Can Anybody Find Me (Kiss Me at Midnight)

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Book Details

  Dedication

  Can Anybody Find Me

  About the Author

  Can Anybody Find Me

  Julia Alaric

  Kiss Me at Midnight

  Will is panicking. In ten days he'll be thirty, and his life isn't anything like he imagined it would be at that age. As he considers his future, he sees the possibility for failure. When he thinks of the past, Will sees all the opportunities and loves he's lost. The only thing he can't see is what's right in front of him.

  Book Details

  Can Anybody Find Me

  Kiss Me at Midnight Collection

  By Julia Alaric

  Published by Less Than Three Press LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

  Edited by Remy Ang

  Cover Illustration by V. Rios

  This book is a work of fiction and as such all characters and situations are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

  First Edition January 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Julia Alaric

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 9781620041536

  For my own somebody to love

  Can Anybody Find Me

  April 19th dawned bright and sunny. A crisp breeze tousled Will's hair as he reached deep into his jacket pocket on the way out to his car, keys jingling as his fingers blindly tried to free the half-uncurled wire key ring from the thread on which it had snagged. He breathed a sigh of relief to find the keys still there; yesterday they had fallen through the hole his dog had chewed in the pocket the previous week, and he had almost lost them.

  A shout drew Will's attention back to his little gray house, where through the picture window in front—goodness, he really needed to get curtains up one of these days—he spied his husband Andrew, half-dressed, running circles around the dining room table. Max must have stolen something out of the laundry basket again. Will shook his head in exasperation; if Andrew would ever pick up his clothes, then Max wouldn't have such an easy time tearing them to shreds. But chances were better that Max would spontaneously decide he didn't like the taste of underwear than that Andrew would start picking up after himself.

  With a cry of victory loud enough to be heard outside, Andrew straightened, one balled-up sock held high over his head as he did a little taunting victory dance. Will rolled his eyes, mouth tipping up slightly when he read Andrew's lips, just able to catch the tip of Max's wagging tail as he dashed around the corner to their bedroom again. Andrew would undoubtedly be jogging around the dining room pursuing the other sock in a minute. Really, it was a miracle that dog didn't think his name was You Fucking Bastard, given how often one of them was shouting it at him.

  Will tried to fold himself into the driver's seat of his car without banging the door into the side of Andrew's motorcycle. Mid-contortion, his head knocked painfully against the top of the doorframe, throbbing doubly because he had smacked it right on top of the knot left from doing the same thing the day before. The '95 Accord smelled terrible, thanks to a defroster that rained condensation onto the passenger side floor mat, fostering colonies of mold that grew up in thick, terrifying forests like something out of an old German fairytale. Will cracked the window so he could breath, taking a moment to stare enviously over at Andrew's 2011Volkswagen GTI with its clean, mold-free leather interior parked quietly on the other side of the motorcycle. He couldn't resent Andrew for replacing the POS he'd had before the GTI, but still … He opened the garage door and backed out before he could dwell upon it too long. He didn't need any extra stress or jealousy added to his shoulders at the moment. He could barely deal with the tension that was already there.

  Will was freaking out. He had been for a couple of weeks already if he were honest, but it was getting worse by the hour. Now there were only ten days left.

  Logically, he knew that the twenty-ninth of April was just another day, another rotation of the earth like any other. He would spend the twenty-ninth of April in the same way he spent every Monday: he would go to work, he would go to class, and he would drive home for a late dinner with Andrew before doing a little more work and watching a little TV. His life would not dramatically alter between 11: 59 P.M. Sunday and 12: 01 A.M. Tuesday. One twenty-four hour window was unlikely to result in any major life changes. He would undoubtedly be, apart from the minor biological changes of an average day, the same man he presently was.

  Except that he would be thirty, and that was something he absolutely could not wrap his mind around. He had been trying ever since he had reached twenty-nine and a half and started rounding his age up to anyone who asked. Outwardly, he had been admitting to being thirty for nearly six months already. Inwardly, however, he was balking like a stubborn horse at the thought of abandoning the safety of his twenties for the unknown pasture of a decade that cloaked itself in responsibility, adulthood, and Being a Mature Grown-Up. Will did not feel ready for that. Once he passed thirty, Will would be on a steady downhill roll toward middle-aged and beyond. Just thinking about it made his skin feel saggy and his waist expansive. Pretty soon his belt would be lifting tan polyester pants away from a pair of white orthopedic shoes, gravitating with inexorable force toward his armpits, and he would start dreaming of shuffleboard games in Florida.

  Andrew didn't understand why Will was so upset. When Will made oblique references to his increasing age, Andrew rolled his eyes with an exasperated smile and only said, "You're not old, Will. It's just another day," as though the number were all Will worried about. Turning thirty was only the tip of the iceberg; it was all of the other things that came with it that had Will tied up in knots.

  Will pulled into the parking lot of the church where he and Andrew had held their commitment ceremony nearly eight years earlier. After Iowa had made it legal, they had gotten an official marriage license too, but the ceremony they'd had in front of their friends and family was the one Will considered their real wedding. Now the church was the home of the school where Will taught one class a day.

