Promises of Eternity Read online

  PROMISES OF ETERNITY

  M/M GAY ROMANCE

  BY LINA LANGLEY

  © 2017

  Lina Langley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without express written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is intended for adults only. It contains explicit sexual scenes and is not suitable for children.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  BLURB

  Gabriel Acosta can’t believe what’s happening right in front of him. His best friend, Holden Brochu, is being left at the altar by his fiancé. Sean doesn’t want to marry Holden, which becomes even more evident when Gabriel drags him to the venue and then watches, in horror, as he turns around and runs away from his very own wedding and groom.

  Holden is stunned and seems devastated. Gabriel, not quite knowing what to do, tries to care for Holden as recovers from the shock. But the moment that he takes his eyes off him, Holden practically disappears. Gabriel doesn’t see him again until two weeks later, when he’s had time to really think about why he’s so upset about the wedding and exactly why he missed his best friend so much.

  Holden Brochu wasn’t that excited for his wedding, but he did at least expect it to happen. When it doesn’t, he’s not quite sure what to do. His natural reaction is to hide, so that’s exactly what he does. He doesn’t realize that he’s going to hurt his friends and family in the process. But once he’s done brooding, he comes back with a brilliant revenge plan. The only problem is that it involves his best friend’s Gabriel cooperation. By going for it, though, they might both be getting more than they bargained for, in more ways than one…

  Warning: This story contains depictions of anxiety and selective mutism, as well as panic attacks. It is approximately 30,000 words in length and contains language & erotic adult scenes. It is intended for adults.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Gabriel Acosta tried to resist the urge to check his wristwatch when his best friend, Holden Brochu, flashed him a pleading look. It was only for a second—Holden knew better than to lose his composure in front of all these people—but Gabriel felt sick to his stomach.

  Gabriel took a step toward Holden, leaning up so that he could whisper into his ear. “Hey,” he said. “I’ll go check on him.”

  Holden nodded, ever-so-slightly. Gabriel walked down the steps slowly, so that there wouldn’t be cause for alarm. Holden had watched a smaller wedding, but after the death of his brother, Holden had become an only child and his parents were… disconcertingly… accepting. They thought that Holden wanted to have a small wedding because he was marrying another man, not because he was shy and quiet and hated being the center of attention. Gabriel had thought it was hilarious, up until the month when Mrs. Brochu had booked the biggest convention center in the city.

  Gabriel had stopped thinking it was funny when he’d seen Holden’s face as he ended the call, dropping his cellphone on the sofa next to him as if he’d gotten some terrible news. Holden Brochu’s wedding was absolutely a dream wedding, with the white tablecloths with the golden trimming and the cute centerpieces with a variety of Sean and Holden’s selfies. There were little lanterns with the wedding’s colors hanging from the beams in the vaulted ceiling, wrapped carefully in soft purple and gold ribbon. It just wasn’t Holden’s dream wedding.

  When Holden had first seen the reception area, he had looked like he was about to faint. Compared to the way that he looked when he was waiting for Sean in front of the officiant and all his wedding guests, though, Holden had looked positively cheerful then.

  The moment that Gabriel had turned a corner and he was sure that none of the guests were looking at him anymore, he started to sprint as he took his phone out of his pocket. He rarely called Sean, but he had his name in case of case of emergency, and he was sure that this classified as an emergency.

  He pressed on Sean’s contact card and held the phone up to his ear, but it rang and rang and rang and Sean never answered. Gabriel could only hope that Sean would still be in the room next to Holden’s, where he was supposed to have been getting ready.

  Gabriel muttered a swear word under his breath when he finally reached Sean’s door. He put the phone in his pocket again and knocked on the door, worried that he would have to be insistent enough to call attention to himself.

  Nothing happened for a little while, and Gabriel took a deep breath as he got ready to knock again. When his hand was hovering in the air, the door opened. Gabriel took a step into the room. “Sean? Are you here?”

  Sean was walking away from him. Then he was next to the window, leaning back against the wall and Gabriel noticed that his face puffy and red.

  “Sean? What happened? Are you okay?”

  Sean opened his eyes to look at him. He opened his mouth, not even shaking his head. “I’m not—I can’t—”

  “Hey, it’s okay,” Gabriel said. “Can I sit down?”

  Sean watched him, saying nothing.

  “Okay, I won’t sit down,” he said, more to himself than to Sean. “Listen, Holden is waiting for you.”

  Sean scoffed. “I know Holden is waiting for me,” he said. “I know they’re all waiting for me. My little sister is here. Did you know that she lives in New Zealand?”

  Gabriel shook his head.

  “Yeah,” he said. “She lives in New Zealand. And she’s here, to watch her older brother get married, and I can’t—I can’t force myself to go out the door. I keep trying, like, I keep getting closer to it, and then when I do, I just start panicking.”

  Gabriel blinked. “Sean…”

  “No, I know,” Sean said, sitting down on the bed behind Gabriel. “I can’t—I can’t just leave him there. That would be terrible. Right?”

