It had been so long.

That was the thought that came through most clearly. It had been so long since Carl. It had been seven years. Seven years, and in those seven years, Shaw had kept the world at a distance. Part of it was the trauma; Shaw knew that much. But a part of it had been North. Tonight, staring up at the ceiling, he could admit that much. He could admit how long he had carried on this stupid crush. He could admit how very stupid this crush had been all along. Because North might tolerate him. On good days, North might actually enjoy being his friend. But North didn’t care about him, didn’t have feelings for him, didn’t love him. For a moment, Shaw was back in the April night, staring into the yellow glare of the windows, listening to the soft pop of the leather strap. If North had trusted Shaw, he would have told him what was happening. He would have asked for Shaw’s help. Instead—instead, North had lied . . . and lied . . . and lied.

What hurt most was letting go of the dream—the fantasy, Shaw corrected—that some day, it would be North who helped Shaw over that Berlin Wall of hangups. What hurt most was letting go of a collection of imagined moments, tiny dream-shards that Shaw had gathered waking and sleeping, that he had composed into a fantasy of the night that North finally made love to him. The roughness of North’s hands on his skin. The smell of North’s hair. The feel of his tongue low on Shaw’s belly. The incredible gentleness with which North would have taken Shaw. That gentleness was really the hallmark of North McKinney—not the blue-collar show he put on, not the teasing and joking, not even the intelligence he tried to hide. His gentleness.

For a moment, Shaw put all the pieces together and let himself drift in the fantasy. He had never really allowed himself to do this before. Those dream-shards would come to him in the middle of something else—while he was filing paperwork, and then the sudden clarity in his mind of what it would feel like to have North’s hands run up the inside of his thighs—and Shaw would always squirrel the thought away. It was dangerous, thinking things like that. And inappropriate because he knew, or he thought he knew, that North was happily married, that nothing would ever really happen between them. In part, that had been what made North the perfect choice for Shaw’s dreams. Not because North was gentle—even though he was—or because Shaw could trust North—even though he could—but because North was fundamentally inaccessible. And so he was perfectly, totally safe because he would never happen.

Shaw wedged his bare feet under the knotted sheets. He stared up at the ceiling. He was looking past the ceiling. Looking at himself, he realized for the first time, that North McKinney was never going to gently ravish him, get him past the hangup of being a twenty-six-year-old virgin with an ugly scar on his balls. He was realizing that part of him had always known this. He was realizing that North McKinney couldn’t rescue him from his virginity the way he had rescued Shaw from his apartment and the dishwater light and the days when Shaw couldn’t bring himself to walk as far as the front door. He was realizing that part of him had wanted the safety of never having to take any risks, and so it had been easy to go on dates, easy to fend off others’ advances, easy to lie—even if the lies had been unspoken.