His body registered it before his brain did.
He set the glass down carefully and looked up.
Tommy stood just inside the entrance, cheeks slightly flushed from the cold, dark hair pushed back from the wind, already smiling at something Chase’s mother was saying.
Logan stood beside him, broad and unhurried, one hand finding the small of Tommy’s back with the ease of long habit.
They looked good together.
Not in the performed, curated way of couples who needed people to notice. In the quiet way of people who had stopped needing to prove anything to anyone, including themselves.
Something in Chase’s chest tightened.
He stepped back before either of them could see him.
Not retreating.
Just giving himself a second.
Okay,he thought.You’re staying.
He already knew that. He’d known it when he hung his jacket back on the hook. He just hadn’t admitted what it meant until this exact second, watching Tommy smile in his mother’s foyer and feeling the thing in his chest that had no useful name.
He waited until they’d made it through the entrance conversation, until his mother had kissed Logan’s cheek and pointed them toward the food, until Tommy’s eyes had started their automatic, restless scan of the room.
Then Chase stepped back into the hall.
And Tommy’s gaze found him across the crowd like it had been looking all along.
Chapter Seven
Tommy
Tommy almost didn’t get out of the car.
The engine had been off long enough for the warmth to start fading, the windshield fogging faintly where his breath kept hitting the glass. The house sat at the end of the driveway exactly the way it always had , white siding, string lights along the porch railing, cars lining the street like the neighborhood itself had been invited.
He’d been here a hundred times.
Backyard barbecues. Holiday parties. Birthday dinners that stretched long enough for the adults to forget kids were still awake.
So why did it feel like he was walking into a version of his life he wasn’t ready to explain?
He stared at the front door.
Logan’s hand rested on his thigh, warm and steady, not squeezing, not asking. Just there.
“You good?” Logan asked quietly.
Tommy dragged in a breath.
“Yeah,” he said.
It came out a little too fast.
Logan didn’t call him on it. He never did. He just watched Tommy the way he always did , like he was listening for the thing underneath the words.
Tommy’s fingers worried at the seam of his jacket.
