“He’s a prick. What’s yours like?”
Heath’s hands stopped moving. “My dad’s been gone for many years, but he was… you know, I’m never sure how to answer that, because my mother says I’m his carbon copy. I thought he was really great, but?—”
“But then you’d sound like an egotistical asshole?”
A puff of laughter danced across Evan’s back, raising the fine hairs on his neck.
“Something like that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a little ego.”
“I suppose you’d be the authority there.”
Evan let his head fall forward, his smile too huge to hold up. Damn, but he really liked this guy. He’d never had a sparring partner who didn’t go for the low blow when things got heated.
He’d also put zero thought into the double meaning potential of that sentence, but now he couldn’t think of anythingelse. Maybe spending more time in the sun had been a bad idea.
“I’m sorry about your dad, Heath.”
“I’m sorry about yours, too. Evan.”
“I’m also sorry about what I said earlier. About the Spencers.”
Silence fell and lingered. The rhythm of Heath’s breathing synced with the waves below, and Evan matched it without effort. His hands remained at rest, fingers loose and relaxed, the pads of his thumbs pressed into the divots on either side of Evan’s tailbone.
An electric current ran through his body, putting every muscle on high alert. He wasn’t even sure what he was waiting for, but the suspense was excruciating.
“We should probably get back.”
The hands disappeared, and God help him, but he whined at the loss. If Heath noticed, he said nothing, which was probably for the best.
No, it’s definitely for the best, because what the hell, man?
“I’ll be right behind you. Wanna chill a little longer.”
He kept his back to the trail, but heard Heath’s grunt of acceptance and the crunch of his feet in the dry earth as he went back down the hill.
He’d been wrong. The existential crisis wasn’t imminent; it was ongoing. Their strange energy and his sidetracked emotions might not have been enough to clue him in, but the unmistakable hard-on now raging in his pants absolutely was.
seventeen
. . .
Descending the hill took far longer than climbing it had, both because the slippery little stones were insidious and his motivation to put distance between himself and Evan was now lacking.
The look on Evan’s face when Nate had asked him to bring the boat toward shore had reminded Heath of the kids he knew who had less than ideal lives outside of school. The grey pallor and vacant eyes. His shaking hands as he’d grasped the wheel. What had caused the impossibly confident Evan Westin to shrink from something as mundane as pointing the front of a sailboat into a wide-open channel?
Not that he believed he could do better. His affection for sailors didn’t mean he made a good one. It just felt like something Evan would be alllaissez-faireabout. And just like that, the barbed wire atop the fence keeping his empathy at bay had rusted to powder, swinging his gates wide open.
“This changes nothing,” he muttered, cursing as his foot slipped for the umpteenth time. “The man has no interest in what you’re offering, and you will not be making an ass of yourself in front of all these people.”
“Who are you talking to?”
Heath leaped straight out of his skin as Evan caught up to him and easily kept pace.
“Myself, and I’ll thank you not to eavesdrop.”
“Don’t talk so loud then.”
