I crossed the distance, pulled my hands from my pockets, and wrapped my arms around him.
The second I did it, I knew it was a mistake. Troy had never been easy with contact, not with me. He'd spent most of his teenage years flinching away from anything I tried to initiate, making it clear that whatever we were to each other, physical affection wasn't part of the arrangement. But I couldn't take it back. My arms were already around him, one hand between his shoulder blades, the other at his lower back. He was solid under my grip and smelled like airports and stale coffee, and underneath all of it there was a scent that was just his, unchanged, the same as it had been when he was seventeen and came home bloodied from who knows where.
He froze. I felt it through every line of his body, that instant of total stillness while he decided whether to pull away or say something cutting or just stand there until I got the point.
Then, slowly, his arms came up and settled around my ribs. The grip wasn't tight and it wasn't comfortable, but it was there, and he didn't pull back, which was more than I'd expected from him.
We stood like that in the middle of the terminal, locked in an awkward and tense embrace that neither of us knew how to end gracefully. I could feel his heartbeat against my chest, faster than it should have been, and the small hitch in his breath before he steadied it back out.
I knew I needed to let go, needed to step back and defuse the moment before it turned into an exchange neither of us was ready to have. I held on for three more seconds anyway, feeling the weight of him, the solid fact of him standing here after six years of not knowing for certain if he was all right.
Then I made myself release him and stepped back. My hands fell to my sides and had nowhere useful to go.
Troy put a deliberate foot of space between us, and his expression locked down into a flatness I remembered well, everything readable behind it sealed off before I could catch a glimpse.
“Hey,” I said. A brilliant opening. Six years of separation and that's what I led with.
“Hey.” His voice was rougher than I remembered and pitched lower. “Thanks for the pickup.”
“Yeah. Of course.” I reached for his bag before he could argue about it and slung it over my shoulder. “Flight all right?”
“Long.” He glanced around the terminal like he was still casing it. “You didn't have to come yourself. Could've just sent a car.”
“I wanted to come.”
“Right.” The word landed flat, sitting somewhere between indifference and disbelief.
I let that sit. “Car's this way.”
He fell into step beside me with a careful distance between us, at least two feet, like he'd measured it and decided that was the minimum he could get away with and still look like he wasn't making a point. We walked in silence through the terminal, down the escalators, through the sliding doors, and out into the parking garage that smelled like exhaust and raw concrete. Snow had started while I'd been inside, light but steady, dusting the cars and turning the pavement slick. My truck was on the third level, covered in road salt and a thin skim of fresh powder.
I unlocked it, tossed his bag in the back, and climbed into the driver's seat. Troy got in beside me, pulled the door shut, and immediately turned his attention to his seatbelt like it was the most complicated mechanism he'd encountered in years. Snow melted off his boots onto the floor mats and left dark wet patches on the rubber.
I started the engine, cranked the heat, and pulled out of the spot. The wipers scraped across the windshield as I navigated toward the exit ramp. The silence in the cab got heavier with each floor we descended.
Keep it casual. Keep it light. The plan was gone but I could still hold the basic shape of it. Just act normal, whatever normal was supposed to look like when the person you'd spent six years trying not to think about was sitting two feet away from you.
“You look different,” Troy said.
I glanced over. He was watching the windshield, tracking the wipers, but I could see the set of his jaw and the way his hands had locked around his knees.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He looked at me then, eyes moving across my shoulders and arms and the way my shirt pulled across my chestin a way I pretended not to notice. “What the fuck have you been doing to yourself?”
“Working out.”
“That's not just working out. You look like you've been sleeping in the gym.”
“Maybe I have.”
That landed and he let it sit, which told me he'd caught the weight behind it. He turned back to the windshield. “Still got the same truck.”
“Runs fine.”
“Yeah, that's you all over.” There was an edge under it that he wasn't bothering to hide. “If it works, don't change it.”
“That a problem?”
