Who: Will Hayes & Willette Sullivan What: Another reunion between Will and someone who was very important to him once. Where: South Boston When: Sunday, July 1st; afternoon Warnings: TBD but probably mild.
Once, Will had dreamed about getting out of South Boston. The neightborhood was tangled up in his head with his father and the family business; it had seemed like to leave one he'd have to leave the other. Will hadn't figured there'd be much left for him in Boston anyway. He hadn't had a chance to get to know anyone outside of the men who worked for his father... and there was Kait, of course, but all of his plans for getting out had meant Kait being with him and the two of them going to find Luke so they could all be together again. A family. That was all that Will had wanted from the time that he was old enough to realize that his father wasn't one of the good guys. Kait hadn't been part of the picture then, just him and Luke, but plans changed when you got a new little sister added to the mix. As much as Will loved his siblings, both of them, he'd been relieved when there'd never been another. Another little brother or sister would have meant more years keeping his head low in Boston and barely being able to communicate with the brother he'd helped get out already.
Now that Will could get out of South Boston, the idea terrified him a little. He'd told Luke it was so that Kait could finish school—and it was, mostly. Will knew Southie though, knew it like the back of his hand. He knew how to get where he needed to go; he knew what bus to take and when they'd all get there. They knew him there. Most employees in his favorite places didn't even get impatient when it took him a frustratingly long time to get a sentence out because the words just wouldn't arrange themselves the right way. The waitress at his favorite diner knew what his usual was so he didn't even have to say anything to order it.
With his chance finally there to go anywhere he wanted to, this was the only place that Will really wanted to be.
Except that he wanted to be near wherever Luke wanted to settle, too. He wanted to be near wherever Kait went off to college... because she was going to go. Kait was going to be the first Hayes kid to really have a shot at college and Will was going to make sure that he did everything he could to get here there. He wanted to be near Olivia too, even though what they had was still too new to even start thinking about moving in together. Will had been thinking about it anyway but that was because Will was sure of Olivia the way that he'd never been sure of anything aside from himself before. Maybe the confusion of all the things that Will wanted was the reason he was clinging to this bit of familiarity. Everything in his new life was too loud and chaotic inside his head sometimes, and it wasn't like he could blurt it all out. Not without twice as much time as it would take anyone else to get through that vent. Even home and being reunited with both his siblings in the same place again was too much sometimes when he couldn't speak up fast enough to dissolve the tension.
That was why Will was standing in front of the public library and cursing himself for forgetting that it was a Sunday and the building was closed. All he'd really wanted was to lose himself in books for a couple of hours, return the one in his satchel and check out something else. Maybe another one on home design or renovation; he wanted to redo that house, update it a little so that it'd sell better. More important than that, he wanted to see if he could knock out some of the bad memories along with the walls. Except, of course, he couldn't do that when the damned library was closed and...
Will stopped and took a long, steady breath. He followed it with another and a question to himself: was it really the end of the world if he had to wait another day or two to switch out books? He had other things to read at home. He could even take a last look through the book he had to make sure he had all the notes he wanted from it before he checked it back in. Waiting another day wasn't a disaster.
Some of the books that he'd checked out had been about psychology; therapists would have expected him to talk out loud.
It would be awhile before another bus stopped. Will could have walked to a different stop, but he looked around instead. There was a nail place across the road from the library, not somewhere Will could see himself spending any time. The Punk & Poet sounded a little too trendy for Will, even though he'd never been inside to know that for a fact—he wasn't even exactly sure what it was. Most of the other businesses around were salons, boutiques, the kind of cute little places where Will would feel like a bull in a china shop. The 6 Twelve was right next door to the library, but his bus stop was right in front of a 7-Eleven so if he was going to hang around in a convenience store...
Will shrugged, sighed, and started trudging back the way he'd come from.