Jack felt like he nearly shouted, his voice was so rough. “I’ll email you?”

Theo paused, buttoning his slimming coat. “Yes. You will email me.”

He looked down at Jack, and for just a moment the facade cracked, and Jack could see the long shadows of his truest, worst mistake.

Theo’s voice was low, dangerous, and deadly serious. “I will never chase after you. I will never seek you out. If you want my time, you will work for it.”

Jack’s mouth was dry.

“Yeah, I.” He swallowed. “Of course.”

He watched Theo’s back, the slender lines of the coat, the perfectly hemmed trousers, the impeccable posture, the long fall of shining hair.

That didn’t go at all as he’d expected.

Jack was always letting Theo walk away. Making him walk away.

He didn’t want to do that anymore.

When his alarm went off, Jack burrowed his head farther into the down pillows and groaned. Why was he waking up this early?

He rolled over and stretched, lazy, down to his toes. Tired or not, he felt unusually fantastic. His whole body was relaxed like a spiral of honey off the comb, the bed so soft, his muscles slack. He had never felt like this.

Eyes still closed, he recalled flashes of abstract details from last night—the club, the courthouse, the grit of the stone behind him, and Theo’s hand. Theo’s mouth as it bit him and as his whole body released, as if he had been waiting his whole life for that sharp pain.

His eyes snapped open. Shame came in the wake of remembered pleasure.

He had really done that. After four years of struggling and hating and wanting, hungering, more than anything, and telling himself that it wasn’t true, it couldn’t be, and he had—

He thought about home, Dare and Quinn and, oh God, Meg—what would they think if they knew that the most pleasurable moment of his eighteen years was clutching at Theo in the dark, giving in? He and Meg, they weren’t—they were together, but not together, no real commitments, not sure where the next year would lead them, but—

What would they all think if they knew he—

A part of him that he had thought he had amputated wondered, what would his mother say?

He tried to think back to kissing Meg, winding his fingers through her dark red hair. He felt an echo of his lingering childhood love, like a sepia-toned photograph. Something precious but aged, like a snapshot in a family scrapbook.

But Theo—