Chapter Text
Tom had been staring out his office window at the crawl of traffic stories below, a stack of neglected paperwork sitting in a heap on his desk in front of him, when he heard a timid tap on the doorframe.
“If this is about those expense reports, Cindy, just tell Accounts Payable that I’ll have them done by five,” Tom said, without bothering to look up. “Five-thirty, maybe. And, ah, hold my calls for the afternoon, please. I’m busy.”
“Um.”
Greg hung in the doorway with one hand resting on the knob. “Sorry,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, then back at Tom. “Your secretary sent me in? She said you were free.”
“Right,” Tom said with a grimace. He shuffled some of the expense reports around on his desk that had been sitting there for a solid week. The pile had grown exponentially since he’d last looked at it. This was his personal hell.
“So, um.” Greg hesitated. “Do you have a minute?”
Tom pointed at the chair across from his desk, and Greg nodded, closing the door to Tom’s office tight behind him.
“Uh-oh,” Tom said, raising an eyebrow. He was pretty sure that he wasn’t imagining the pinched look on Greg’s face, the tautness in his jaw. “Greg. Am I getting the pink slip? Is this a mercy killing?”
Greg frowned, folding himself into the chair. “What? No, dude. I don’t think I even have the authority for that, anyway.” He pressed his lips together in a tight line. “I just, uh. I realized that, like, it’s been a while since we’ve talked? And I wanted to—to check in.”
“...Okay.”
“So, uh. Checking in. You’re good? Everything’s, like, copacetic here?” Greg asked. His eyebrows turned up at the ends, lending him a look of hopeful innocence.
Tom narrowed his eyes at him. He wanted to believe that this was Greg showing genuine interest in him, he really did, but it was hard not to be a bit of a cynic. You couldn’t really trust anyone these days.
“What is this?” Tom asked, suspicion creeping into his tone.
Greg’s placating smile faltered. “What?”
“Oh, come on, Greg. In the nine months since your little coup d’état, you’ve never once popped by my office to check in. You think I’m stupid, huh?”
A deep crease appeared between Greg’s eyebrows. “Uh. No?”
“Forgive me for sounding paranoid, but.” Tom folded his arms across his chest. “This feels like the fucking Saturday Night Massacre.”
“Dude. It’s not—like, it’s not that. That would imply that, like, I don’t trust you. Or that you’re hiding something.” Greg paused, cocked his head to the side. “Wait, are you?”
“Greg, what is this?” Tom repeated, sighing heavily. “I actually have a job to do, here.”
“No, no. Sure.” Greg stood up from his chair then, and Tom frowned up at him. “You’re, like, extremely busy. But, um, would it be alright if I stopped by your place tonight?”
Tom blinked. “Tonight?”
“Just to talk,” Greg said quickly. He reached up to rub at the back of his neck, and Tom found his eyes drifting involuntarily to the slim column of Greg’s throat, the soft slope of his jaw. “Not to, um. You know.”
Oh, God. Did he ever.
He lowered his eyes to the stack of expense reports to hide his own pathetic blush. “Fine, whatever. Come by later. You know where to find me.” And until Greg lumbered out of his office and snapped the door shut behind him, Tom didn’t allow himself a spare glance.
It was hard to concentrate on the quotidian task at hand, approving monthly expense reports and scouring the bottom-line for possible cuts to the ad spend. It was pretty much an admin position that didn’t jibe with his executive title, but Tom could see it for what it was: a slap on the wrist for his role in the Brightstar scandal, a healthy serving of crow.
Kendall had shunted ATN to the side after the network started shedding advertisers like a stray dog with alopecia, and that had effectively sidelined Tom, too. In a truly insulting move, the top brass had even pushed him into an office in a low-traffic corner of the hall. His old office had looked out over the Brooklyn Bridge. Now he was stuck staring down at a service entrance lined with dumpsters.
Which, fine. Tom could grin and bear it, as long as he was collecting a paycheck at the end of it all. They could shuffle him into meetings and make him answer for the ratings nosedive, the bleak outlook on continuing advertising partnerships. He was good at taking beatings–had Shiv and Logan to thank for that, he supposed. But eventually, he’d outlive his usefulness. And then what?
They’d shoot him like a dog in the street, that was what.
