I looked before I could help myself.
Not fully.
Not in a way that gave me enough detail to justify the guilt that followed, though guilt was not precisely the word. It was not moral discomfort—I had little talent for that. It was the knowledge that Cove had given me one boundary he still believed I might respect, and I had failed it by the smallest possible increment.
Still, I looked.
A flash of pale skin blurred by steam.
The sharp curve of a shoulder.
Copper hair darkened by water and gathered over one side of his delicate neck.
His freckled and lean arm lifted as he rinsed shampoo from his hair, movement fluid and unguarded because he believed, or wanted to believe, that he was alone enough for that.
The sight entered me and rearranged something.
I looked away, but for the rest of that day, I was aware of him in a way I had not been before.
Not merely as a mind I wanted to observe, a creature I wanted to keep, or a presence whose proximity altered the temperature of the house. I had always found Cove beautiful; that had been obvious from the first morning I saw him, hair adorned with small silver sea creatures, freckles scattered likea map over pale skin. But beauty had been aesthetic then, collectible, rare.
This was different.
This was lower, warmer.
It moved through me in a slow, unfamiliar current, disorienting precisely because it had no system I understood.
I had never been a man ruled by sexual appetite.
I had seen the way desire made other people foolish, how they bent themselves around bodies, fantasies, chemical imperatives they mistook for destiny. It had always struck me as inconvenient. Useful in others, at times, but rarely admirable.
My own interests had been narrow, precise, and largely untouched by that particular hunger.
Until the shower.
Or perhaps the hunger had always been there, dormant until it found an object worthy of its attention.
That thought unsettled me less than it should have. What truly unsettled me was that I did not know what to do with it.
I wanted to touch him.
Not only to restrain him, or guide him, or steady his injured ankle when he forgot to favor it. I wanted to touch the damp strands of hair curling against his throat. I wanted to trace the freckles disappearing beneath his clothes. I wanted to feel his pulse beneath my thumb without the excuse of checking his injuries.
And because I wanted it, I did not.
Restraint, I had discovered, was easier when the desired outcome remained abstract. It was another thing entirely to stand beside Cove in the aquarium wing while he leaned close to the glass, cuff chain stretched between us, his voice still rough from disuse and anger as he explained that the morays were not eating poorly; they were simply responding to a shift in feeding time that had disrupted the anticipatory pattern.
“You’re staring,” he said without looking at me.
I had been.
“Yes.”
His eyes flicked toward me then, wary and irritated. “You’re not supposed to admit that.”
“Lying would insult your intelligence.”
He paused, and then the corner of his mouth had twitched.
