Chapter 8
Two days.
Two days of Marcus not looking at him. Two days of carefully choreographed avoidance that made the previous week's version look amateur.
Marcus had constructed an entirely new schedule—leaving before dawn, returning after dinner, spending his evenings in the garage with the door closed and the radio on, a sonic barricade between himself and the rest of the house.
When they occupied the same room, Marcus addressed the space beside Jamie rather than Jamie himself, directing comments to the counter, the refrigerator, the air three inches to the left of Jamie's ear.
Jamie understood. Marcus was doing what Marcus did after a breach of structure: fortifying, rebuilding, restoring the walls that had been compromised.
It was the same instinct that had made him stop coming to Veil—when the boundary broke, Marcus retreated behind a new, stronger one.
He was an architect. He built things. And when something collapsed, he didn't mourn; he redesigned.
But Jamie was done being a building Marcus walked away from.
Tom noticed the distance—of course he did, in his vague, well-meaning way. "You two seem a little off," he said over breakfast on Thursday, looking between Marcus's empty chair and Jamie's untouched toast. "Did something happen?"
"Nothing happened, Dad. He's just busy with work."
"He's been so stressed about the Henley project. I keep telling him to delegate, but you know Marcus—he has to do everything himself."
Jamie knew. He knew exactly how Marcus's need for control manifested. He knew it with the kind of intimate, body-level knowledge that made eating breakfast across from his father while discussing it feel like swallowing glass.
"I'm sure he'll lighten up after the wedding," Jamie said.
"Five weeks." Tom smiled. "Five weeks and I get to call that man my husband."
Jamie excused himself and went upstairs and sat on the guest bed and breathed and did not scream.
Friday evening. Tom left at six for a colleague's retirement party.
"Save me," he said at the front door, adjusting his tie. "If Dr. Hoffman starts his anesthesiology stories, I might not survive."
"You'll be fine," Marcus said. He was standing in the kitchen, a careful twelve feet from Jamie, holding a coffee mug like a prop. "Have a good time."
"Don't wait up. These things go late." Tom kissed Marcus's cheek, waved at Jamie, and was gone.
The front door closed. The car backed down the driveway. The street went quiet.
Marcus rinsed his mug. Set it in the dishwasher. Closed the dishwasher. Every movement a sentence in the grammar of a man maintaining routine in the face of entropy.
"I'm going to work in the garage," he said. Not to Jamie. To the kitchen at large.
"Sure."
Marcus walked through the mudroom. The garage door opened and closed. A moment later, the radio came on—something with a bass line and no vocals, the kind of music Marcus listened to when he worked with his hands.
Jamie stood in the kitchen. The house was enormous around him, every room a chamber in a silence so dense it had texture.
The invitation files were open on his laptop.
The revised proof was finished—beautiful, in fact, the best work he'd done in months, every line and margin refined by the collaborative process of sitting across from Marcus and receiving instruction.
He should email it to the printer. He should finalize the paper order.
He should do any of the eighteen productive things on his task list instead of what he was about to do.
He closed the laptop.
He walked through the mudroom.
He opened the garage door.
Marcus was at the workbench, hand-planing a joint on the island's edge piece.
He'd changed into a worn t-shirt and jeans, and his forearms were bare and flexed with the rhythm of the plane's stroke, and the garage smelled like linseed and oak shavings and him.
The radio played. The overhead fluorescents hummed.
It was domestic and ordinary and Jamie hated every molecule of it.
Marcus looked up. His expression flattened. "Jamie."
"We need to talk about it."
"No."
"You can't just pretend—"
"I'm not pretending anything. I'm working." Marcus returned his attention to the plane. Steady strokes. Shavings curling off the blade. Dismissal in the language of lumber.
Jamie leaned against the door frame. "How long are you going to do this?"
"Do what?"
"Hide in here. Build your little project. Pretend you didn't—"
"I'd prefer not to discuss it."
"I know you'd prefer not to discuss it. You'd prefer to file it in whatever compartment you keep things you can't control and lock the door and go back to sanding.
That's what you do. That's what you did at Veil.