He brooded for a while, staring at the stack of expense reports until his vision swam and he felt a tension headache coming on, and he had to step out into the hall to ask his secretary for an aspirin. He felt stupid for getting worked up over something so menial. Signing the damn things took almost no time at all, and then it was five o’clock, anyway, so he just snatched up his briefcase and went straight home, trying not to think about the fact that his days were probably numbered if he could clock out at the same time as the low-level grunts in production without anyone noticing, or caring.
His driver delivered him to an empty apartment. It didn’t surprise him—Shiv spent most nights with other people, anyway—but it still hurt. If only he could sit her down and ask her, point blank, why he wasn’t enough for her. Why had she been so willing to offer him up for a blood sacrifice? And why was he trapped in a failing marriage, lonely and miserable and impotent, while she got to keep fucking around?
It was awful. At his lowest point, right after he’d been betrayed in quick succession by his wife and his—well, whatever Greg had been to him—Tom had seriously considered therapy. The loneliness was crippling. He barely spoke to Greg, didn’t touch his wife. He’d wanted to die.
Then he got a dog, and he felt like dying a little less. But it was a far cry from the life that he thought he would be living, back in ‘73. You had to wonder if it was all worth it, if his life was going to come to this point.
Tom took Mondale out for an abbreviated walk around the corner, driven back inside by a gust of cold rain, and then he settled into a quiet funk that no amount of distraction could dispel. Not the six o’clock news, or the evening paper, or a halfhearted attempt at reading the latest Crichton.
And then the phone rang, and he snatched up the receiver as fast as he could, on the off-chance that it was Shiv on the other end of the line. It wasn’t.
It was Greg, asking in a tremulous voice if it was a good time to come by.
“Sure,” Tom said, twisting the cord around his finger. “It’s, ah. It’s just me. Shiv’s not in.”
There had been a time at the height of their unspoken arrangement where the three of them had accepted that Greg might drop in unannounced, that they might need to set out a third dinner plate on any given night. It felt pointless to nod to her absence. Or to pretend that they were picking up where they’d left off last summer.
Greg cleared his throat. “That’s—that is, um. Rather serendipitous,” he said, in the cordial tone of voice he’d taken to using around Tom, as of late.
Tom hung up feeling odd, anxious. The feeling didn’t dissipate when Greg showed up thirty minutes later. He looked like he’d just left the office, still wearing a pair of trim cigarette pants that flattered his narrow frame, a loosely knotted tie, and that same tight set to his mouth from hours earlier.
“You look awful,” Tom told him, frowning, when he opened the door. (Exhausted might have been a better qualifier, but it was still hard to let Greg have the satisfaction of the upper hand, even after all these months.)
“Thanks.”
“Want a drink?” Tom asked, without waiting for an answer. He left Greg to trail behind him into the parlor.
It wasn’t until he had a pair of lowball glasses set out on the living room bar cart and was pouring out splashes of scotch that Tom found himself thinking about other nights that had started out much like this one—the coy suggestion of a nightcap, forgotten drinks on the side table, belts and button-downs discarded somewhere on the spiral staircase between the first and second floor.
He pushed the thought aside. This was strictly business, right?
“Here,” Tom said, shoving a glass into Greg’s hands. He settled into a tartan wingback chair opposite the couch where Greg sat, and watched him take a tentative sip from his glass. “So, Gregory. Care to tell me what’s going on, or should I wait until you’re a little more, uh, liquored up?”
“It’s nothing, really,” Greg said. He pulled a face as the scotch burned a trail down his throat. “Just, like. Petty bullshit. I’m probably just overreacting.”
“Uh-huh.” Tom squinted at him, unconvinced.
Greg sighed and slumped back into the cushions. “I don’t know, man. This job is, like, a lot? A lot of work. You know that Ken and Stewy have me vetting out an acquisition in the travel sector, like going over the financials? I don’t even know what I’m looking at half the time.” He shook his head. “Every decision I make, it’s like—there’s, like, millions of dollars riding on it. Millions, Tom.”
Tom nodded, straining for sincerity. Sometimes he forgot how much of a rube Greg really was, at his core. Then Greg would go and say something stupid like that. Millions of dollars. Come on.
“I don’t want to sound, like. Ungrateful, you know? Like, if it wasn’t for Ken, I don’t know where I’d be right now.”
If Greg noticed Tom flinch at the sting, he didn’t show it.
“But sometimes,” he said, swirling his scotch around the glass in a lazy circle. “Sometimes, I think this job might, like, actually kill me.”
