Page 39 of Hell or High Water
It would never be like that with him and Wes, but there was still love between them. Two people who, if they weren’t together, would be alone and knew it.
“You okay?” Wes asked, rolling over, grayish-green eyes full of concern.
With anyone else, Ramsey would smile and nod. He’d practically made a fucking career out of being okay. But that was the beauty of Wes. He was allowed to shake his head instead. Allowed to say, “No. But I will be.”
And Wes was allowed to reach over and squeeze his arm and say back, “Yeah, you will.”
Chapter 5
Nateknewsomethinglikethis was coming, but he was still surprised when Aidan cornered him in the hallway just outside the locker room after practice.
“Hey,” Aidan said, pushing off the wall, where he’d clearly been lying in wait for Nate to head out towards the cafeteria for lunch.
Nate glanced over at him suspiciously. “What do you want?”
“Maybe I just want to say hey,” Aidan said, making a face. “Why wouldn’t I want to say hey?”
Nate shot him a disgruntled look. “Because I know you?”
“Fair. That’s fair. I just wanted to grab you real quick and check in.”
They both knew what Aidan wanted to check in about, but Nate was annoyed enough they had to have this conversation at all he was going to pretend until there was zero plausible deniability. “Oh, you want to chat about Atkinson, too?”
Aidan frowned. “What’s going on with Atkinson?”
“Sterling didn’t tell you?”
“Oh, he did.” Aidan steered him, not towards the elevator that led to the floor with the cafeteria, but one of the empty meeting rooms. Again, it wasn’t surprising as much as it was annoying. “Told me you were taking care of it. Are you not?”
“I am,” Nate said. He’d been to three strip clubs in ten days, and he hadn’thatedit, though the whole point of it had been pretty lost on him.
“Good, good.”
Aidan leaned against the first row of chairs in the auditorium-style room. “I’m glad, but Atkinson isn’t why I wanted to check in.”
“I know,” Nate said.
“If you—” Aidan broke off, shaking his head. “You don’t want to talk about it.”
“I think you’d be the first person to get that,” Nate muttered.
“I am, but sometimes we gotta take one for the team.” Aidan gave him a hard look.
“He’s not on our team.”
“No, he isn’t,” Aidan said frankly. “He’s not really onanyteam right now, and that sucks.”
Nate wanted to say how that wasn’t his problem. He was desperate for it to not be his problem. But it had, inevitably, been his problem since June.
His problem because his brain and some other organs he refused to identify kept making it his problem.
“Yeah, it does,” Nate said instead.
“I talked to Wes a few days ago and he told me Ramsey’s not going back to Buffalo anytime soon.”
Nate had known it, but it still sucked to hear it, laid out in black and white like that. He needed Ramsey to be okay, not just because that would mean Ramsey would go back across the border, but because it meant he would beokay.
“Okay.”
