He snorted, stood up, stretched. Shuffled back to the couch. Listened to her footsteps on the stairs. And then he pulled out his phone. Stared at it. Put it down. Picked it up. He thought about how brave his wife—his truest friend—was, trying to figure out a new life which might thrive in the absence of all the things they had built. And he knew he couldn’t live as such a damned coward anymore.

He wrote the most clumsy, useless, two-in-the-morning email to the other person he had realized he could not live without.

He woke again, two hours later, with that hand reaching.

“What the fuck was that?”

Jack’s hands damn near vibrated with anger. He wanted to use them.

He threw down his battered lacrosse pads, walking with violent purpose across the locker room. Theo sat on a bench, shoulders slumped, and the room was full of steam, the smell of grass and dirt, the departing laughter of other boys. He was stripped down to his shorts, pads and jersey in a heap next to him, and his cleats were thick with mud.

Jack wiped his face, sweat dripping from his messy black hair. Blood trailed down his leg from a long scrape—Theo had nearly knocked his knees out from under him, the head of his stick slicing against Jack’s shin.

“Go away, Gardner.” His voice was dull as it echoed against cold tile.

“Fuck off.”

Theo laughed, a little, but not like anything was funny. “Yes, that. Do that.”

“What the hell were you trying to do out there?”

Theo closed his eyes, leaned back against the cinderblock wall. “Play lacrosse, Gardner. Surely you’re not too stupid to figure that out.” At Jack’s disgusted noise, he smiled, nasty. “But I could be wrong about that.”

Jack moved in front of him, standing barely a foot away, crowding into his space. Everything was hot around them, and charged like lightning, and he had never wanted to hurt someone as much as he did in this moment, because—

It wasn’t just that he played dirty, too rough. Theo was such a bastard about everything, so good-looking and cultured and—and God, Jack hated him so much, and his life was so perfect and spotless and easy, and Jack had to fight for every damn thing. And lacrosse was something he was good at, or supposed to be, and it just wasn’t fucking fair that Theo had to be better at that, too.

He wasn’t better. He was just cruel.

Jack’s mind flashed back to the look on Theo’s face in the bell tower, and he had not been cruel in that moment, no, but there was something...something too horribly dangerous in those silent seconds, and Jack hated himself too, his fear, his sudden awareness that—

“Stand up.” His voice low and rough like gravel.