“Not always soft,” Parker murmurs lowly before crawling down my body to take me apart.
+
A gentle knock at the door wakes me up from a deep sleep. Parker is still sound asleep on his side of the bed.His side. My brain does a little happy dance at the idea of that before remembering someone at the door woke me. I maneuver myself out of the bed as best I can without disturbing Parker.
Hayden stands at the door, illuminated only by the nightlight in the hallway. His breaths are coming heavy and his eyes are haunted.
“Hayden?”
Hayden lifts his hand to clutch at his chest. “I can’tbreathe.”
“Come here,” I murmur, opening the door until Hayden gets the clue to walk through. Parker stays asleep despite the clumsy steps Hayden takes into the room. I scurry into thebathroom, rifling through my cabinets until I find one of my emergency antianxiety meds. Is this legal? No, but Hayden is hurting, and he won’t help himself, and it looks like I’m the one who is going to end up ensuring all of these guys don’t fall apart at the seams mentally.
Hayden collapses onto the floor of the bathroom beside me, eyelashes wet with tears, chest moving rapidly in the way I know intimately—his brain is telling him too many things at once.
I tip out two pills and fill a glass with water, then kneel beside him. “Take them.”
Hayden does it without any further prompting. I sit beside him on the bathroom floor, only the darkness and the quiet between us, until Hayden’s breathing slows and he tips his head back against the wall.
“I’ve failed them all,” Hayden whispers brokenly.
“How so?”
Hayden shakes his head. “I’ve known for a while. Robin isn’toneperson, but many. I figured it out one day, you see, when the emails started to look different. One formats with a size smaller text, the other likes to use hyphens for no discriminate reason. I don’t think Robin is bad, but I’m starting to think…” Hayden tilts his head to the side to pierce me with another haunted look. “I’m not sure what we’re fighting for anymore. And Jacob… Jake…”
“Yeah,” I urge him.
“I won’t let anyone make Jake the fall guy. Anyone else but him.”
“Why?”
Hayden snorts. “Oh, Mason, you’re smarter than that. If you have to ask, you haven’t been paying attention.”
He’s right, but I think he needs to say it, instead of me guessing. “Maybe you’ll feel better saying it out loud.”
“No,” Hayden firmly denies, sounding more tired as the moment goes on. “Jacob can’t love someone like me, no one can.”
“Why?”
Hayden lets out a pained puff of air. “Nobody can love me. I killed my own brother.”
The air grows thick with tension, then immediately falls as Hayden slumps in exhaustion against the wall, effectively knocked out. It’s at that moment that a sleepy Parker pushes through the bathroom door, hand rubbing his slightly stubbled cheek.
“Oh,” Parker says in shock.
“He had a panic attack,” I tell him.
Parker wakes up immediately at my words. “Hayden did?”
“Let’s get him into our bed.”
Parker and I work together to get Hayden up, but maneuvering a large Greek god into the bed isn’t easy, despite our own size. But we get him into the center of the bed, both of us lying down beside him, our hands tangled over Hayden’s body.
“He told me something,” I whisper into the room.
Parker closes his eyes. “Keep it between you two. He wouldn’t want me to know. If he wanted me to know… I’d know already.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
