Chapter 2 #2
"I keep telling him he should look for a one-bedroom. More space for his work. Marcus, didn't you say you know some people in Brooklyn real estate?"
"I might." Marcus plated the caprese and brought it to the island. He set it between Tom and Jamie and stepped back. "Looks like the tomatoes cooperated."
"This is gorgeous." Tom pulled out a stool. "Jamie, sit. Eat."
Jamie pushed off the refrigerator and moved to the island. He chose the stool farthest from where Marcus was standing, which still put them within four feet of each other—the island wasn't that big—and when he sat down, Marcus saw his nostrils flare.
Scent. Jamie had always been scent-driven.
It was one of the first things Marcus had cataloged about him at the club—the way the boy responded to proximity before contact, how his breathing would change when Marcus stepped close enough to be smelled but not touched.
Marcus had used it deliberately, strategically, for months.
Standing behind the boy's chair. Leaning in without making contact. Letting anticipation do the work.
Now he was standing in his fiancé's kitchen, three and a half feet from the boy who used to breathe him in like oxygen, wearing the same cologne he'd worn on Thursday nights, because he hadn't thought to change it. Why would he? It was just cologne. Except that nothing was just anything tonight.
Jamie stared at his plate and did not eat.
Marcus opened the champagne—controlled pop, no spillage, no fanfare—and poured three glasses.
When he set Jamie's down, their fingers didn't touch.
He made sure of it. The half-inch of air between his knuckles and Jamie's was the most carefully engineered gap Marcus had ever constructed, and he'd built cantilevers.
"To family," Tom said, raising his glass.
Jamie's hand tightened on the stem. Marcus watched the tendons shift in his wrist and thought about how those tendons looked in restraints—flexing, pulling, going slack when the boy finally stopped fighting—and then buried that thought so deep it would need an excavation permit to retrieve.
"To family," Marcus said.
The clink of three glasses was the loneliest sound he'd ever heard.
Dinner was an exercise in architecture. Marcus built the conversation the way he built structures: load-bearing elements (Tom's stories), structural supports (his own measured contributions), and decorative facades (questions directed at Jamie that Jamie answered in the fewest possible syllables).
"What kind of design work are you doing these days?"
"Branding. Identity. Some editorial."
"Tom showed me your portfolio. The work for that coffee company was sharp."
"Thanks."
"The typography especially. You've got a good eye for hierarchy."
Jamie looked at him. Really looked at him—the first direct, sustained eye contact since the handshake—and Marcus made the mistake of meeting it.
Four years. It had been four years since he'd looked into those eyes without a mask between them, but he'd looked into them with the mask hundreds of times, and his body didn't know the difference.
The eye contact triggered something deep and structural, a recognition that bypassed cognition entirely and went straight to the part of his brain that remembered how this boy looked from above—lashes dark, pupils blown, mouth open, completely surrendered.
Marcus looked away first. Reached for the bread. "Tom, is there more olive oil?"
"Cabinet above the stove."
He stood and turned his back to the table, and the three seconds it took to retrieve the olive oil were the three seconds he used to rebuild the wall that Jamie's eyes had just put a crack in.
When he sat back down, Jamie was staring at his plate again. His cheeks were flushed. His fingers were white around the champagne stem.
Tom noticed nothing. Tom was describing the seating chart for the reception and the political complexities of his sister Carol's table assignment, and Marcus contributed appropriate murmurs of agreement while tracking Jamie in his peripheral vision the way a man tracks a structural fault in a building he can't evacuate.
A small moment. Ordinary. Meaningless.
Tom asked Jamie to pass the salt. Jamie reached across the island at the same time Marcus did, and their hands collided over the salt cellar—not fingers brushing, not a glancing touch, but a full palm-to-knuckle contact that lasted less than a second and sent a signal through Marcus's body that he recognized with the precision of a diagnostic: arousal. Pure, animal, immediate.
Jamie yanked his hand back. The salt cellar skittered across the butcher block. Tom caught it.
"Whoops." Tom laughed. "Here you go."
