Tommy shifted closer, pressing his forehead briefly against Logan’s collarbone.
“And you?” he asked quietly. “Where are you in that?”
Logan didn’t look away.
“If this works,” he said evenly, “it won’t be because I tolerated it.”
Tommy waited.
“It’ll be because I chose it.”
The words settled between them, solid and unhurried.
Tommy leaned up and kissed him once, slow and steady, no performance in it.
Logan wrapped his arm around him automatically, pulling him closer.
When they got dressed later and stepped out into the day, Logan wasn’t walking toward a party that threatened what they had.
He was walking toward a possibility.
And he knew, in a way that felt steady rather than reckless, that if things shifted again, he would meet them head-on.
Not because he had to.
Because he wanted to.
Chapter Six
Chase
He almost left before they arrived.
That was the part Chase hadn’t planned for, standing in the front hallway with his jacket already on, keys turning slowly in his fingers, listening to the party noise build behind him like water rising in a room. He’d told himself he had a work thing. An early morning. A vague obligation that would satisfy his mother without requiring explanation.
He’d actually made it as far as the door.
Then he stopped.
Stood there for a moment with his hand on the handle and the cold air already seeping through the gap, and asked himself the question he’d been circling all week:
What are you actually afraid of?
Not Tommy. Not seeing him here, in the context of Christmas lights and family friends and thirty years of complicated history.
He was afraid of seeing Tommy and feeling nothing.
Of discovering the hotel had been adrenaline and coincidence and not the particular realignment it had felt like in the dark.
He was afraid it wouldn’t happen again.
Chase let go of the door handle.
Hung his jacket back on the hook.
Went upstairs to his old bedroom instead.
The room hadn’t changed much. His mother still treated it like a preserved exhibit , the same navy comforter stretched tight across the twin bed, the same oak desk beneath the window, the same faint indentation in the carpet where a weight bench had once lived.
