Dirty Laundry: A Tucker Springs Novel #3

conquer.
    Within ten minutes he was swearing, sweating, and doing whatever he could to get the hell out of there.
    Denver didn’t just hate the big box stores—he couldn’t seem to function in them. Before he’d moved to Tucker Springs, there had been a Target he’d gotten to know well enough to survive, but Walmarts were hard, this one in particular. Nothing in the layout was the same as other stores, and the whole place seemed to be designed to get him turned around backward. This one wasn’t quite as bad as the one where Denver hadn’t been able to find the entrance, but it was close. He was able to find his eggs and milk, but everything else was a wash. By the time he made it back to his truck, he was shaking.
    Never again, he vowed. He’d go all the way back to Tucker Market, no matter how far away he was.
    This was what came of getting caught up in a crush, he told himself when he was back in his apartment, making a six-egg-white omelet for dinner. He let himself get caught up in everyone else’s relationship drama—it was really getting around too. First Jase hooked up, then El had practically gotten married, and at this rate Seth was probably headhunting a sweetheart. Just because they all wanted to jump off a bridge didn’t mean he had to. Maybe he’d hooked up in the laundromat like he and El had always joked, but that didn’t mean a damn thing either. The only thing it got him was so distracted he’d had to deal with the big Walmart. Not good, not good at all.
    Of course, Denver couldn’t help checking his phone for messages a little too often. Usually it was the other guy chasing him, so checking messages and hoping for them was something new. He liked to make the boys hunt him down so he could weed out the guys who were too much work, spotting the needy head cases before they got to be too clingy. Denver didn’t chase anybody. He had a system, and it worked great.
    Except this time he was chasing, and it wasn’t going so well. Usually by now he’d have at least one “thanks for the great time” text, but he had nothing from Adam. Nada.
    Nothing at all, not Friday, not Saturday either, and not on Sunday morning when he woke up.
    To distract himself, Denver went back to the gym, even though he wasn’t due until Monday. Deciding he could use some extra leg work, he put in another two hours on free weights and then five miles on the treadmill.
    He went to bed Sunday night sore as fuck, exhausted, and cranky because he still didn’t have any texts. He wasn’t sure what upset him more, that Adam hadn’t reached out, or that Denver cared that he hadn’t.

Though Adam had moved out of Crispin House, the unofficial off-campus housing for entomology graduate students, he’d unwittingly left a few things behind, and the Tuesday after his laundromat adventure, he went back to collect them. He’d needed to do so for some time, but it took him that long to work up the nerve. To soften the anxiety of the chore, he called first to inform them he was coming over.
    “Just stop by, man,” Ollie told him, bemused at the call. “You know you’re always welcome here.”
    That was the crux of the issue. To Ollie, to the rest of the Bug Boys, to all rational individuals, visiting someone’s house was normal. Nobody got worked up because they didn’t “belong” in that house or apartment or dorm room.
    Nobody, that is, except Adam.
    Ollie let Adam in the door with a cheery wave.
    “I miss you, man,” he teased, punching Adam lightly in the shoulder. “And not just because the bathroom turned into a sty about ten minutes after you left.”
    Adam tried to smile, laugh a little, to basically be human in the presence of a friend who meant well, but it was hard when your brain was screaming at you the whole time.
    As a delectable cherry on the top of his neurotic sundae, in addition to depression and anxiety, Adam suffered from a rather sophisticated case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Oh, everyone could make jokes about hand washing and cleaning things and alphabetizing the cupboard, but in Adam’s experience, very little was laughable. Inside the tortured confines of his mind, everything had to be Just So or the world would not continue to turn properly on its axis. He found comfort in the knowledge he didn’t have something truly crippling, like the poor boy who couldn’t reply in conversation until he’d repeated the words spoken to him by someone else backward in his head.
    There was