DOMINIC’S NOT home when I park in front of his house. That’s okay. I can do the creepy stalker thing and wait. It could be hours, I know, but this is important. I’ll wait all damn night if I have to.

I don’t wait long.

He pulls into the driveway. Sees me sitting near the curb. He doesn’t hesitate. Opens the passenger door. Gets in with me. Looks over at me. He smells so good.

He doesn’t speak. Just watches me. I know he’s waiting for me.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey, yourself,” he says back.

“You hungry?”

“I could eat.”

I nod. “Ben?”

“With his mom. I got all the time in the world, Ty.”

I start the car and pull away from the curb.

It’s minutes later that I say, “Dom?”

I can hear the smile in his voice. “Yeah?”

“I missed you. Every day.” With every single piece of my heart.

I can hear the overwhelming relief in his broken voice when he says, “I missed you too.”

We drive on.

17. Where Tyson Meets the Man Who Becomes Helena Handbasket

AND SO it began again, him and me. After years of nothing, a fragile connection made, a hand extended by the one who was in the wrong. Honestly, I thought it would be much harder than it was. But the ease with which he slipped back into my life made it feel like nothing wrong had ever happened to begin with. Thank God it only took me four years to figure it out.

That isn’t to say that there hasn’t been some awkwardness. You can’t break off a friendship as close as ours for as long as we had it with no closure on either side and suddenly have everything be as it was before. Moments come up when I’m speaking with him where I go to remind him of something that happened in the past four years, only to remember that he wouldn’t know about it, at least not from me. Or him telling me something about Ben that happened last year and Otter laughing about it, saying he remembered it.

There’s history that neither of us is privy to in our own memories, but only hear as it is told by others. And I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t been a struggle, because it has. The Dominic I knew, the shy gentle giant of a man, is gone, replaced by a stalwart and hardened cop and father. Sure, he looks the same, if a bit bigger. Sure, he sounds the same, the gravel-filled voice. But there’s a fire in his eyes that I don’t ever remember seeing, and an almost grim set to his mouth. He smiles, sometimes. At Ben. And Stacey. Every now and then he smiles at me, but it’s a rarity. It isn’t like it used to be.

I have to stop thinking that it will be. These days nothing is how it used to be. Not all of it is my fault. Not all of it is bad. I think for the longest time I’d forgotten I was actually alive, much less that I was capable of contributing to society as I should have been. I’d become a sort of shadow of my former self. Sure, I still talked big (and a lot), and I laughed and loved and lived, but it wasn’t with my whole heart like I know I used to do. But now that Dom’s here again, I… I don’t know. It doesn’t seem fair to put all of that on him. For either of us. I shouldn’t be so dependent on him to make me whole. He shouldn’t be expected to carry the weight of my burdens on his shoulders. That’s not how friendships work. Each must give the same amount and take away from it the same. That’s the only way people can survive with each other.