Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Theo
The rain had eased to a fine mist, the kind that blurred the edges of everything: streetlights, neon, the shape of my own reflection in passing shopfronts.
I walked without hurry, my coat collar turned up, Max’s words circling my head like an echo I couldn’t shake.
Go and find him.
It sounded so simple when Max said it. As though all I had to do was walk home, open the door, and admit what I already knew.
But Max doesn’t live inside my head.
I hadn’t spent years learning how to hold everything together through control, to know how easily a single mistake could unspool it all.
I headed for the Tube in Leicester Square, rainwater squelching beneath my shoes. London on a Tuesday night was still awake. Sirens echoed in the distance, laughter spilled out of pubs, all of it part of the rhythm of a city that didn’t know when to rest. I envied that kind of recklessness.
I used to think I’d outgrown it.
I wasn’t sure anymore.
When I’d first said yes to Cameron staying with me, it had been out of obligation—to Gary, to history, to the idea of being useful. I’d imagined a few awkward weeks, polite conversation, boundaries drawn yet again in permanent marker.
I hadn’t imagined the way Cameron’s presence would fill the air, how it would rearrange the rhythm of the flat. The way his laughter would stay behind even after he left a room.
I’d forgotten what it felt like to come home and not be alone with the silence, and that terrified me.
I negotiated the escalators, then waited for the next train, my head still turning over my conversation with Max.
What Max didn’t understand—what no one did—was that I had rules for a reason. Rules kept me from repeating mistakes, from letting desire turn to chaos.
From becoming the kind of man Luka had been, restless, consuming, cruel in the way people can be when they love without care.
Cameron was too young for that kind of mess. Too open. Too easy to hurt.
And yet every time I walked up to my front door, the same thought hit me like muscle memory.
He’s inside.
Every time I unlocked the door, I felt the same low hum under my skin.
Don’t look at him. Don’t want him. Don’t let him see.
I was failing at all three.
Max’s voice came back again, softer now. You’re falling for him.
Falling was easy. Staying upright afterwards? That was the part that terrified me.
I tuned out the voices of the passengers around me, the clatter of the train, the announcements signalling the next station.
What surfaced was the memory of a smell.
It had been years since I’d thought about it, but I could still recall it with startling clarity: old coffee gone bitter on a warming plate, dust in sunlight, the sour tang of a rehearsal space that was once everything before it became nothing at all.
The memory was so sharp, it could have been happening in real time.
A door, a laugh, a voice I could pick out of a crowd at twenty paces.
Don’t rush me, Theo. You ruin the rhythm when you rush.
And suddenly I wasn’t squashed on a crowded train but drowning in memories, no longer twenty-six but nineteen, standing in a college music room with scuffed floors and a leaning piano and Luka’s smile, all sinew and certainty, offering attention like a spotlight.
Luka had looked like trouble even while standing still. Not the loud, obvious kind Max tossed around like confetti, but a colder version, deliberate, practiced, honey laced with glass.
The first time Luka waited for me after rehearsal, I’d felt chosen.
He noticed me. The thrill of it had made my hands shake.
“Walk me back to my dorm,” Luka had said, as if I’d been doing that every night for years. “You’re the only one who doesn’t speed up on the downbeats.”
I hadn’t understood what that meant, but I’d nodded, my heart climbing into my throat.
We’d walked through the campus half-lit by sodium lamps, Luka tossing out fragments of stories like notes, me listening, laughing too quietly, offering fewer words and more attention.
By the time we reached Luka’s building, walk me home had become a habit, then a rule.
Don’t rush me. You ruin the rhythm when you rush.
I closed my eyes and told myself I was fine.
The memory should have been an artifact by now, as brittle and harmless as a pressed flower.
But the air in my chest hadn’t quite expanded, and the taste of someone else’s rhythm lingered like stubborn smoke.
The sound of the train permeated my thoughts, the safe, ordinary sounds I knew so well.
Luka had not been ordinary. That had been the point.
The first month had felt like oxygen. If Luka was a song, he was one I’d been waiting for without knowing it. Someone who saw me. Someone who said you’re not just valuable, you’re vital.
That single word—vital—had been the first hook.
Luka had written a song for me.
You didn’t say written for me out loud to other people; it made you sound na?ve, proprietary.
But I’d believed it. Luka had told me in a stairwell after rehearsal, his rich voice pitched for privacy, that the song was about surrender, about letting someone else set the tempo because you trusted they’d keep you upright.
