For so long he’d thought—told himself—that what he missed was the sex. He could, for the most part, get through what he’d needed to do with Alexia, closing his eyes or looking over her shoulder, and it was—it was all right. But he did long for it, a broader body, muscle and sinew and stubble on cheeks, heat pooling in his gut as he imagined taking a man into him again. He had thought so many times—despite his recent refusal to act on those thoughts—about going out and finding someone else, if only for a night. And Lexi had even, after one miserable attempt to conceive when he couldn’t pretend for one more moment, told him that she would be fine with that, that she would still care for him, but...

It wasn’t the sex. Sex was just sex.

He missed being in love. He wished he had never learned how.

So it got pushed down and locked up and bound with silken rope and he never, ever wanted to look at it again.

And then he saw Jack. And he knew those feelings had never gone away.

He pushed away his dinner, barely touched. And who the hell cared if he ate enough?

Nothing would ever be enough. Not food, not money, not booze. Nothing would fill him. Why bother?

He put his head in his hands, fingers digging into his scalp, and tried to put it all away. He should have known how to do this by now. He’d been doing it for almost twenty years.

He let himself regard one last image, like limoncello crème brûlée after an exquisite meal—firelight on Jack’s golden skin, glinting in the silver threads in his hair, as he lowered himself and lined them up and kissed him as if they had been doing it their whole lives.

He couldn’t respond to Jack’s text, he couldn’t, because—all he could think about was the way it should have been, snapshots of a life, Jack kissing the back of his neck, laughing, teasing, and Theo telling him to shut up in the way that meant I love you. So many images he held up in his mind like gold-leaf iconography. His mouth watered at the picture of them, two fragmented people, made whole, and he let that picture burn through him like a bonfire in his head.

And then he let the image go.

At least for now. Until he couldn’t stop the conflagration of what he wanted from destroying him again.

“If you put more chocolate Hobnobs in that basket, I will, in fact, murder you.”

Jack laughed at him, hand halfway in the basket. He dropped them in with a grin. “Will you?”

“Well,” Theo tossed back a bit of his fringe that was hanging in front of his eyes, “Maybe not murder. Maybe just withhold sex.”