Forget Me Not

Chapter Sixteen

It hurt.

There was nothing he could do to change Knock's mind and that confirmation sent a searing pain through his entire body. But it was different. It didn't feel like he was spinning his wheels in search of something that would never be his again. It felt like a door had finally close.

This what the kind of pain that healed, not the kind that harms.
It was not the forgiveness he'd longed for, but it was a start.

When he first moved to Chiang Mai, everything had been raw and painful. Every action had been a reaction to that pain. Either by trying to make it end, so he could go back to being normal or by punishing himself because he thought he deserved it.

Every one of his new habits was part of a plan to build a good life.
One that didn't have Knock in it.

It wasn't just empty rhetoric. It wasn't for show. He wanted to fill the gaps in his education. Become the kind of man he believed could get the love of his life back—or find a way to live without him. Live in a way that didn't make him hate the sight of his own face in the mirror.

It had worked a little bit. Mostly, it had worked slowly.

Korn hadn't done a very good job of getting back or getting over Knock. Not when seeing him had sent him right back to the beginning when he felt like the worst kind of asshole for what he'd done. But there was another part that was about proving his father wrong.

It wasn't as obvious...but it had probably saved his life. Korn wanted to show his dad that the 'gay lifestyle' was not a profligate merry-go-round of indiscriminate sex, drugs and alcohol, parties and infidelity. The constant threat of disease, heartbreak and emptiness was not the only fate for men who loved other men.

He hadn't done a very good job of that either.

With no one to keep him accountable, he'd fallen into the trap of drinking himself to sleep until he couldn't anymore. After Knock, there had been a time when the temporary reprieve of an easy lay had provided some sort of balm to his broken heart. The nameless and sometimes faceless encounters proof positive that his father knew a little more about the 'gay lifestyle' than Korn had given him credit for.

With all the activities he'd picked up to fill his life, and the fact that he wasn't dating, fucking or filling his body with poison...Korn's life was empty.

It was time to grieve the losses. To find a way to come to terms with his new reality. To let go of the past and forge a new future even if it meant building it from scratch. It wasn't all bad. So much of what he'd been was based on secrets and lies; on holding his tongue and holding back. Pretending and praying that nobody noticed he was barely keeping it together

That had been P'Pete's superpower. Not that he had been an asshole and not that he had screwed with Korn and Knock for his own entertainment—although both were true. But it was his ability to see the cracks they had tried so hard to hide. Then he'd used every single one of them to get what he wanted.

If he patched his cracks, he wouldn't be susceptible to someone like that. It was not an assurance that he would be free from influence but maybe it would give him some protection against the P'Pete's of the world.

Keeping his distance at work had been a way to ensure he never felt such a betrayal again. Holding his new colleagues at ransom for the sins of his old ones, wasn't fair. It was unlikely he'd miraculously become friends with them but he owned them the chance to show him who they were before judging them.

His guard was up and it would always be. There was prudence in remembering what he'd learnt; colleagues were not the same as friends. But perhaps he didn't have to build such a high wall around himself. For all its power to keep people out, it also locked him in.