How did he know?
Sacha knew the answer to that. Jonah Gray was observant. Empathetic. Kind. And he didn’t discriminate either, not like Sacha who picked and chose who to share his finite affection with.
Sacha stared at the stack of pizza boxes on the table. There were too many to count. “Take some for yourselves,” he told Samson and the janitor who’d staggered into the office with them.
“No need,” Samson replied cheerfully. “Mr. Gray always takes care of us.”
Always. Of course he did. Even the two nights they’d slept side by side, Jonah had regularly flailed a hand out in his sleep, resting it on Sacha’s chest a moment, as if checking his cynical heart was still beating.
Sacha smiled at the memory, the pills in his belly finally softening the sharp pain in his temple. He hadn’t noticed Jonah leaving the office the night of the pizza delivery, and the disappointment at knowing he’d missed him had been…disarming until Samson had arrived laden with boxes. A silly thing, really. A simple goodbye would’ve been more tangible, even snatched and stilted in front of an audience.
Nothing about how Jonah made Sacha feel was simple.
I like him.
But then, who didn’t? Sacha didn’t partake in office gossip, but he listened, and he’d heard enough to discern that Jonah’s FG employees adored him. That he was the sweetest, kindest boss he could be while running a fledgling advertising agency.
Sacha? He could clear a room with his glare and he liked it that way, but he couldn’t deny the spell Jonah had put on him too. Or how long the last three days had been without him, which made no sense at all considering he’d spent an entire lifetime without Jonah’s company, and only a handful of occasions with it.
You’re overtired. It makes you emotional.
God, Sacha was bored with that mantra, despite the fact that it was truer today than it had been since he’d stepped into the same broken lift as Jonah Gray.
Eventually, the storm in Sacha’s brain passed, muted enough by medication for him to ignore it and get on with his work. Another late night loomed ahead of him. After four hours of straight coding and all the bullshit snags that came with it, he finally opened his emails. Most were pertinent to the current project that was teetering on the edge of disaster. One was from his cousin letting him know Sacha’s father was unlikely to be alive by the end of the year.
Sacha deleted the email without reply, numbness creeping into the irritation he carried with him ninety percent of the time, unless he was with Jonah. Nausea returned. He pushed it down. Sacha reached for his phone and opened the message thread he had with Jonah. They hadn’t spoken since the exchange about Christmas, a conversation that Sacha had seemed to observe from afar, watching his fingers tap out messages he didn’t recognise as coming from his own brain.
The notion of accompanying Jonah to his family home for Christmas was preposterous, and yet…Sacha would go if Jonah wanted him to.
I wish he was here now.
The errant through caught Sacha off guard. He’d grown used to the yearning in his belly that deepened after every sexual encounter they shared, but the ache in his chest was new.
I don’t just want to fuck him.I want to—
Sacha’s phone buzzed.
JG:Are you awake?
Sacha typed an answer without thinking.
Sacha:Yes. Are you?
JG:It would be hard to send you this message if I wasn’t.
He had a point, but Sacha’s brain wasn’t working as well as it usually did. Fatigue and drug fog had seen to that.
Sacha:Okay. I will ask why you are awake instead. It is late.
JC:It’s early, actually. I just got up.
Sacha blinked and checked the time. Sure enough, it was four-thirty in the morning—an hour before he usually rose on a regular work day—and he’d missed his window to go to bed.
Sacha:Maybe it is late for me.
JC:You say strange things.
Sacha:I am okay with that.
