Paging Doctor Asshole

The Truth

William hadn't left his room much in the past two days. If it wasn't for food, work, or laundry, he stayed tucked into the four walls of his bedroom safely. I didn't blame the older man in the slightest. If my high school sweet heart came back into my life and acted like I was the crazy one for still caring about him and also flipped the script and said I broke up with him, I would have swallowed bleach— his locked door was definitely a better option.

Either way, Taylor had kept as far as humanly possible from the house and only came inside when he needed to use the bathroom. His brown eyes stayed glued to the floor with each step and his shoulders were tensed way past the point of comfortability. It was sad but also slightly funny. Maverick had turned on the pettiest of his behaviors since the revelation. It was almost like when him and I first started to come around one another.

Petty comments, shoulder bumps, and the silent treatment.

Honestly, I was kind of jealous.

—But, I knew better than to get in between Maverick and one of his bleeding heart issues.

The house was still peaceful even with all of the unspoken words and pent of tension. Maybe it was because the energy in the house reminded me of my own childhood home. Either way, I enjoyed having Maverick to wake up and fall asleep to. The doctor was burrowing deeper and deeper beneath my skin and I was falling harder and harder for him.

He read comic books whenever his eyes got too tired from watching TV.  If he got hungry before bed, he had to eat something sweet. He loves to watch political debates on YouTube and curse loudly at the screen as if they could hear him. He liked to pluck his eyebrows right after the shower— well his uni-brow hilariously enough; I walked into the bathroom to grab toilet paper and Maverick had almost jumped out of his skin with the tweezer poised to pluck a hair.

Maverick was more than I ever could have imagined and while it did soothe the inner beat inside of me, that anxious feeling inside of my chest only seemed to grow. If our hands were locked together, I found my eyes just staring at our contrasting skin— tangled fingers looking like stripes on a t-shirt from the clear distinction in tans. My heart felt like it would swell up in my chest, my mouth dried, and suddenly my eyes couldn't meet his. I hated it but also I couldn't even figure out why I was feeling that way to do anything about it so I just continued to do what I was sent  to do... and more.

Early in the afternoon, I had Maverick pinned to one of the counters in the kitchen, hand shoved down inside the front of his pants trying to persuade the doctor he should come back to bed with me when the phone rang. Maverick gave me a cheeky smile as he escaped my clutches with pink burning his cheeks. I yanked the phone up but didn't let my eyes leave the older man until he was sitting at the dining table where he had left his comic book.

"Hello?" I asked with annoyance.

"I need you to come down to the Mussolini Mansion," Ace said without hesitation. "Cecil has been... talking... to Tommy and he said he'd talk to you."

Me? "Why me?"

Ace made an inhuman noise. "Fuck if I know! Vincent and Emilio have been trying to crack at him for the past two days and then Cecil went in... and now he said he will talk to you but only you," he explained while I listened carefully. I figured they would move onto heavier methods eventually even if it broke Em and Vin but I didn't expect for the young man to want to talk to me. Yeah, he tried to kill me but he didn't seem particularly interested in telling any of us anything the last time. Whatever Cecil had done... must not have been pretty.

"Apollo?"

"Yeah, I'll head over now," I answered and Maverick lifted his head to meet my eyes with question. "Should we be worried this is a trap or something?"