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“Well, the guys were all in a bit of a panic. Apparently, your phone’s been going to voicemail all afternoon, and they were worried you’d had a bad seizure.”
Felix scrubbed a hand down his face, then turned and left the door open as he walked back to the couch and grabbed his phone off the coffee table. Sure enough, there were fifteen missed calls and fifty messages between individual and group chats.
Jesus, these guys.
Felix: I’m alive. Just napped all day. Dei’s here. Sorry.
He set his phone down and ignored the buzzing as Dei took a tentative step in. “I thought you might be hungry.”
Felix’s head whipped to the side, and he stared at him. “Seriously?”
Dei shrugged, looking unsure. “Soup. Figured it would be easy on the stomach.”
“Uh.” Felix swallowed, his mouth painfully dry. “Uh. Okay.”
Dei looked like he wanted to say more, but instead, he used his right hip to shut the door, and then he walked past Felix and into the kitchen. After a minute, Felix heard a pot hit the burner, and a second after that, he heard liquid being poured.
His head was still a mess, and now so was his heart. Was Dei seriously there to cook him soup like he hadn’t kissed him, confessed he wanted him, and then disappeared for two weeks?
Was that all it took to get his attention again? The death of a family member?
He started laughing and suddenly couldn’t stop. But it quickly turned ugly—the sound going sour and then moving deep into his lungs as he sobbed. He grabbed a pillow and buried his face in it, and he didn’t look up, even when a warm, strong hand gripped the back of his neck.
“Is my being here makin’ it worse?”
Felix shook his head, then stopped and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, words muffled against the fabric. “I wish I’d seen you before all this happened.”
“I’m a shithead, I know. And I probably should’a stayed away tonight, but I knew you weren’t gonna feed yourself.”
Felix laughed, sniffing a little as he finally turned his head to breathe. “I kind of just…passed out, I guess. Didn’t mean to.”
“Yeah. I know how that goes.”
Felix let himself take comfort in the fact that Dei was now drawing soft lines over the backs of his shoulders. “I knew I was never going to see her again. My grandma,” he clarified when Dei’s brows furrowed. “She was old when I left, and we both knew I wasn’t coming back.”
“Why?” Dei asked very softly.
Felix squeezed his eyes shut so tightly he saw sparks. “My mom kept threatening to get a conservatorship over me so she could collect my disability checks.”
Dei suddenly looked ready to murder. “She did what now?”
Felix let out a heavy breath. That was an old pain he really didn’t feel like reliving. “I wasn’t even on disability, but she thought she could put me there by proving I couldn’t take care of myself. My brother and sister were on her side.”
“Fuck them,” Dei snarled. “Who gives a shit what they think?”
Felix laughed, the sound hollow. “I shouldn’t. But, uh…I think I made it worse today.”
“How the hell could you have done that?” Dei asked.
Felix grimaced and buried his face in the pillow again. “Told them I had a boyfriend and he was coming to the funeral with me.”
Dei stroked his fingers through the back of Felix’s hair. “Can you repeat that, darlin’?”
Felix sighed and turned his head, debating about lying, but he couldn’t think of a good one. His brain was too worn-out. “I told my sister I had a boyfriend who was coming to the funeral with me. Like a moron.”
“You think having a boyfriend makes you a moron?” Dei asked.
Felix rolled his eyes. “I think lying about my hot Canadian boyfriend like I’m in middle school makes me a moron.”