Tom couldn’t hold his tongue anymore. “Jesus. What did you think you were signing up for, exactly?” he asked, and Greg frowned. “Handing off those papers to Kendall. You thought—what, you’d get a corner office and a better title? Zero oversight?”
“No,” Greg said, and his voice took on a defensive edge. He looked almost hurt by the implication. “It’s just. Hard, right? The responsibility of it all?”
Tom rolled his eyes. “There’s really nobody else you can talk to about this, huh.”
“I just figured, like. You would understand.”
“Please. I’m a stuffed shirt,” Tom said sourly. “What kind of fucking responsibility do I have, at this point?”
He was already halfway out the door at Waystar. The Roys hated him. Basically, he was just keeping up appearances by continuing to show up to work every day, to attend family functions. Beyond that, what did they really need him around for?
Greg didn’t seem to have an answer for that.
He wasn’t sure that this was making either of them feel better about their respective situations. The room was steeped in gloom, and the scotch wasn’t helping, really. But Tom was lonely, and he got the distinct impression that Greg was, too. He didn’t have the heart to throw him out in an angry huff.
So they drank. In silence, at first, until the scotch loosened their tongues and Tom was suddenly unburdening himself to Greg—a mistake, he should have learned his lesson a long time ago, when it came to trusting Greg with anything sensitive—and he found himself sprawled out on the far end of the couch with his glass balanced on his chest.
The thing was, Tom was an awful drunk. Emotional, loose-lipped. He knew this, but it didn’t stop him from laying a year’s worth of bitter disappointments at Greg’s feet. His marriage was wrecked and he was a walking punchline around the office. (The sad part was that he had been for so long that the lead-in to the joke was long forgotten.)
“What are you gonna do?” Greg asked.
Tom lolled his head to face Greg. “I don’t know,” he said. “You could fire me. Put me out of my misery.”
“Hm.”
“Just an idea.”
Greg was quiet. “Or, um.” He bit his lip. “We could both leave. Start fresh somewhere else.”
“Ha, ha. Very funny, guy.” Tom looked at Greg, waited for the teasing smile to break through. But Greg just stared back. “You’re joking. You—you’re putting me on.”
Greg raised an eyebrow.
“Come on,” Tom said, shaking his head. “That’s ridiculous, you can’t—leave.”
“Why not?”
Tom blew out a frustrated breath. “You’re an executive, Greg. Like it or not, you have fucking responsibilities. Okay? You can’t just pick up and—and leave when you get overwhelmed. See a shrink, smoke a fucking joint, I don’t know.”
“It’s not—like, I get that. I do. But, dude. None of this is for me. It doesn’t work.”
“Just so I understand this: you scammed your way into a job here, but now you want out?”
Greg set his drink aside. He sat up against the couch arm, tucking his knees underneath him. In the blink of an eye, he could shift from a worn and weary company man to a dumb kid, and back around again. The effect was dizzying. “I don’t like who I am,” he said, deliberate. “Or, like. I don’t like who I have to be when I’m here. You know?”
Tom hated that he understood.
“So, ah—where?”
He expected some hemming and hawing, the pretense of indecision, but Greg shrugged. “California, I think. San Francisco.”
Tom couldn’t help it—he made a face. “Right. Hippie breeding ground.”
“You mentioned it to me, actually. A couple years ago,” Greg said, with a hint of a smile. “And, like. It stuck in my mind, I guess.”
“I did?”
“Mm.” His eyes gleamed. “So, thanks for that. The idea, I mean.”
Tom’s heart clenched, an involuntary reflex. He could feel his throat tightening with the threat of completely inappropriate tears, which was stupid because he and Greg weren’t—anything, anymore. He didn’t get to lay a claim to him like that. But it was there, unavoidable. “You really think you can just strike out on your own?” he asked in a small voice.
(What he really wanted to ask him was: Who’s gonna look after you?)
“Sure.” Greg gave him an odd look. “But, like, I don’t have to.”
Oh.
“What, you want me to—to run away with you?” Tom struggled with where to place the emphasis. Me, you. It was a joke, had to be. He hardened his face into a scowl to prepare for the letdown. “Who are we, Bonnie and Clyde?”
“Yeah,” Greg said, like it was that simple. “Would you?”
Good God, yes. “No,” Tom said with a weak chuckle. “I have a wife.”
“You just told me that you and Shiv are separating,” Greg pointed out. That was true—he had said that. Damn his loose lips.
