Page 204

“Of course I have.”

“You never said anything.” Nate rubbed his forehead. “I wish I had coffee,” he muttered, before looking up at Leo again. “I need you to understand that I’m not ashamed of being with you, and also, I’m not choosing this blindly. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

“Do you?” Leo held his gaze. “Because I feel like you don’t understand that sometimes keeping something hidden is the best choice. Not because you’re ashamed but because you don’t want to give other people the chance to ruin it.”

Nate didn’t answer immediately.

“We’re all right when it’s just us,” Leo continued. “You look at me. You talk to me. I know what we are. We don’t have to invite strangers in to make it real.”

“No,” Nate said slowly. “I suppose we don’t.”

Leo waited for the but.

Nate just looked at his phone, though.

For a moment, Leo thought he’d succeeded.

He hated that possibility almost as much as he wanted it.

Nate picked up the phone, turned it over in his hands, then put it down again. “I’ve spent years making sure nobody catches me looking at the wrong thing. Or answering somebody they can’t hear.” He glanced at Leo. “I got very good at it. Now I do it to you every time I turn that thing on, and I don’t want to anymore. Do you understand that?”

Leo did, but still, he did not find the words to say. He’d wanted to hear that. Badly enough that he didn’t quite trust himself to answer.

“We don’t have to tell them everything,” Nate said. “You’re right that some things are just for us to keep. We won’t talk about what happened yesterday, or mention the boy you loved. I only want the world to know who’s here with me.”

“They’ll ask questions.”

“Yes.”

“Questions you won’t want to answer.”

“I don’t have to answer everything.”

Leo considered that. He liked the idea of having boundaries, even if they did tell the strangers a small bit of the truth. “I could finally tell them how wrong they all are.”

Nate’s lips quirked. “You could.”

Leo felt himself smile in response. But he had to ask one more time, just to be sure. “What if it goes badly?”

“I’ll be upset,” Nate admitted. “I’m not saying I won’t be. But I’ve thought about it. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

Leo looked at the phone.

Then at his own face, waiting on the chair.

“Let’s do it.”

Setting up took longer than usual.

Nate adjusted the tripod, checked the image on his phone, and moved it back six inches. He sat down with the painting resting against his knees, then got up again to check the angle.

“Are you nearly done?” Leo asked, having watched this whole process twice already.

“I want this to be perfect. It’s important.”

“Right.” Leo folded his arms and said nothing else.

In a way, it was reassuring to know he wasn’t the only one who was nervous about this.