“And was he okay with it?Or angry as well?”
A shrug.
“For fuck’s sake, Flynn!”
He grunted annoyance.“Fine!Fucking hell.It was...horrible.Polite, and quiet, and horrible.Like we were strangers, sharing a hotel breakfast table.So I came over to your place, instead.”
I blinked at him.“You just left?”
“I mean, I shouted goodbye.”
Swallowing the urge to tell him that probably hadn’t helped matters - a fact I was sure Flynn undoubtedly knew - I drummed my fingers on my leg, instead.Unable to shed the feeling that this was all my fault, really.That, had I not visited the city, and responded to William’s message, and gone over to their apartment, all of this would not have happened.Flynn would still most likely be dating his ex, or maybe not, but either way he’d have felt little requirement to come out to his family.
“You’re trying to decide how you can blame yourself for all this, aren’t you.”
His question shook me from my spiraling.I frowned, wondering if I’d inadvertently said something out loud, or if Flynn simply had a mind-reading talent I’d never known about.
“It’s just so...complicated,” I grumbled.
He made a face.“Is it?Or does it really just come down to ‘some people are assholes about this stuff,’ and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”
“You’re being very balanced about all this.”
“I’ll give you a heads-up before I have a breakdown.”
I laughed, even though it wasn’t really all that funny.
#
We’d been driving fornot much more than two hours, when the phone rang.“MOM & DAD” flashing up on the big screen in the middle of the dashboard, atop red and green buttons.
I glanced at Flynn, knowing he’d already expect my question.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” he admitted.“Not now, anyway.”
“’At least we’d know,’” I parroted back to him.
A frustrated grunt.He stabbed at the green icon.
“Hey.”
Silence, for a moment.Long enough, I just started to wonder if he’d waited too long; that whichever of his parents had called was now listening to his voicemail message.
“Hey there, son.”
Flynn’s dad.He was a nice man, albeit a quiet one.I’d never been sure whether that was a learned response to his talkative wife, or what made them compatible in the first place.
“Hey, dad.”
I nudged him in the arm.
“You’re on speakerphone, by the way,” Flynn added, cutting his eyes at me.“Oli’s in the car.”
He cleared his throat.“Ah.Well.Hello, Oliver.”
“Hey, Mr Cunningham.”
Silence, again.I looked over at Flynn, wondering what his expression would be.From the blank look facing the highway ahead, I figured he was treating this as just another hotel breakfast.