“Jude?”
I turned my head. Isha was staring at me, his arm draped across the couch behind me. In another world I might’ve thought he was inviting me to lean on him, but of course, he wasn’t. His kids were right there…“and I don’t know how I’d ever explain that to them.”
Isha’s words at the zoo haunted me, playing on a loop, louder and louder, however hard I fought to silence them. This was it. Us playing pals in front of his kids when they were around, and hiding in my house when they weren’t.
Isha wasn’t out.
He had no plans to be out.
And while I respected that a million per cent, I couldn’t fucking live with it.
I was on my feet before I truly knew what I was doing, wheeling out of the room with no sense of direction. Darkness met me in the hallway, and I wound up in the kitchen. My heart thundered. I couldn’t breathe. I pressed my forehead against the stainless steel fridge and tried to get my shit together enough to leave Isha’s house. To walk out on him and his kids, and put some goddamn distance between us.
But I couldn’t make my legs move. Staying felt like suicide, but leaving was an apocalypse all of its own.
“What’s the matter?”
Nothing. Everything. I closed my eyes and willed Isha not to touch me. His palms against my heated skin had been my undoing from the start, and I needed to go. Now. Before I changed my mind and set us up for another round of whiplash inducing heartbreak. And it would be worse next time. Of course it would. I was growing more attached to him every second of every day, even when he wasn’t around.
Isha wound his arms around my waist. My body responded to him like an old friend—no, like a lover—and I did the very thing I’d escaped to the kitchen to avoid. I leaned on him, let the solidity and warmth of him fool me into believing it would always be like this. That our finite embrace meant something more than aborted sentences and half-truths.
Fuck this.
But still I didn’t move. Couldn’t. Because Isha’s grip on me, literally and emotionally, was so absolute I no longer had a choice.
He turned me around, his dark gaze searching. “What’s the matter, Jude?”
“I need to leave.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“I don’t, mate. Or I wouldn’t be asking.”
A bitter laugh escaped me. How could he be so dense? Or maybe he wasn’t and this conversation was another helping of bullshit. Either way, it left a bad taste in my mouth.
I pushed him away and shoved my hands into my hair, as a manic, desperate need to escape swept through me. “I can’t stay here and pretend this shit is normal.”
“What shit?”
“All of it!” I exploded. “You don’t want me to be nice to your kids because it gives you too many feels? Well guess what? It gives me fucking feelings too—feelings that can’t go anywhere because you’re too entrenched in your closeted life to realise it’s holding you hostage.”
“Jude—”
“Don’t! I can’t deal with your evasive crap anymore, okay? I lo—I really like you, but I can’t live like this…never knowing if you’re going to turn up for the night with dinner, or not answer my messages for a week because you can’t handle the gay.”
“I can handle—”
I slammed my fist against his already dented fridge door. The noise rang out in the kitchen that was twice the size of the entire ground floor of my house, and with it came the perspective I’d been searching for. We were worlds apart, and we always would be. “Just let me go, Isha. This is never going to work.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. You don’t want my life, and I don’t want yours. Let’s leave it at that. Tell the kids I had to go.”
I pushed past him to the door I hoped would take me outside. It opened into the garden, where I found a gate that took me to an alleyway. Isha called my name, but I didn’t stop until I was on the street. And I was halfway to the nearest underground before I realised I’d left my coat on Isha’s couch.
I can’t go back.