Something gets real, something gets messy, and you retreat into your workshop and make something perfect with your hands because the rest of your life is—"
"Careful." The plane stopped. Marcus looked up, and the expression on his face was not the careful neutrality of the past two days. It was closer to the surface. Closer to the fault line.
"Or what?" Jamie pushed off the door frame and stepped into the garage. "You'll walk away again? Add another room to the fortress? You're running out of building materials, Marcus."
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"I know exactly what I'm talking about. You're a coward. You were a coward at the club and you're a coward now. You'd rather build a kitchen island for a man you're half in love with than admit that you kissed me two days ago and it was the realest thing that's happened to you in three years."
Marcus set down the plane. Carefully. Precisely. The way a man sets down a tool when his hands want to do something else with the energy.
"You should go inside," Marcus said.
"No."
"Jamie—"
"You're playing house. You know that, right?
You're in here every night sanding and measuring and making something beautiful for a man who doesn't know you.
He knows the Marcus who shows up for dinner.
He doesn't know the Marcus who used to pin me down and take me apart until I couldn't remember my own—"
"Stop."
"He doesn't know what your voice sounds like when you're about to—"
"I said stop."
"He doesn't know that you're standing in this garage right now, pretending to work on his wedding gift, when what you're actually doing is hiding from the fact that you kissed his son against a bookshelf and got hard doing it—"
"Jamie."
"—and that you miss me on your knees and you know it."
Silence.
The radio played. The fluorescents buzzed.
Jamie's chest was heaving, his face was flushed, and his mouth had, as usual, run approximately six miles ahead of his self-preservation instinct.
He'd come out here to talk. Talking had devolved into detonation.
This was his pattern—poke the bear, provoke the reaction, force the hand—because somewhere in the fucked-up wiring of his psyche, an explosion felt safer than a slow, honest conversation.
Marcus was very still.
He stood behind the workbench with his hands flat on the wood surface, and his shoulders were rigid, and his jaw was clenched so hard Jamie could see the muscles jump, and his eyes—his eyes were not calm.
His eyes were not controlled. His eyes were the eyes of a man who'd been holding something at arm's length for ten days and had just felt his grip fail.
"You have no idea," Marcus said softly, "what I miss."
He came around the workbench.
Not walking. Something faster, more direct, more inevitable than walking.
Two strides and he was across the garage and Jamie's back was against the wall and Marcus's hands were on his wrists, pinning them flat against the drywall, and Marcus's body was pressed full-length against his and Marcus's face was inches from his and the expression on it was nothing Jamie had ever seen at the club.
At the club, Marcus was controlled. Precise.
Measured. Even in the most intense scenes, there was always the architecture underneath—the structure, the plan, the careful engineering of sensation.
This wasn't engineered. This was the building coming down.
"You want to know what I miss?" Marcus's voice was low, rough, scraped raw.
His breath was hot against Jamie's mouth.
"I miss the sound you make when I hold you down.
I miss the way your body goes slack when I tell you you're good.
I miss the taste of your skin after a scene, when you're sweating and shaking and you smell like surrender.
I miss making you beg. I miss making you come.
I miss the way you looked at me in the dark like I was the only real thing in your entire life. "
Jamie's brain whited out. His wrists were pinned and Marcus's hips were flush against his and he could feel Marcus through his jeans—hard, thick, unmistakable—and the combination of the words and the pressure and the voice and the heat was overloading every circuit he had.
"Marcus—"
"You want to call me a coward?" Marcus pressed closer.
His thigh slid between Jamie's, and the friction against Jamie's cock—already straining, already aching—pulled a groan out of him that he couldn't have stopped with a gun to his head.
"You want to stand in my garage and tell me I'm hiding?
I'm the one who asked for your name. I'm the one who wanted more.
You ran from me for a year and I let you because I thought that was the right thing to do and I have regretted it every single day since, and now you're here, in my house, wearing that fucking t-shirt, dropping pens on my floor, putting your hand on my chest and asking me why him and not you—"
He released Jamie's wrists. Jamie expected him to step back. To rebuild. To retreat behind the wall and the plane and the careful routine.
Marcus dropped to his knees.
Jamie stopped breathing.