  He looked up at Gabriel, as if Gabriel was going to tell him that it wouldn’t be terrible to leave his best friend at the altar.

  “Yes,” Gabriel finally said, crossing his arms over his chest. “That would absolutely be terrible.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “No,” he said. “We’re going in together.”

  “Gabe—”

  He would have normally corrected him, but this time, he let it slide. The way that he was looking at Sean was enough to stop him from saying anything else.

  “Look, whatever issues you have with Holden,” Gabriel offered. “You can work them out together, later. But you can’t just leave him standing there in front of everyone. That would be cruel.”

  Sean shook his head. “You don’t understand. There are things about Holden I didn’t know.”

  “Yeah, you’ve known him for like a year, that stands to reason,” Gabriel said, completely ignoring the panic in Sean’s voice. He took a step forward, put his hands on Sean’s shoulders, and looked down into his eyes. “Listen to me, and listen to me carefully, because I’m not going to say this twice.”

  Sean blinked. Gabriel thought that he wanted to get away from him, but he wasn’t going to let him.

  “There are two hundred people out there waiting for you to come out and marry my best friend,” he said. “Who, incidentally, is way out of your league.”

  Sean opened his mouth, but Gabriel got closer to his face, not letting him speak.

  “I’m not going to let you leave him there,” he said. “This was your idea. You asked him to do this, he told you that he wasn’t ready, and you wooed him int
o the idea of marriage. You convinced him to do this. So now you’re going to man up, stand up, walk out the door of this hotel room, walk up to your fiancé and marry him. Do you understand?”

  “Gabr—”

  “Do you understand?”

  Sean licked his lips. “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Gabriel said. He extended his hand and waited for Sean to take it. When he did, he noticed how cold to the touch he was, how sweaty. He didn’t care. He pulled Sean up and positioned his body so that he was standing right in front of him. It was weird, Sean was definitely the bigger one of the two, but he was letting Gabriel handle him as if he was a ragdoll.

  When they finally got to the threshold, though, Sean turned and looked at him, wide-eyed.

  “No,” Gabriel said, his tone stern. He didn’t want Sean to noticed how panicked he was, but underneath the force of his voice, there was real fear. He grabbed Sean’s shoulders and turned him around so that he was facing the door again, then he walked forward until they had both left the room. He heard Sean’s breathing quicken, which put a spring in his step. When they were about to turn a corner into the reception center, Gabriel stood to the side, holding on to Sean’s forearm hard enough not to let him get away from him.

  It felt so strange, like he was escorting Sean to prison instead of to his own wedding, and Gabriel wondered how much of this he should tell Holden about. Holden would be hurt if he knew exactly how little his groom wanted to marry him and it was surely Gabriel’s job, both as his best friend and his best man, to protect him.

  When they got close to the reception center, close enough for everyone to see them, Gabriel could feel the palpable sense of relief in the air around him. He wasn’t supposed to be the person walking Sean down the aisle, but it didn’t matter, because at least he was walking down the aisle and toward Holden.

  The moment the string quarter saw Sean turn a corner, they started playing Canon in D, and Gabriel relaxed his hold of Sean’s arm. He watched as Holden looked at him, smiling thinly, and Sean started to walk ahead of him, excruciatingly slowly.

  When the song was about halfway done, Sean doubled back. It was done slowly, and it was so surreal that Gabriel didn’t, couldn’t, stop him. It was as if he was watching turn around through a glass screen.

  He walked past Gabriel and back toward the entrance as the music swelled up. When he got to it, he didn’t turn back once. All that Gabriel could hear was the violin music, because it felt like everyone around them was holding their breath as they watched Sean leave the reception area.

  Then he started to run.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Holden couldn’t exactly remember what had happened when Sean had left the reception area. He could hardly recall the moment that Sean had turned, all that he could remember was that he felt like he couldn’t breathe anymore, and the officiant had been holding him so that he wouldn’t fall face first on the ground in front of him.

  Someone ushered him out of the reception area, though he wasn’t sure who it was, or when it happened. Though he was surrounded by chattering people, he managed to shake them off and walk toward the cliff. They were only vaguely aware that he had escaped the crowd of people. He didn’t want to jump off the cliff—he didn’t think so, anyway—he just wanted some time to himself, and seeing the sea always calmed him down.

  It felt like his steps were wobbly as he approached the edge of the cliff. He wanted to think—he needed to think—but he couldn’t form a coherent thought. There was nothing in his head but static and the need to escape.

  He looked back at the venue only to realize that all his guests were watching him. All their guests, he supposed, though the correction felt entirely academic and unneeded.

  He didn’t think that he was going to be able to walk past them, so he did the only thing that he could think of: he sat down, his legs dangling over the side of the cliff, and took a deep breath. He normally didn’t like heights, but this transcended any of his likes and dislikes. He couldn’t stand anymore.

  He closed his eyes and leaned back. He heard someone approach him, but he didn’t turn around, he didn’t look up to see who it was. It didn’t matter. Sitting there, on that cliff, wearing the suit that he was supposed to be wearing when he was getting married, nothing felt like it mattered.

