Swallow (Sugar Pill Duet #2)

Prologue

LUCA

It has been three months since I last saw Noel.

It isn’t for lack of trying, either.

I look for him everywhere. On the bustling sidewalks in downtown Boston late at night.

On the T I don’t need to take, on the Orange and Green lines he used to frequent.

At Anathema or ManRay or whatever other club I happen to be at that night, and there I look for him in the dark-haired boys I glimpse in the flickering shadows.

One time I even looked for him at his old apartment in the West Fens, the one we shared for a while, but the woman who answered the door was no one I knew. She’d moved in a month ago, and no, she didn’t know the previous tenant, sorry.

Another time I looked for him at his mother’s house: that old, run-down colonial in Malden only a few minutes from my own house, but he was never there, either. At least, no one ever answered the door when I knocked.

I can’t find him anywhere. The beautiful boy I once had, my stunt girl.

But I see him in absolutely everything. In pigments at the shop as I shake them apart and in the sound of the tattoo gun as it vibrates beneath my fingers.

In the lines of my hands, hands that used to touch and hold him close.

In my own desire, and my own release—I think of him and I find him there, however briefly, before he’s gone again.

Snapshots fluttering in the empty spaces of my mind that he used to occupy.

That he still does, but I can’t get in. A locked room like a shrine, all my memories of him, and I am desperate to break through.

It’s never enough, though. It’ll never be enough.

There is only him, and him, and him.