"Thanks." Jamie's voice was scraped thin. He looked at Marcus for a half-second, and in that half-second, Marcus saw everything—the fury, the confusion, the sick arousal, the desperate question: did you know?
Marcus gave the smallest possible shake of his head. No.
He wasn't sure Jamie saw it. He wasn't sure Jamie was capable of seeing anything past the wall of shock and whatever else was happening behind those green eyes. But he tried.
The rest of dinner passed in a haze of Tom's stories, Marcus's autopilot, and Jamie's silence.
Tom opened a second bottle of wine. Marcus drank half a glass.
Jamie drank two full ones, quickly, and the flush in his cheeks spread to his throat and his collarbones and Marcus cataloged it automatically because that was what his brain did with this particular body—it cataloged, it mapped, it remembered every response and filed it for future use, and the fact that there would be no future use was a reality he hadn't finished processing.
"I should turn in," Jamie said, standing abruptly. His chair scraped the floor. "Long drive. I'm beat."
"Of course." Tom stood too, reaching for a hug that Jamie accepted with the rigid posture of a man being fitted for a straitjacket. "I'm so glad you're here, kid."
"Me too, Dad."
Jamie looked at Marcus over Tom's shoulder. The eye contact lasted two seconds. It was the longest two seconds of Marcus's life. Jamie's face said nothing. Jamie's eyes said everything.
Then he was gone. Footsteps on the stairs. The guest room door, closing with a click that Marcus felt in his molars.
He cleared the table. Washed the dishes by hand, because the dishwasher was too fast and he needed the time—the hot water, the repetition, the simple mechanical task of cleaning a plate and setting it in the rack. His hands moved. His brain screamed.
Jamie. His name is Jamie.
The boy from Veil. The boy who knelt for him every Thursday for a year. The boy whose body he knew better than his own. The boy he walked away from because he couldn't keep wanting someone who wouldn't be real with him.
That boy is Tom's son.
That boy is twenty-six years old and sleeping in the guest room upstairs and will be here for six weeks and is going to design the invitations for Marcus's wedding to his father.
Marcus set a plate in the rack and gripped the edge of the counter and breathed.
Tom came up behind him. Warm arms around his waist. Chin on his shoulder. Tom's body was familiar and good and safe, and Marcus leaned into it because he needed something solid to hold him up and Tom had always been solid.
"I think that went well," Tom said.
Marcus stared through the window at the dark back yard and the pool lights reflecting off the water and the outline of the garage where the half-finished kitchen island sat waiting for hands that were, at this moment, shaking under the dishwater.
"Yeah," he said. "I think it did."
Tom kissed his shoulder and went upstairs. Marcus heard the creak of the master bedroom door, then the sound of the shower turning on.
He stood at the sink for a long time. The water had gone cold. He didn't turn it off.
In his mind, two images overlaid each other like a double exposure: the boy on his knees in a dark room, face upturned, waiting to be told what to do.
And the man at the kitchen island, holding a champagne glass, white-faced and trembling, looking at Marcus with eyes that contained, among other things, the specific fury of someone who had been abandoned and just found out where the person who abandoned them had been the whole time.
Marcus turned off the water. Dried his hands. Hung the towel on the oven handle, aligned with the edge, because alignment mattered, because structure mattered, because if he could keep the towel straight, he could keep the rest of it straight.
He turned off the kitchen lights and went upstairs in the dark. Passed the guest room door. Did not slow down. Did not stop. Did not press his palm flat against the wood and stand there listening for the sound of breathing on the other side, which is what every cell in his body was demanding he do.
He went to the master bedroom. Brushed his teeth. Got into bed beside Tom, who was already half-asleep, warm and trusting, one hand reaching for Marcus under the covers.
Marcus took Tom's hand. Held it against his chest. Stared at the ceiling.
In the guest room, twenty feet and a lifetime away, a boy he'd once called mine was lying in the dark, and Marcus could feel him through the walls the way you feel a fire in the next room—not the flame itself, but the heat, the pressure, the certainty that something on the other side of the barrier was burning.
He did not sleep.