  “Hey,” he heard Gabriel say.

  He opened his eyes slightly to see Gabriel sitting down next to him. Holden didn’t like heights, but Gabriel hated them, and he had tried to steer away from the cliff as much as possible during the wedding. The fact that Gabriel had sat down next to him, as if this was just something that he would do, would have normally made Holden smile.

  Except he wasn’t sure that he could remember how smiling worked. He wasn’t sure that he could remember how to do anything with his face, full stop.

  “Holden.”

  He opened his eyes fully, setting his gaze on Gabriel. Gabriel looked so good, with his curled eyelashes and his understated make-up, and the black suit with the white and gold pocket square that his parents had insisted Holden’s best man wore. He took a deep breath, saying nothing, and Gabriel grabbed his hand, interlacing his fingers through Holden’s.

  This wasn’t the kind of thing that they did. They weren’t the kind of friends who touched a lot, in fact, in the many years that they had known each other, Holden thought that he could count how many times they had touched using only the fingers in his right hand. But this felt right, and even if it hadn’t, Holden didn’t know if he would have the energy to disengage from Gabriel right then.

  They sat there saying nothing for what Holden thought might have been forever when Gabriel edged closer to him. Holden looked at his hands, at his perfectly trimmed manicure, the little freckles of gold on his nails standing out against the white nail polish. Holden couldn’t help but marvel at Gabriel’s attention to detail, even though he couldn’t find it in himself to compliment him right then. He opened his mouth to talk, to try and say something, but it felt like he had lost his ability to speak and he found himself completely baffled by his inability to form coherent sentences from his thoughts.

  “I’ll take you home,” Gabriel said. “How does that sound?”

  Holden watched him, because he wasn’t sure what he could say. He didn’t even think that he could bring himself to nod. It didn’t sound nice. It didn’t sound like anything. It sounded like everything was blank and fuzzy and words didn’t make sense anymore.

  “Come on,” Gabriel said. “Let’s get up, get you home.”

  Gabriel got to his feet and Holden followed him with his gaze, swallowing. The knot in his throat was gone, but now there was something else there, something that felt physical and nauseating every time that he used his throat. Their hands were still interlaced, so it stood to reason that Gabriel would pull him up with him, but Holden’s body felt like it wasn’t responding and Gabriel had to exert what Holden was vaguely aware was an unreasonable amount of strength to get him to stand up.

  He was soon being dragged away from the cliff, the crowd of people opening up as if he was contagious. He was vaguely aware of his mother talking to Gabriel, of Gabriel reassuring her and of being watched as they slowly made their way to the parking lot. Gabriel opened the passenger door for him and Holden got in automatically.

  Gabriel walked around the car, got into the driver seat, turned on the ignition and looked at Holden. “Are you…”

  Holden turned to look at him. He didn’t do or say anything, he just stared and he watched Gabriel swallow. “Right,” he said. “Stupid question.”

  He put the car into gear and backed it out of the parking spot. They drove out of the venue and Holden watched it get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror on the passenger side.

  He watched the scenic hotel disappear when Gabriel merged onto the highway and closed his eyes as the generic traffic noise became almost too much to handle. He tried to make himself as small as possible, which was tricky because there was a seatbelt digging into t
he soft skin of his throat when he tried to slide down. It didn’t matter, though, soon he was curled into a ball, and he was only vaguely aware of Holden asking him what he was doing. He couldn’t answer, mostly because he had no idea what he was doing himself, so he didn’t. He stayed there, quietly, saying nothing.

  They pulled up to the apartment complex that they both lived in, a high-rise conglomeration of buildings with a courtyard located over the parking garage. He was vaguely aware that Gabriel was parking in his assigned spot and that he was walking around the car to open the passenger seat.

  “Come on, let's go upstairs,” Gabriel said. Holden watched him. Gabriel looked like he belonged on a television show, he thought, not in this dingy parking garage in the middle of this shit city.

  He had his hand extended out, and he was clearly waiting for Holden to take it. Holden wasn't sure if he could, he wasn't sure if he could even move. He tried, and it seemed to work, though it still didn’t feel like his hand was following his commands. It was so strange, almost like Holden was watching his limbs, like they were part of someone else’s body.

  It was only when Gabriel was holding his hand again, when his soft, warm skin touched Holden’s and made him remember that he was a person and that he lived in his own body. He started to feel things and only then did he become aware that he hadn’t been feeling anything for the longest time, the way his hair was sticking to his face from sweat, the way his suit jacket felt like it was strangling him, the way that his sleeves hugged his wrists like tight rubber bands.

  Gabriel closed passenger door behind him, and Holden walked slowly with him towards his apartment building as he started to take off his clothes. He didn’t care that this was the parking lot, he didn’t care that his neighbors might see him, that they would know that he was coming back from his own wedding.

  They walked together—kind of, because Holden was sluggish behind Gabriel, partly because he didn’t feel like he could walk very well and partly because he didn’t want to walk, but mostly because even walking felt weird. Because existing felt weird and part of him wished that he wasn’t doing it at all.