  As he unlocked his classroom door, he thought over what lay ahead in his schedule. After teaching, he was off to four hours of graduate classes and then three hours in the clinic before meeting with his partner for Dr. Tanner's language analysis project. After that, he would go home to make dinner and do the laundry, grade some papers, and probably study a little. If he could convince himself studying wasn't a waste of time, anyway. Will sighed heavily and pushed the thought away.

  Not only was the twenty-ninth of April his thirtieth birthday, but it was also the day he would finish his second semester of graduate classes and start looking ahead to the summer sessions. Andrew thought he was excited about this. Will didn't have the heart to tell him otherwise.

  Andrew was so happy that Will was back in school. He had loved the excitement bursting out of Will after the first day of his new master's program when Will had come home babbling about theories of language acquisition, underlying representations of words, zones of proximal development, and a hundred other terms Andrew couldn't have cared less about. He had just listened with a smile, because Will was totally caught up. The career change was going to come with a significant increase in salary, and they were finally going to be able to afford to move out of their ugly house into something nicer, and they were both looking forward to that. Andrew was so fucking proud of Will for getting into a top fifty program and for showing how brilliant he was, how good he was going to be at his new c
areer, that he hadn't noticed when the stars slowly faded from Will's eyes and doubts began to take their place.

  Will felt like an idiot, which was another thing he didn't want to confess to Andrew. Because he had been so certain it was what he wanted, Will had never bothered to job shadow anyone once he'd decided to pursue his new career. On paper, speech pathology sounded great. He had a strange gift for hearing the placement of a person's tongue during speech. He could pick out and explain phonological processes in a given language sample almost instinctively. He had always been in love with language. So how was it possible that he didn't love the job now that he was starting to do it?

  It was quite simple, really. As Will was discovering, all he had to do was enjoy each of those things as long as they remained ideas, but not enjoy their practical application. Will loved theory. He loved analysis. He wanted to find each problem and explain it. He just didn't really want to fix it. If he were honest, the truth was that the prospect of teaching these struggling children bored him. Yet what sort of monster must he be to think that helping children communicate was boring? Certainly not the kind of man he wanted Andrew to think he was. Just as he didn't want Andrew to think he was foolish, a disappointment, or a failure. Lately he felt like all four.

  In retrospect, he should have known something was wrong the instant he met the other people in his program. They were all the maternal, nurturing, early elementary education types Will had never really understood. He had taught some elementary classes during two years when the school had been short-staffed, back when he had been a full-time history teacher, so he had experience and knew that he was good with kids. It was just that those interactions left him feeling restless and bored. The other people in his program cooed over their toddler clients in the clinic while discussing their few teenaged clients in commiserating, condescending tones that made it clear they all suffered through those sessions by grace and patience alone. Will didn't get it. The teenagers were the clients he really enjoyed, and he enjoyed them even more in groups. Nothing sparked his interest like a room full of self-absorbed, know-it-all, anti-authority, insecure, curious, vulnerable, fledgling adolescents. Sure, they were brats sometimes, but Will loved his high school students.

  At the end of the day, that was his problem in a nutshell: he loved teaching more with every class, and he loved the clinic less and less every day. Clinic hours weren't bad; he knew what to do and how, and everyone told him he was very good at it. But it didn't light anything inside him the way a classroom full of high school history students did.

  When he stepped into his classroom each morning to teach his one and only class, something inside him switched on. For the next 48 minutes, he was the perfect Will: not without mistakes, but everything his own insecure teenage self had wanted to be, and everything his adult self was proud to be. It didn't matter that he was shy; nobody cared how he dressed, what music he listened to, or what he had or hadn't watched on TV the night before; nobody cared if he was any good at sports; nobody made fun of him for being on the honor roll every semester. He wasn't trying to fit in, and nobody expected him to. For an hour, he got to be the biggest history geek in town without needing to apologize. His students thought he was cool because of all the random trivia he could pull out of the recesses of his brain, and they liked him because he respected them without trying too hard to ingratiate himself. They learned from him because he was passionate about history and knew how to draw them in. His love for his subject and his love for his students were contagious. While class was in session, Will was a fish in water.

  Then the bell rang, he got back into his car, and all the water drained away to leave plain old shy, nerdy Will Amundsen gasping for breath. Part-time, uncertified and therefore mostly unemployable Will Amundsen, who needed a career that would allow him to be hired full-time and paid a full salary that might even come with benefits. Someday he and Andrew were going to move out of that hideous house they currently owned, maybe move to another city, and Will was going to need to find a job outside of the one tiny private school that had hired him straight out of college without blinking an eye at his lack of certification.

  That was why he had decided to become Will Amundsen, SLP. Too bad Will Amundsen, SLP missed Mr. Amundsen the high school history teacher so badly and so constantly that he couldn't stop thinking about the classes he wished he were teaching. Half the time, he spent his speech-language pathology classes doodling notes not on language disorders or intervention techniques, but on how to explain the strengths and weaknesses of Caesar Augustus, accompanying assignments he might give a class after the lecture, and which chapters of Suetonius or Tacitus he might require them to read. As he lay in bed at the close of each day, after he'd kissed Andrew goodnight and curled up against him, Will's mind returned to speech-language pathology only insofar as it gave him ideas for how to explain or engage with the historical events he was covering in his class the next week.