“I—well, yeah. But it’s temporary.” Tom was sweating, at his temples and around his loosened shirt collar. Was it warm in here? “And—my job.”
“You hate it.”
“It’s a job,” Tom said helplessly. He was running out of excuses. “This is insane.”
And it was, on the surface. He couldn’t just bundle up his entire life in an overnight bag and follow a boy across the country. Even if he wanted to do it, suddenly and painfully, with a fierce desperation that he hadn’t felt in a long time.
He wanted it. More than anything that he might be leaving behind, here.
Tom sucked in a sharp breath. “Fuck it. Let’s go.”
“Wait,” Greg said, brow creased. “Like, for real? You’re serious?”
“Do you want me to sign something? Swear an oath?” Tom said, rolling his eyes. His mind had never been clearer, even a couple of scotches in. “For Christ’s sake, yes, I’m—”
Greg surged across the length of the couch and kissed Tom full on the mouth, hard. The kiss drew a desperate whimper out of Tom, a high-pitched, needy sound he didn’t know he could make. He clutched Greg around the shoulders, fingernails like talons that dug crescent-shaped indents into Greg’s soft skin; a possessive mark. It was selfish, but he’d gone so long without affection that he was determined to take it wherever he could get it.
The kiss turned lazy. Tom relaxed into it, softened his grip on Greg’s shoulders. He wasn’t going anywhere. He slipped his tongue into Greg’s mouth and felt a jolt of recognition.
“You mean it?” Greg asked, grinning at Tom with an incandescent beam, when he broke away. He looked fit to burst. “This isn’t, like. One of your jokes that aren’t funny?”
He meant it. Hours later, even days later. The drunken euphoria faded and his spur of the moment decision felt more foolish in the harsh light of day, but he meant it. If it meant that his life wouldn’t be this miserable shade of gray, this awful portentous cloud hanging overhead.
Tom didn’t take risks. He wasn’t a betting man. But he was still willing to bet that there was something better out there for him, as long as it was with Greg.
The decision to leave was easy. Planning was another matter entirely.
Tom needed a month or so to get his affairs in order—he had to quietly resign from ATN, ask Shiv for a no-contest divorce settlement, put the Park Avenue penthouse on the market. And Greg was fine with the wait. He had his own exits to figure out.
Like, for instance: Kendall.
Greg thought about it for a week. Then a week turned into two, and he was no closer to figuring out how to do it, but, like. There wasn’t much time left.
His palms were sweating when he dropped by Kendall’s office one night, after hours. The bullpen was pretty much deserted. Greg followed the thin trickle of fluorescent light in the hall and found Kendall hunched over his desk, a lit cigarette clenched between his teeth. He tapped on the door with a knuckle.
“Oh,” Kendall said, and he stubbed out his cigarette. “Greg, hey. Didn’t expect to see you here so late.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Greg stood in the doorway, hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets. He felt, inexplicably, like a kid reporting to the principal’s office for a rap on the knuckles and a reprimand. “Got a second?”
Kendall nodded. “No, sure. Come on in.”
Greg drifted into the office and settled in a stiff chair by the window. It didn’t seem to matter how long he’d been living in the city—two years in, and he still wasn’t immune to the way that the skyline looked in silhouette. He stared out the window with his chin propped on his hand. It still didn’t seem real. It was all sort of gauzy, dreamlike. Tom might laugh at him for thinking like that, romanticizing a place that had torn his hard-won idealism to shreds. But Greg had always harbored a fondness for things that could hurt him.
“What’s up?” Kendall asked, looking up from an open file on his desk with a distant frown. “It’s not about the, uh. The acquisition, is it?”
“Oh, no. No,” Greg said. He looked down at his hands, splayed out in his lap. “To be honest with you, Ken, I don’t—um, I don’t really know how to do this.”
“Do what?”
Greg bit his lip. He had played this conversation out in his head a few dozen times over: in the elevator up to the 35th floor at a quarter past seven each morning; in front of his toothpaste-flecked bathroom mirror every night; in his restless dreams. There were versions of the truth, variations on a theme. I don’t think I’m cut out for this. I get bored if I stay in one place for too long. I might be in love with Tom Wambsgans, and that just doesn’t seem like an advantageous position to be in, if I stay here? But the truth was messy.
