Tomorrow. He was offering—Jack didn’t really know. He didn’t know what to hope for. Except he’d never felt like this, like everything inside of him was balanced on the edge of a cliff, like he was in that farmhouse, careening in a tornado toward unknown ground. He had been carrying too many things that had damaged him as a little boy, and he had fulfilled the expectations of the people he wanted so badly to love him, and it felt like each choice he made was no choice at all, but a mindless submission to a world that didn’t care about him, really, at all. And he’d done what he was supposed to do, subverting the expectations of his poverty, putting up with the abuse, earning his place in the world, and he was glad of it, but this—

This was entirely his choice.

He would be doing this for himself.

Black-and-white—morality, duty, sporting events with clear rules, things he should and shouldn’t do.

Or full fucking color.

He jumped—he chose—he fell.

He brought Theo coffee every morning for a week and a day.

And on that next Friday night, when he danced with this man—so stunning, so damaged, just as hungry and broken as he was—Theo leaned over and said:

“Save yourself a walk tomorrow.”

He pulled Jack close and bit his neck and held him as he nearly fell apart.

“Come home with me.”

It was an easy decision, despite this betrayal of Meg and home and everything he was supposed to be, and he finally got to see, got to feel—

Theo in the glow of streetlights as they stumbled up the hill—Theo, as he pushed him against a stone wall and thrust their hips together—Theo, and the way he took off his clothes, practiced and perfect and unaccountably nervous—

The chirping of birds and the way he rolled his eyes and muttered, “Fucking Cathal.”

The sound of the record player, skipping, and an old LP, David Bowie’s Low.

A spliff and its thick smoke, the way the night blurred around the edges, the way it was impossibly searing when he wrapped his lips around Theo for the first time, and how Theo gently fucked his face and he choked and it was exactly right, exactly what he—

And lubing up his fingers, pushing them into impossibly tight heat, watching Theo throw his head back onto his lumpy pillows, finding that spot that made him shiver and cry out and clutch at his hand and demand in that cultured but newly shattered Beaumont tone, “Get in me, Jesus fuck, Jack, just—”

Pouring himself into that heat, every inch of him, and how was it possible with that slender body with the silvery scar on his lip and the blackened tattoo and God, no one told him it could feel like this—