The tension in Shaw’s voice was enough to wind North like a clock-spring, but there was something else too. Something North couldn’t quite recognize. So he played it cool. That was always the way to play it with Shaw: cool, and let him talk it out. Let him process it, North thought with an inner smile.

“Have you ever heard,” Shaw began, and then he rubbed his face again and spoke into the glass, his reflection just a shimmer of heat. “Have you ever heard that Regina likes to go after virgins?”

It was one sentence. One simple sentence. But it was so much more than that. It was that tension in Shaw’s voice. It was that something else—embarrassment, North realized with a flash of clarity. It was the way Shaw wouldn’t look at him. It was the way the heat-shimmer ghost of his reflection looked ready to cry.

All of a sudden, a hundred little mysteries laid themselves bare. All the nights in college when Shaw came home from dates early. All the boyfriends he dumped without explanation—or with explanations that didn’t make any sense. All the mornings after when Shaw looked a little too bushy-tailed, a little too chipper, in spite of his story of spending the night with a new guy.

And on the one hand, North wanted to laugh and say it was impossible because he knew Shaw had slept with guys. Only a few, sure, because Shaw liked to take his time, but North was sure he could name at least a few. But at the same time, there was a part of North’s brain that had always collected questions, gathered things that didn’t make sense, held them close as part of the eternal mystery that was Shaw Aldrich, and in light of this single moment, those questions unraveled.

Of course, North thought with an insight that cleaved him to the heart. Of course Shaw doesn’t know how every little thing he does only makes him so utterly fuckable. Of course he doesn’t because he’s never been fucked.

And that sounded so crude that it only doubled the pain of the insight, and North hated himself for it.

All of this happened in a millisecond.

Be careful. That was the next thought, and it came with the same gut-twisting fear that North had felt the first time he ever held a newborn. Be so very careful, he thought. The next few moments meant everything.

“Did Regina tell you that?”

“No.” The lie shone in the heat-shimmer reflection. “I’ve just heard it.”

“And you think maybe she was the one who—”

“No.” Shaw wiped at the glass; the sun backlit his hand. “I just think it’s a weird coincidence. Matty has this horrible experience with Mark, and then Regina—” The slip in the story was so minor that, if North hadn’t already caught the larger truth, he might have missed it. “Then I remembered this stuff with Regina.”

North chose his next words carefully. “Shaw, a blackmail scheme involving only virgins would be incredibly complicated and would only have limited targets.”