“I do, you know.” He started speaking to Jack’s zipper, but looked up and met his too-blue eyes. “Owe you. I’m—I’m grateful.”

He lowered the zipper, pushed the jeans down, glad he’d adequately conveyed to Jack that boxers were a waste of time. He smelled so good, like dancing, like flying, like something both ancient and brand-new.

Like freedom.

Theo opened his mouth, licked delicately around the head, sucked, just a little, and pulled off. “Thank you.” Jack’s face looking down at him was so lovely, so serious... “Thank you for being here. With me.”

“Theo, I—” Jack wove his fingers through Theo’s golden hair, shaking.

“I thought—I thought I would always be alone, that no one could... Thank you for the gift of this life.” He tongued at the slit, held the base of Jack’s cock in a firm grip, and winked. “Now pull my hair and fuck my face, will you?”

Jack laughed, and maybe he was also crying a little, and he did pull his hair, and Theo took him down all the way, until Jack gave a choked moan and pushed him back—

“Fuck me.”

And Theo bent him over the sink, their flushed, damp faces panting in the mirror, Jack’s hair as black as soot, Theo’s silvery scar flushed and visible as he held himself against the wall, a permanent sign that Jack Gardner would always own him.

And when Theo came, he watched his own face as he whimpered out, still almost against his will, “God, I love you.”

Jack reached behind him, kept Theo buried deep, cried, came, and whispered back, flat, “Love you too, you asshole.”

Back at the apartment—as they cleaned themselves up, went back for drinks, for more dancing—a mouse skittered over paper, crumpled up and shoved under the bed. A bit of writing flashed in the shift of light. Dear Jack, it said, and there might have been other words, letters like D, maybe, or M—but the rest was hidden in shadow and ash.

Chapter Twenty-One

The long-awaited text had arrived first thing, Jack barely out of bed, still in soft flannel pajama bottoms and a threadbare T-shirt, items which had escaped the purging of his closet. Four words from Theo—and they sounded anything but cheerful, but Jack let himself, in this sleepy first hour of waking, imagine his smile.

He wrote back immediately, his answer guaranteed before he’d placed his fingers on the touch screen. Come over.