He hadn’t seen CJ since they’d been, what, twenty years old and on top of the world? For one thing, he’d not come home often, and for another, CJ had left Wildstone for a while too. They needed to talk, but knowing what a prick he’d been, he’d felt uneasy and awkward about doing so.

Vaguely, he realized Piper had made some excuse to leave them alone and was gone. CJ still stood in the doorway, looking neither uneasy nor awkward.

Made sense. Gavin had been the one to screw up. He’d made a lot of mistakes, and he was here to own them. But as it turns out, saying that to himself and actually doing it were two very different things. “Are you hungry?” he heard himself ask. “I’ve got breakfast. Well, minus the toast. There’s more than enough. I could make you a plate—”

CJ was already shaking his head and turning away, without a single word to the guy he’d once claimed to love, and Gavin died a little inside.

“Ceej.”

He stopped but didn’t turn back. Tall, leanly muscled, tan on top of his Puerto Rican coloring, all of it stealing Gavin’s breath.

“I’m . . . sorry,” he said.

That got CJ to turn around, his dark gaze looking . . . haunted and sad, which didn’t match his carefully distant tone. “For?”

Okay, so he was going to make Gavin say it. Fair. “For leaving. For staying gone. For not returning texts or calls. Pick one. Or don’t. Whatever, it’s your choice.”

CJ took that in a moment. “When I say whatever, I really mean screw you.”

“Sometimes me too,” Gavin said, relieved because they were at least talking. “But right now it means I really am sorry, and I don’t know how to make you believe that.”

“That’s because I don’t give a flying fuck.”

But see, that had to be a lie, because CJ always gave a flying fuck, about everything, and it was that, the sarcasm and lie combined, that gave Gavin his first little bubble of hope since the day he’d left rehab. “Okay,” he said, nodding. “Understood. But you used to give a whole bunch of fucks, at least about my homemade breakfasts, and I have to tell you, I’ve only gotten better.”

CJ’s gaze slid past him to the stove, and Gavin bit back a smile. Gotcha. “I can hear your stomach growling from here,” he said softly.

“That’s because I’m just coming off a twelve-hour shift.”