When it came down to it, Greg left it deliberately vague—It’s my mom, you know how she is. (Which, no. Kendall probably didn’t know, since Marianne was the black sheep of the Roy family.) And as shrewd as Kendall was, he didn't question it—Oh, sure. I get it. Take as long as you need, seriously. But maybe that wasn't because Kendall was a nice guy.
He had suspected for a while that his usefulness to Kendall only extended as far as the information he could provide. The intel. Stolen documents, keen observations from the bottom rung of the corporate ladder. And that had been fine; it had made him feel valuable. For a while, he had felt like a part of the family, and not just by proxy. It wasn’t just Tom looking to bring him into the fold.
Greg wasn't expendable, exactly. He knew that Kendall had done his political calculus, and arrived at the conclusion that it was safer to keep Greg around than to let him walk. But maybe it was kinder to operate under the assumption that it was a family matter, an extended leave of absence, than to confront the truth: Greg just didn't need to be there anymore.
He didn’t fit. Certainly not with Ewan, not really even with Kendall. Hadn’t seen his mother in years, didn’t know his father. He was an odd-shaped puzzle piece with a jagged edge, far easier to discard than to accommodate, in his experience.
The worst part about all of it? Greg was too afraid to sever his ties to the city, even though he knew it was the only logical choice. It was what Tom was doing, after all.
It was just—what if this was a mistake? If Tom decided that he didn’t want Greg all on his own? If he had only wanted him at Shiv’s behest, if Greg had only ever been a chess piece in their games and just never known about it?
He was scared. Scared of leaving, of losing the last certain thing in his life.
But Tom seemed sure. Confident, even. Greg allowed Tom’s certainty to buoy him when he faltered.
It wasn’t like that had ever gotten him in trouble before. Right?
They met up at a dive bar on St. Marks Place in the mid-afternoon. It was quiet, empty but for a few weekday drunks hunched over the bar, knocking back 7 & 7s. Even though it was one of those late spring days where the breeze was mild and the streets were dappled in soft sunlight, the bar was suspended in perpetual dusk. The place had always vaguely reminded Tom of the dank, unfinished basement in his parents’ house.
He inclined his head in a nod to the longhaired freak behind the bar, and dragged Greg to one of the tables in the back corner where they’d be undisturbed. The windows facing the street were filmed over with about a decade’s worth of grime, but Tom didn’t want to risk being spotted—here.
(Truth be told, it was kind of a thrill. Sneaking around, making clandestine escape plans in squalid rendezvous points. He had missed the camaraderie of a shared secret. This one, at least, wasn’t going to land them both in a penitentiary upstate.)
“Okay, so.” Tom drew a square of paper with hastily-jotted notes out of his jacket pocket and flattened it on the tabletop, smoothed out the wrinkles with his palm. Greg craned his neck for a better look. “Getting there. I called a travel agency this morning, and we can book a nonstop flight to San Francisco next Thursday. Now, ah. It’s a red-eye, but—”
Greg blinked. “Oh.”
“Come on, Greg. You can sleep on the plane.”
“No, yeah. I just thought we could, like, drive.”
“That’s insane,” Tom said. It was a knee-jerk response, at this point. “You wanna drive three thousand miles, Greg? It’ll take us a week, at least.”
Greg nodded evenly. Apparently, he was unfazed by the prospect of greasy diner food, gas station pit stops. Cheap roadside lodging with low-thread count sheets. It was enough to make Tom break out in hives. “But it’d be fun, right? We could, um. We could see the country, you know?”
“I grew up in Minnesota,” Tom said, frowning. “I think I’ve seen enough, thanks.”
“Yeah, but I haven’t,” Greg insisted. “I mean, like. I’ve been down the coast and through, like, Washington state, with my mom and her friends? But I kinda want to see more.”
“More of what, exactly? Cornfields? Acres of wheat? It’s fucking flyover country, Greg. I promise you, it’s not worth it.”
“Hm.” Greg gave him an inscrutable look. Then he sighed and got up from the table, stretched his legs. “I’m gonna get a drink. Want anything?”
“It’s three in the afternoon,” Tom said, aghast. “The middle of a fucking workday.”
“We’re unemployed,” Greg pointed out.
“Fair enough.”
Tom watched as Greg leaned over the bar, hungrily traced along the length of his slight body before he remembered himself. He dropped his gaze back to his scrawled notes, cheeks hot.
