He couldn’t be like this.

There were things in his past which he had chosen to forget, as if they had never happened. If he tried, he could dredge them up, heart pounding, but he knew that those memories were locked away for a reason. He didn’t need them, couldn’t focus on them. Those things were in his way. He protected himself.

And so this—the way he felt about Theo—would have to be another thing which he partitioned off. A splitting. Another thing he would have to live with, which he would silence.

Sometimes, here at school, when he was working hard and struggling for the best grades and kissing Meg, he would shove every bad thing into the cold bedroom where he’d grown up, a corner of his mind he could ignore. The bad things were there, waiting for him, but for nine months he put them away. He needed to put—put Theo and his tears on his neck into that cold and forgotten room. A place he never wanted to go.

Soft footfalls, a gentle rustling, to his right. He kept his eyes closed. He smelled the wind.

He turned his head in the grass.

He was dazzled.

Theo stood thirty feet away, maybe, and his eyes scanned the horizon. There was still the shadow of a bandage on his lip, his face like an ancient statue worn harsh by time. His hair reflected the afternoon light like silver needles, glinting. All of that pale skin shone, polished white granite with flecks of some reflective mineral. He looked like he could unwind, unspool, fly away.

He looked so terribly lonely.

Jack didn’t know—couldn’t tell if Theo had seen him. The grass was long, his body cocooned in blue-green. He wanted to look away, to close his eyes, to hide further. But he was drawn to this moment of Theo in isolation, unaware. Maybe thinking that he was unwatched.

Bury it. Bury it, Jack.

But he couldn’t. He felt that native thing low in him. The hunger. He didn’t know who he could be without that hunger. Without hating Theo. Without wanting—

Here, watching him, Jack could almost feel that wiry body against his chest, the hand on his throat, the wetness. Theo fell into the grass, so graceful even as he was damaged, sat with his head in his hands. His hair a curtain across that honed face.

Jack wanted to hollow himself out, carve away those bad things in the bedroom, and he wanted to wedge Theo inside of him like a thing he couldn’t keep. He wanted him against his bruised knuckles, he wanted him under his tongue, he wanted to kiss him and hit him and ask, why, why?

He imagined getting up, bare-chested, walking over, sitting next to him, knees against knees; he imagined ripping off the bandage, regarding what he did, trying to see if it would scar. Holding him down; being held.