Jeremy looks at him with his brow furrowed and his lips pressed in a hard line. A puff of air escapes through his lips as he lets out an audible sigh. “What are you doing down here?”
Stopping a few feet from him, Sergio brings his hands to his mouth and cups them before he blows into them again. “I came to talk to you.”
Jeremy rolls his eyes and turns his focus back to looking between the trees. “About what?”
“About last night,” Sergio says as gently as he can. This is rapidly not going as well as he had envisioned. Where’s the gracious Jeremy of the days he spent kissing him? The Jeremy who smiles at his charms. The Jeremy who lets his guard down. The Jeremy who would have been possibly more amenable to the idea of Sergio tearing his clothes off and ravishing them both to orgasm.
Jeremy takes a sip of his drink. Apple and cinnamon tea by the smell of it. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, and takes another sip, still not looking at Sergio.
Damn it, this is not going well.Where’s Henry when I need him?He begins to panic and changes the subject. “I hear you’re skating again,” he tries, hoping that acknowledging something Jeremy loves will bear better fruit.
“And you care about that? Why?”
“I … I guess I would … I imagine it’s freeing for you to skate again.”
Jeremy turns his head to look at Sergio again and takes another sip of his tea. “Freeing from what? Failure? Disappointment? My life as everybody’s pet pity project?”
“No.” Sergio hangs his head and rubs his temples. “Why is this going so badly?” He looks back up at Jeremy. “You’re not understanding me.”
“Oh, I’m understanding you perfectly well.” Jeremy takes another sip. “You thought you could come down here and butter me up by showing some faux sympathy. But I don’t need your sympathy, Sergio. Nor do I want it.”
Sergio looks around, stunned. “That’s … that’s not what I was doing at all. I really only came down here to apologize and see if you wanted to spend the day with me or something.”
“And why would I want to do that? You think I want to get tangled up withyouagain? So you can ditch me the moment things are out of your control?”
Sergio, looking back at the successful days he’s had with Jeremy, nods.
Jeremy takes one last gulp of his tea, emptying the contents of his mug into his mouth, then swallows thickly. Staring right at Sergio, an eyebrow raised in a manner frighteningly similar to Rose, he says, “Look, you’re hot and, in the past, you have shown rare signs of being a human being capable of caring about somebody else. However, until I see that more sincerely from you, we’re not spending any more time together than we have to.” He pauses, tugs the corner of his left eye, and stares at Sergio. And now it’s Sergio’s turn to swallow. His pride slides down his throat like a frozen, jagged rock. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get ready for Allison’s practice. Enjoy your day, Sergio.”
Mouth agape, Sergio watches Jeremy turn around, open the barn door, and disappear behind it before it shuts with a slam.
“What the fuck was that?” Sergio asks no one, then turns and walks back up to the house with his tail between his legs. How did everything go so wrong so quickly? He can get it right in the afternoon. Maybe Jeremy isn’t a morning person. Maybe Sergio chose the wrong outfit, even though this one works fine in the afternoon. Who the fuck knows?
Or maybe, what works in the afternoon is that Sergio comes to Jeremy at a moment when both of their guards are down. Henry is always there, which brings out Sergio’s softer side. Jeremy is on the ice, and though that is his element, having an audience at this point in his relationship with figure skating is not somethingto which he is accustomed. And both of them, always in that moment with one of their metaphorical walls broken down, are able to see each other more clearly.
This morning, it was right back to Sergio feeling cocky after a few solid days of success and Jeremy feeling exhausted by the arrival of the man who has managed at every turn—as far as his memory and knowledge of their history goes—to disappoint him.Fuck,Sergio curses his damn ego.
“Well, look who decided he wanted breakfast after all!” Holden exclaims around a mouth full of pancakes as Sergio enters the kitchen through the back door.
“Jeremy didn’t want brunch, did he?” Henry says from his chair.
“No. No, he didn’t,” Sergio says and takes a seat, and then pours himself the last of the coffee.
“That’s because Jeremy Owens is smart,” Rose says over the brim of her own mug, with her eyebrow raised.
“Yeah,” Sergio says, defeated, and avoiding everyone’s eyes on him at the table.
Holden claps him on the shoulder with one hand and shovels more food into his mouth with his other. “Don’t worry, Sergio. You’re smart, too.”
“Smarter than a bag of hair,” Adrien adds, then takes a sip of his coffee.
Sergio sighs and loads a plate up with a small amount of food, wondering how and why this day always seems to devolve into pick-on-Sergio day. He supposes that maybe he deserves it. And also supposes that tomorrow he’d be better off going back to what he knows works instead of trying to reinvent the hamster wheel he’s on.
But since he’s here, and he’s feeling pretty shitty, a thought crosses his mind. There’s another way he can release some of this tension in his body. Another way he can get a jolt ofadrenaline and serotonin. Something he can do with Holden and Adrien that will bring them all together, even if it is only for one day, the other two will forget. But he’ll have it, and maybe if he can get past the guilt of that, it will be enough to get him through these repeated failures.
“Hey, Holden,” he says. Holden turns to look at him and gives him a goofy grin while he chews his food. “You got any helicopter hookups around here?”
Holden’s grin seamlessly morphs from goofy to serious. He wipes his mouth with his napkin, then places it onto the table. “Heli trip?”
