He thought about Meg. How much he loved her. But he couldn’t look away—couldn’t see anything but grass and sky and Theo, that boy, that person, an avatar of the things in that room, deadly, desired, despised for the way he made him weak.

He wanted him more than he wanted food.

He wanted him, in that moment, more than he wanted family.

He did close his eyes then, against that shocking pain. The person he couldn’t let himself be.

In that dark corner of his mind, he opened the door of his bedroom.

Theo made a sound. Jack chose not to notice the quality of that sound.

The early-summer wind smelled like vanilla and gin, botanical and sweet.

Jack was hungry.

He locked it away.

And even though he did get to have Theo—even though they’d had those months together, even though he did love him, had always—

He had still been that boy, so scared, so hungry, even as he’d sworn that he was Theo’s, and Theo’s alone.

And now he had this apartment and he had been so wrong for so long. He had built his life on that wrongness. He had thought he could be happy in this lie.

He wasn’t ready to move in yet, delaying. He wanted more time before everything was irrevocably changed, and he and Meg hadn’t—

A jolt of anxiety. There was a lot that he and Meg still needed to work out.

A lot that he still needed to do.

He pulled his phone from his back pocket, a tighter fit in these new snug jeans, and cradled it in his hand. Knowing what he wanted to do; scared to do it. He scrolled through his contacts, fingers hovering over a name he’d breathed into his pillow every night for over half of his life.

He didn’t know what to say.

He typed out, Hey, and hit send with a jolt of apprehension and desire. Stuffed his phone back into his pocket, because he knew that if he didn’t, he would stare at the phone with too much anxiety, waiting and hoping and longing. He felt like a teenager. Maybe, in trying so hard to grow up in an acceptable way, he never grew up at all.

He took one last look around the apartment, his back pocket ticking like a bomb, and he thought about this new story which might end up being more than a lie.

He went back home—to Meg’s home—and smiled and kissed Amy’s cheek and let himself tell a lie for just a little while longer. And he waited for his phone to ring.

Kissing was—it was intimate.

For that first month, Jack hadn’t really noticed that they didn’t kiss. Kissing Meg had been—it was warm, comfortable, a natural extension of their friendship, and he had never been really bothered about it. It hadn’t been underwhelming, exactly, but it also hadn’t seemed too terribly important. Meg liked kissing, and so he kissed her. He wanted to make her happy, after everything she had done for him.