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My usual, safe four words came up the way they always came up, There is nothing wrong. It was the sentence I’d closed a thousand doors with, the one that kept everyone safe on their own side of the wall. They got as far as my teeth and stopped. Because I looked at him, and I understood all at once, and all the way down, what saying them would cost.

Not what saying the truth would cost.

What saying the lie would cost.

Another night like this, another shirt a size smaller, another twenty feet and another faster man, over and over, for as long as I kept choosing the wall. And me on this stool every time, holding the coats, being the thing he leaned on and never the thing he reached for, until one of these bars finally handed him to somebody, and I got to stand up at their wedding and give a toast about what a good friend I’d been.

I’d spent thirty-nine years being brave in every direction but this one. I’d built a whole life I could stand inside without needing anyone to reach back, and I’d called it strength.

Mark’s thumb moved again on my wrist, waiting, trusting, not letting go.

I let go of the table.

I set my drink on the bar.

I lifted my hand to the side of his face.

He went still.

I felt him stop breathing, felt the whole loud bar fall away to nothing, to only him, to eighteen inches that had been twenty feet that had been two weeks that had been thirty-nine years. I watched his eyes go wide, and I didn’t look away from them, because a man should watch the thing he’s finally brave enough to want.

I closed the distance.

And I kissed him.

Chapter 14

Mark

Dante Pierce was kissing me.

My brain, a brain that could run a P&L and tell you the load rating of a header beam by looking at it, took that fact and simply stopped. Every light on the board went out at once. Somewhere in there, a small voice that sounded like me was saying, “Those are his lips. That’s his hand on your face. This is really happening.” The rest of the machine that was my brain stood in the dark holding its hat.

The kiss should have lasted a second.

When a man kisses you by ambush, you pull back. That’s the choreography. But I didn’t pull back. For a long, delicious moment, I stayed exactly where I was, in the warm press of it, his palm rough and certain along my jaw, the smell of him close and clean under the bourbon and the leather-bar sweat. Something detonated low in my gut, a bright, stupid, sixteen-year-old firework of feelings I hadn’t felt in so long I’d assumed the wiring was dead.

It wasn’t dead.

It went off like it had been waiting years for the fuse to be lit. My whole chest detonated with it. And that was what finally made me pull back—not the surprise, but the size of it.

I stared at him.

He stared at me.

We were an inch apart, both breathing each other’s air like we’d run somewhere.

I had no words. My mouth opened on nothing while my heart tried to climb out through my bare sternum.

“Dante,” I got out. “What was—”

And I watched it happen.

I watched the terror arrive on a face that never showed me anything, especially not fear. The wall, the flat calm I’d stood next to for two years, cracked all the way through. Behind it was a man braced to be hurt, a man who’d just laid the one card he’d never shown anyone face up on a bar and was already, in real time, deciding it had been a catastrophe.

His jaw set. His eyes went somewhere over my shoulder. He started to turn away, to get himself out the door and back behind the wall where a mistake like this couldn’t follow him.

He only got about half a turn, because my machine came back on. All of it, all at once, every light on the board flooded back so hard it was almost painful, and the thing it had spent the last quarter of an hour, the last several weeks, the last two years, failing to compute finished computing in the space between one of his heartbeats and the next.