Teddy desperately wanted to cup his cheeks and swipe the wetness away, one, and then the other. But he couldn’t. “We just found each other again. I don’t…I don’t want to lose you from my life again.”
“They’re punishing us. And you’re letting them,” Wren said flatly.
“Better torture than death. If they rip you away again it’ll kill me, Wren. And they will. Kellan already knows. He holds all the cards. He’s giving us one chance.”
I can’t let him hurt you.
Wren screwed up his face, then pushed past him and out of the house.
“Wren!” Teddy called after him, but he knew he wouldn’t stop.
Teddy let his own tears fall.
Chapter 11
Wren
“You should tell them,” someone’s hands signed in front of his eyes, and he snapped his head up only to be met with shiny leather and even shinier jewelry that looked completely out of place in the tiny kids’ playground Wren had run to.
“Midas,” Wren signed, frowning. “What are you doing here?”
“I was in the neighborhood,” Midas said, leaning against the railing of the slide stairs Wren was sitting on and glancing down at him. “Thought I’d say hi.”
“I call bullshit.” Wren narrowed his eyes. “You don’t just say hi randomly.”
“I could. You don’t know me.”
“I literally know you better than anyone else. You don’t just drop by, and there is no way you were just around here when this isn’t even our territory.”
“Fine!” Midas rolled his eyes. “A little birdie found me and insisted I follow. Makes sense you’d find the only green surface that isn’t a posh golf course to sulk in.”
Wren gasped and turned his head to look at Blu, who very pointedly turned away, looking behind himself as if helping Wren locate whoever had dared to say such a thing.
“Cute,” Wren muttered. “Ineffective, but cute.”
Blu chirped and flapped a wing at him before flying off, not a care in the world.
“What’s happening?” Midas asked.
Wren shook his head. “Nothing. I have no idea why he’d track you down. I’m fine.”
“Clearly,” Midas said. “Yeah, no, you look absolutely perfect.”
“Shut up,” Wren said, kicking Midas in the shin with the toe of his ripped-up sneaker. He leaned back on his palms and looked up into Midas’s eyes before speaking out loud so he could read his lips.
“Nothing’s changed,” he said without looking away. Trying to emphasize the gravity of it. A decade of divide and they were still exactly where they’d been before. Adults now. With jobs and the type of freedom they didn’t have before, and yet none of it mattered.
He swallowed heavily and closed his eyes to shake his head. Saying it out loud made it seem like he was accepting it. The rejection. The denial. The impossibility of them.
And he wasn’t.
He didn’t want to.
It just…it felt like he had to and he hated being told he had to do something he didn’t feel like doing. Something that felt so fucking wrong.
“What hasn’t?” Midas asked when he opened his eyes again.
Wren shrugged. “Us. Him. Them.”
