation to not steal Jacob’s future in the pursuit of more of those moments.
The way he saw it as he ripped out more prickly weeds, he was either a man of his word or he was nothing at all. And he hadn’t kept his word, a concrete pylon of guilt weighing him down all summer. Jacob deserved more than him, and even if Wyatt had lived, had somehow found his way to more tolerant views, Linc couldn’t believe that he would have condoned him being with Jacob. And maybe he’d stumbled with the whole “get it out of our systems” plan, but he couldn’t give Jacob what he wanted without feeling like he was letting down Jacob’s family, letting down an obligation to keep Jacob safe, give him the best possible future, which wasn’t Linc.