He was right. I should have just said hello like a normal person instead of hovering there while jealousy did something ugly to my chest.
“Morning,” I said.
It came out flat and a full five minutes late. Troy stared at me for a second.
“That's what you've got.”
“It's what I've got.”
“That's genuinely terrible.” But his mouth was doing the thing it did when he was trying not to find something funny. “Little late now.”
“Better late than never.”
“That's what people say when they've fucked up and want credit for eventually acknowledging it.”
“Sounds about right.”
He did smile at that, brief and real, and I felt the same irrational satisfaction I'd felt when I'd made him laugh in the pool. Which was its own kind of problem.
We walked the rest of the way home without talking much, just the occasional comment about the weather or the neighborhood or nothing in particular. When we got back to the house, Troy headed inside first and I stayed on the porch for a minute with my coffee cooling in my hand, trying to sort through what had just happened.
I'd been jealous. That was the plain truth of it. Not because Troy belonged to me or because I had any right to what I was feeling. Just because I'd wanted something from him that I had no business wanting, and watching someone else get it without even trying had made something in me go sideways.
I'd wanted his smile. His ease. The version of himself he handed out to strangers without a second thought but kept locked away from me behind six years of distance and everything we hadn't said to each other.
That was the thing I couldn't fix with discipline or distance. It wasn't about controlling what I noticed. It was about the fact that I'd already noticed, and now I couldn't un-know the shape of it.
I finished the coffee and went inside.
SEVEN
CITY OF TEETH
TROY
Every time I turned around this house, there he was. Shirtless in the kitchen making coffee. Sweaty from the gym, tattoos on display, looking like some kind of weapon wrapped in skin. Sitting on the couch in low-slung sweats that should be illegal, watching TV like he wasn't aware of what he was doing to me.
It felt like walking on a minefield and I was losing my fucking mind.
And this morning wasn't helping.
The shower was running. Normal morning routine that shouldn't have registered as anything except Declan getting ready for the day.
Then I heard it. A low and guttural sound, muffled by water and walls but unmistakable. A groan that went straight to my cock like I'd been shocked.
Declan was in the shower jerking off, and I could hear him through the goddamn walls.
Headphones. Getting out of the house. Any one of a dozen things that would have put distance between me and whatever sounds he was making on the other side of that wall. I'd had options and I'd burned every one of them by just lying there, and now my own body was responding like it had stopped taking orders from anyone with half a brain.
Another groan. Deeper this time. Followed by a sound that might have been my name or might have been nothing and I was too fucked up to tell the difference anymore.
My hand was on my cock before I could stop myself. Squeezing through my boxers, trying to take the edge off, trying to make this stop being a reality I was living in.
But it didn't stop. Just got worse. Because now I was lying there hard and aching, listening to Declan get himself off down the hall, and my brain was supplying images I had no business imagining. His hand wrapped around his cock. His head tipped back under the spray. The water running over all that tattooed skin I'd been trying not to stare at for days.
I shoved my hand away from my dick like it had burned me. Rolled out of bed. Grabbed clothes without looking at them and got dressed fast enough that thinking wasn't an option.
The shower shut off. I heard movement in the bathroom. Heard the door open.
