Did it matter? The result was the same. Augustus would always and forever belong to someone else, and Blaze couldn’t sit still long enough to allow that level of connection.
Augustus stepped out and peered over the railing. The murky daylight reflected off the ship’s wake, and the air felt cooler this close to the water. “What’s changed?”
“They agreed to come on a rescue mission. This is no longer that.” Blaze faced him. “They came because I wanted to be here.”
His honesty cracked the ice beneath their feet.
Augustus lowered his gaze, heart thudding. They’d been sidestepping this moment, protected behind veils of fury and distraction. Selene. The war. The mission. Excuses collected behind thin walls.
Walls that were gone now.
Augustus let out a slow breath, steadying the tremor in his chest. “And now you don’t?”
Blaze’s voice dipped. “And now I see I was delusional at best…and a complete idiot at worst.”
He stepped in close, and Augustus turned into the smell of the man he once loved. Into the familiarity of leather and whiskey and just a hint of rosemary soap.
Blaze reached up and cupped the side of Augustus’s neck, thumb grazing his pulse. “Right?”
Love, history, memory…a noose. Augustus should have stepped away. Should’ve saidyes, ordon’t, orstop.
But he didn’t.
He couldn’t.
Gods, it’d been too long since someone touched him like this. Right or wrong, he needed…something. To feel…anything else. Just this once.
Blaze’s grip tightened, slow, possessive. Then he pulled him in.
Their mouths collided like the last gasp of a storm. Familiar. Practiced. Messy with desperation. Augustus closed his eyes and leaned into it, let it flood him, let it take the sharpest corners of his grief and sand them down.
The taste of buttery caramel swept across his tongue, and he kissed harder. He clutched at Blaze’s jaw, the scratch of stubble, the unforgiving angles of his face. Nothing soft. Nothing yielding. Just salt and heat and the memory of belonging.
He knew this body. These lips. The exact rhythm of this kiss. He knew the ache it left behind when it ended.
But—
This wasn’t right.
Not anymore.
Her name echoed through him like a prayer—his soul was already spoken for.
Augustus wrenched free. Their breath tangled. Their foreheads brushed, and he couldn’t let go.
This washisBlaze. His first if. His almost. His what-might-have-been.
Blaze kissed Augustus again, softer this time. Slower. “Thank you,” he whispered.
Augustus huffed a laugh, his voice thick. “Why exactly are you thanking me?”
Blaze stepped from his arms and tipped the last of his whiskey down his throat. “We never got a proper goodbye.”
“Whose fault is that?”
His smile faltered. “You could have come with me.”
Blaze always had an explorer’s spirit that a life at sea couldn’t quench; he’d known that. Augustus just didn’t think at the time Blaze would choose that life over him.