  Will was bored with speech pathology, and that was the long and the short of it. He could grade papers, plan lessons, and take notes while sitting in class and still pass every test with an easy A. Although the clinic should, theoretically, be just like tutoring or teaching, should engage him in thinking about how to explain, model, or coax proper articulation in the same way devising ways to make the Cold War relevant absorbed him, but it didn't. Even the clients failed to draw him in the same way as his high school students. Little kids were cute. They needed his help. They liked him. They weren't obnoxiously self-centered, arrogant, insecure, or any of those other traits everyone but him seemed to think made teenagers unbearable. In other words, they were boring.

  If Will could have done anything in the world, he would have put together an application for a few top-notch graduate programs in ancient history. He would have devoured a PhD program and come out the other side so much richer in knowledge that just thinking about it made his mouth water, and then he would have immersed himself in college teaching, taking up all the entry-level classes the other PhDs despised, dealing with the freshmen that drove so many professors crazy. Or maybe he would have gone back to teaching high school and just been that much better at it.

  But Will would never do it. He had chosen Andrew.

  At the time, Will hadn't realized he was choosing one over the other. He had thought he could have both. After all, Andrew had always supported Will in whatever he chose to do. When they had first started dating, he had encouraged Will's graduate search. Andrew had even meant everything he'd said. He was so proud of Will and how smart he was, and he had always wanted Will to be happy. When Will had been tempted to procrastinate in the face of some major senioritis, it had been Andrew who had sat on the floor of Will's room for an entire night making sure Will hammered out the remainder of his honors thesis and prepared it for submission. It had been Andrew who had laughingly put a stop to Will's wandering hands and lips the week of final exams and forced him to get back to studying while all Will could think about was getting Andrew back in his bed.

  But it had also been Andrew who had told Will shortly after they moved in together that he couldn't stand to move more than once again. Andrew had moved four times in elementary and middle school, and he had hated settling into a new town, new friends, and a new life every time. All Andrew wanted was the stability of a place where he could put down some roots, make a place for himself, and grow old with the man he loved.

  Will wanted that too, he really did. He just wanted his PhD first. He could handle the five or six years in a college town somewhere and a few years of looking for a tenure-track position as long as he knew Andrew would be moving with him. But Andrew couldn't. He didn't want to and he would have been unhappy the entire time, not to mention that it would have hurt him deeply to go back to living somewhere their marriage wasn't legal. Will would have been all right with just the vows between them, but Andrew worried. When push came to shove, Will had promised Andrew that he would love, honor, and cherish him until the day he died, and that pro
mise would always trump any other longing Will ever felt. As far as Will was concerned, part of loving, honoring, and cherishing Andrew was not making him fucking miserable, especially not just so Will could pursue some personal dream. If there had been a single PhD program within driving distance, even a terrible one, he would have sent in an application in a hot minute; the nearest one was at least a two hour commute each way in good weather, and he didn't think either he or Andrew could survive that. And there wasn't a PhD program in the universe that would be worth breaking his vows and giving up Andrew.

  Now Will was turning thirty. It was a brand new year, a brand new decade, and a chance to start fresh. Yet all he could think was that he was dragging into that fresh start a stinking crock of shit that he was awfully sick of smelling. All he could feel was the panic of watching the years fly away along with his chance to make a change, to live the life he wanted, to ever do the things he longed for.

  Much as he dreaded reaching a state in which he would ever voluntarily wear tan trousers north of his nipples, it wasn't the fear of getting older that had Will paralyzed. It was the fear of failure; the fear of losing his chance; the fear of wasted potential; the fear of living with the burden of being less than what he could have been—what he should have been; the fear of letting people down, himself most of all.

  Will knew it wasn't healthy to keep what he was feeling to himself and just suppress the whole mess. Hell, it probably wasn't healthy to be feeling it in the first place, but there wasn't much he had been able to do about that. He also knew it wasn't good for his relationship with Andrew, but he just couldn't quite bring himself to tell Andrew how he felt. Every time he tried to broach the topic and Andrew laughingly brushed off his fear of his birthday as a fear of the number thirty, Will did little to clarify what he really dreaded. Thus, Andrew had missed the point of Will's anxiety entirely, and he didn't even know he was missing anything. Will couldn't quite bring himself to explain; Andrew tended to take things personally, and if he knew how unhappy Will was, he would assume it was all his fault and disappear into a black pit of guilt and self-loathing while Will just felt worse than ever. And if Will were honest, he had to admit he knew he wouldn't have been able to tell Andrew none of it was Andrew's fault because, in some sense he only acknowledged when he was very bitter, it was. But really, it was just the consequences of Will's own choices, even the things he could have blamed on Andrew, and Will still thought he had made the best decisions he could have at the time with the information he'd had. And even if he had known how things would turn out, he still would have chosen Andrew.