“Sing it with me,” Luka had said, grinning, his breath hot against my hair. “It only works if we’re together.”
It had been intoxicating.
Luka pulled me forward. There were dinners where Luka ordered for both of us and it felt like indulgence, not control.
Late-night arrangements in Luka’s room where the air always smelled like expensive cologne.
Luka’s laugh when I corrected notation. “God, you’re precise,” he’d say, and it sounded like praise.
Little corrections came threaded through the compliments.
Don’t rush me.
Don’t second-guess me in front of them.
Don’t sing it that way; you’re flattening the urgency.
It didn’t happen all at once, the slide from invitation to instruction. It happened the way songs modulate keys without you noticing until you’re too far in to call it strange.
Twenty years old, careful, hungry for belonging, I adapted. It was easier to breathe when you stayed on the right beat. Easier to be near Luka when you made yourself a quiet room for him to fill.
Until it wasn’t easy anymore.
In the second month with Luka, closeness had come with a price.
It had been small at first. Luka cooled if I left a party early.
Luka sharpened if I disagreed with a chord choice in front of other people.
If I talked to someone Luka disliked, I got a look that made me feel foolish and grateful at once when it thawed.
“You know how you get,” Luka would say, amused. “Everything so tidy. Let yourself be messy. Let me.”
There were perfect nights spent between the sheets, Luka balls deep in me, whispering that I was only sexy when I was out of control. I had laughed then, breathless and raw. But the words had stayed, rusting into me.
Being out of control isn’t sexy. It’s dangerous.
More nights filled with music and laughter, and the feeling I’d been chosen for something. But the mornings after cost more. I’d learned the distances Luka needed to stay sweet. I’d learned the shape of apology that always worked.
I learned to anticipate.
And then, because bad habits, like key changes, often resolve dramatically, Luka made a spectacle of ending us, calling it honesty.
We should stop pretending this is more than what it is, Theo.
You’re choking the music.
You need rules; I need risk.
You make me feel watched.
It’s too heavy.
He said this on a break in a room with ten other people, during the first rehearsal of spring term, and when I stayed still, tried to meet him with privacy, Luka laughed as if it was all theatre.
Afterward, Luka wrote a new song. He performed it at an open mic, breathing hard into the microphone, making a confession to a crowd that didn’t require names to enjoy the story.
“It’s about someone who mistook discipline for love,” he said, looking at me, then looking away.
“Someone who counts when he should feel.”
I had gone home and counted everything: the seconds between email pings, the steps between rooms, the number of times I’d ignored the part of myself that wanted to run. I slept fitfully. In the morning, I made rules. Work. Order. Spreadsheets. Precision. Body like a closed door.
If you keep the line straight, no one can push you off it.
Cameron
I poured hot water into a mug. Theo would be home soon.
Warmth spread through me.
Why does it feel as if we made a little progress tonight?
I wasn’t thinking about the singing.
My phone rang, and when Gary’s name lit up the screen, I almost didn’t answer.
“Hey, little man.” Gary sounded as cheerful as ever. “I haven’t heard from you since the move. Are you still crashing at Theo’s?”
“Mm-hmm.” But not for much longer. Two weeks, Theo had said.
Two weeks would fly by.
“Lucky you.” Gary chuckled. “The place is nice, isn’t it?”
“It’s fine. A little small, but we’re making it work.”
Another chuckle. “Theo must have the patience of a saint. You keeping the noise at an acceptable level?”
“I’m trying to.” I smiled despite myself. “He’s not as scary as he used to be.”
“Ha. That’s because he hasn’t caught you leaving dishes in the sink yet. Just don’t burn the place down, okay?”
“I’ll do my best.”
Gary’s voice softened. “I’m glad you’ve got someone looking out for you. Theo’s solid. A bit wound-up, sure, but he’s dependable. You always looked up to him when you were a kid.”
I froze with the mug half-dry in my hand.
Looked up to him. Hero worship. The tidy label Gary had always given it.
“Yeah,” I said carefully. “He was kind.”
“He still is. Theo’s a good bloke. Don’t give him any grief.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” I protested.
Gary laughed. “Of course you wouldn’t. You had the world’s biggest crush on him back then, remember? You used to follow him around like a duckling.”
The words landed in the middle of my chest, the ache spreading like ripples on a pond. I forced a laugh. “That was years ago.”