The kiss was still on his mind. That was a problem for a handful of reasons, but the main one was that it didn’t fit with his carefully-constructed narrative. He used to be able to fool around with Greg under the guise of sexual liberation, or whatever Shiv wanted to call it. Just one of those modern things that metropolitan married couples did on occasion. It didn’t change the fact that he was in love with his beautiful wife, thank you very much. Then his marriage imploded, and so did his arrangement with Greg. The two things were connected.
But then Greg had to go and kiss him breathless. It ruined the illusion that he had his feelings under control.
The last thing he needed—the very last thing he needed right now—was a fucking cross-country road trip with Greg, when it was all that he could do to banish the thought of Greg slipping his tongue into his mouth.
Absolutely fucking not.
Greg returned from the bar with a drink in one hand and a bowl of spiced nuts in the other. He slid the drink across the table to Tom. Scotch neat. “You looked like you could use one.”
“Thanks,” Tom muttered, ignoring the flutter of desire low in his gut. He took a sip to quell it. “If—and I’m saying if, because I still think it’s a terrible idea—if we drove.”
“We could take my van,” Greg offered brightly.
“What?” Tom frowned. He thought fleetingly of the VW bus Greg had rolled up to Logan's penthouse in, spray-painted doors and sagging bumpers and all. “You’ve got to be kidding. Greg. That thing should’ve been condemned years ago.”
“It runs fine.”
“It’s a death-trap, Greg.”
Greg ignored him. “And it’s, like, part of the experience. You know?”
Tom opened his mouth to argue. The experience? He’d been just about ready to pitch a fit when the travel agent on the phone informed him in apologetic tones that first-class seats were fully booked up. He didn’t need the experience of riding shotgun in Greg’s pile of scrap. This wasn’t On the Road. He wasn’t Jack Kerouac.
But he also didn’t have much of an excuse to be a priss.
“Come on,” Greg prodded. He could sense Tom’s hesitation; that much was clear. “Live a little, man. It won’t kill you, I swear.”
Tom scowled at his half-finished drink. “Fuck off.”
“And, hey! It’d be good for Mondale.” Greg grinned, triumphant. He seemed to know that he’d already won the argument. It was fucking infuriating. “Don’t you think?”
“Ugh, fine.” Tom took a hearty swig of his drink, and Greg beamed. “But don’t think for a second that I’m not mapping out a route for us. I don’t trust your sense of direction.”
“No, that’s totally fair.”
The last night in his apartment was eerie. His clothes were all packed into two compact cardboard boxes in the back of his T2, along with a small vinyl collection and some faded Polaroids tucked between the pages of a book. Pictures of his mother, the two of them perched on the steps of the old Airstream that her friend Joan bought that one summer in Vancouver. An unsmiling Ewan in a black-and-white shot from before Greg was born. He’d spent the afternoon sifting through them, but they were cold comfort. These people were ghosts.
He couldn’t sleep. Greg lay awake for hours and stared at the ceiling, listening to the rush of cars on the street below his bedroom window, the distant wail of sirens. He thought about his first few nights in the city. Those humid, sleepless nights. Dreams punctuated by the pop of an engine backfiring. He used to think he would never sleep again, but then the noise recessed into the background. It was bearable, until he stopped noticing it all at once.
He crawled out of bed to splash his face with cold water. Cracked a window to feel a breeze, but closed it again after a few minutes of listening to a stray dog howling at the top of its lungs. He thought about calling Tom. But it was late, and he was scared that Tom might detect a note of fear in his voice.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go. He did. It was just that lately, he kept having these lucid dreams about his childhood, drifting from place to unfamiliar place. They moved along, always moving, never settling, rolling through open stretches of barren land, past gray coastlines. His eyes blurred. He would stretch his hand out towards his mother, reaching for her, but before he could lace their fingers together, Greg would wake with a lurch, heart tapping out a frantic beat against his ribcage.
And, what? Say he called Tom up. Was he going to murmur sweet nothings into the phone, make soft tutting sounds until Greg’s breathing evened out and he relaxed enough to fall into a dreamless sleep? He didn’t know what he wanted.
No, he did. He wanted someone to tell him that it was gonna be okay. That he could finally stop running away.
His grandfather had been right about him, all those years ago. He was a coward.
Greg was awake before the sun rose. He slipped into his old, practiced routine: strip the bed sheets, do one last sweep for lingering personal effects. He closed the blinds in his bedroom, drew the curtains. He left the key on the kitchen island on top of a note for Kendall.
And then he was gone.