Chapter 4 #2
"I know," Marcus said, quiet now. "I knew it then. That's why I left instead of pushing harder. You weren't ready, and I couldn't—" He shook his head. "It doesn't matter. It was three years ago. I met Tom. I built a life. I love him."
"Do you."
"Yes."
"The way you loved me?"
"I didn't say I loved you."
"You said you were falling."
Marcus looked at him, and for the first time since the kitchen, the mask slipped.
Not the physical mask—that was gone, had been gone since the day he stopped going to Veil.
The other one. The one he wore over his expressions, the smooth, competent, controlled surface that kept the world from seeing the machinery underneath.
It slipped, and what Jamie saw in the gap was raw and unfinished and the emotional equivalent of a building with the drywall ripped off: exposed wiring, bare studs, the skeleton of something that had never been completed.
"What I felt at Veil," Marcus said, each word placed with the care of a man walking on glass, "and what I feel for Tom are different things. Tom is real. Tom is a life. What we had was—"
"Don't say it was just a scene."
"I wasn't going to."
"Then what was it?"
Marcus didn't answer. He was close now—so close that Jamie could see the texture of his stubble, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the place where his jaw muscle bunched when he clenched.
Close enough to touch. Close enough to smell—cedar and clean sweat and sawdust and under all of it, the warm, specific scent of Marcus's skin that had been the last thing Jamie breathed in before falling asleep on those Thursday nights and the first thing he searched for when he woke.
Jamie's hand came up. He wasn't directing it. His body was operating on its own authority, following three-year-old instructions that had never been rescinded. His fingers reached for Marcus's chest.
Marcus caught his wrist.
Not hard. Not rough. But definitive. His hand closed around Jamie's wrist and held—thumb pressed against the pulse point, fingers wrapping the narrow bones—and the gesture was so familiar, so precisely calibrated, that Jamie's entire body responded before his brain could intervene.
His shoulders dropped. His chin dipped. His breathing slowed.
His weight shifted forward, toward Marcus, into the hold, the way a door swings toward the frame it was built for.
Three years of distance and confusion and bad sex with strangers, and Marcus's hand on his wrist unraveled all of it in under a second.
Marcus felt it. Jamie knew he felt it because Marcus's grip tightened—a fraction, involuntary—and his eyes darkened, and his breathing changed, and for one electric, terrifying second, the garage was the club and the workbench was the brass headboard and they were right back where they'd started, locked into a dynamic that apparently didn't give a shit about timelines or context or the man currently driving home from a board dinner.
"Go to bed, Jamie."
The voice. Low, quiet, absolute. Not a suggestion. Not a request. An instruction delivered in the exact register that had governed Jamie's body every Thursday for a year—the register that meant I'm in charge now, and you're going to do what I say, and we both know you want to.
Jamie's knees softened. His eyelids fluttered. His lips parted on an exhale that sounded, in the silence of the garage, obscenely close to a moan.
He caught himself.
It took everything. Every scrap of self-preservation he'd developed in twenty-six years of building walls and sharpening his tongue and making sure no one ever got close enough to pull the ground out from under him.
He caught himself mid-surrender, mid-fall, and wrenched back from the edge with a violence that felt like tearing muscle from bone.
He jerked his wrist out of Marcus's grip. Stepped back. His chest was heaving. His skin was flushed from his cheeks to his collarbones. His cock was half-hard in his jeans, which was a humiliation he would process later, in private, and possibly never recover from.
"Don't you fucking do that to me," he said. His voice was shaking. His whole body was shaking. "Not here. Not in his house. You don't get to use that voice on me and then go upstairs and sleep next to my father."
Marcus stood perfectly still. His hand—the one that had held Jamie's wrist—was still raised, fingers slightly curled, as if the shape of Jamie's pulse was still imprinted in his palm.
His face was a ruin. The mask was gone entirely, and what was underneath was a man who wanted something he'd decided he couldn't have and had just felt, with Jamie's wrist in his hand, exactly how much that decision was going to cost.
"You're right," Marcus said. Barely audible. "I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize. Don't be noble. Don't fucking—" Jamie's voice cracked. He pressed his fist against his mouth. Breathed through it. "I can't be in this house. I should leave. I should go home and tell Tom the invitations are done remotely and never come back."
"Is that what you want?"
"What I want is irrelevant. What I want has been irrelevant since I walked into that kitchen and found out the only person who ever—" He stopped.
Swallowed hard enough that Marcus could see his throat move.
"I'll stay for Dad. But you keep your distance.
You keep your voice in its normal register and your hands on your little woodworking project and you don't—you don't touch me.
You don't look at me the way you're looking at me right now.
You don't make me coffee the way I like it like that's a normal thing to remember about your fiancé's son. "
Marcus said nothing. His hand lowered to his side.
"Are we clear?" Jamie asked.
"We're clear."
"Good."
Jamie turned and walked to the door. His legs were functioning through sheer spite. His hand found the doorknob and gripped it and he pulled the door open and the kitchen light spilled into the garage like a spotlight on a stage he was desperate to exit.
He paused in the doorway. Did not turn around.
"For the record," he said, to the kitchen and not to Marcus, "I would have told you my name. If you'd come back one more Thursday, I would have told you everything."
He walked through the kitchen. Climbed the stairs. Entered the guest room. Closed the door. Locked it.
Then he sat on the edge of the bed and pressed his wrist—the one Marcus had held—against his mouth, and felt his pulse kicking against his lips, and hated himself for the way his body was still humming at the frequency of Marcus's voice.
· · ·
In the garage, Marcus Hale stood exactly where Jamie had left him.
He looked at his right hand. Opened it. Closed it. The sensation was still there—the bird-quick pulse under his thumb, the heat of Jamie's skin, the way the boy's entire body had softened at his grip like a key turning in a lock.
The boy. He was still thinking of him as the boy. Jamie. His name was Jamie, and he was Tom's son, and he was sleeping twenty feet above Marcus's head, and Marcus had just used his dom voice on him in a suburban garage while Tom's car keys hung on the hook by the door.
He leaned forward, bracing both hands on the workbench.
The oak plank he'd been sanding was smooth under his palms. He'd cut this piece himself—selected the wood, milled the joints, planned every dimension.
The island was going to be beautiful. It was going to be the centerpiece of the kitchen he'd designed for the man he loved, in the house they were building a life in.
And the boy—Jamie—had stood right here, close enough to kiss, and Marcus had felt his surrender like a physical thing, and it had taken more discipline than any scene he'd ever run to let him walk away.
I would have told you my name. If you'd come back one more Thursday.
Marcus closed his eyes.
One more Thursday. He'd been one Thursday away from knowing.
One Thursday away from hearing the name Jamie Cole and connecting it, months later, to the man at the fundraiser with the warm laugh and the silver-fox handsomeness and the son in Brooklyn who designed things.
One Thursday away from understanding that the boy on his knees and the name on the Christmas card were the same person, and making whatever decision he would have made with that information before Tom's mouth was on his and Tom's hand was in his and Tom's life was tangled up in his in a hundred ways that couldn't be untangled without tearing something.
But he hadn't gone back. Because he'd been proud, and hurt, and tired of wanting someone who wouldn't let him in.
And so he'd left, and the boy had waited, and the gap between those two decisions had produced this: a garage in Connecticut, a half-finished island, a fiancé upstairs, and the lingering ghost of a pulse under his thumb that Marcus could still feel and would feel, he suspected, for the rest of his life.
He picked up the sandpaper. Put it down. Picked it up again.
He sanded until his arm ached and the wood was smooth enough to reflect light and Tom's headlights swept across the garage window. Then he put his tools away, turned off the light, and went inside.
Tom was in the kitchen, pouring a glass of water, looking tired and content. "How was your night?"
"Quiet." Marcus kissed his forehead. "How was the dinner?"
"Long. Dr. Patel cornered me about the budget allocation for forty minutes." Tom leaned into him. "Jamie asleep?"
Marcus looked toward the stairs. The guest room door was closed. No light underneath.
"I think so," he said.
"Good." Tom smiled. "I'm glad he's here, Marcus. It means a lot to me."
"I know it does."
"Come to bed?"
Marcus took Tom's hand. Followed him upstairs. Brushed his teeth. Changed. Got into bed beside the man he was going to marry. Tom curled into him, warm and trusting, and fell asleep within minutes, because Tom slept the way he lived—openly, easily, without guarding against the dark.
Marcus lay awake and stared at the ceiling and flexed his right hand and felt, in the silence between Tom's breaths, the phantom pulse of a wrist he should never have reached for.
He did not sleep.
Again.