Nick nodded and looked away. His jaw felt tight.
“Seriously. You don’t have to watch your words or your thoughts or whatever has you so wound up.” Adam put his hands on Nick’s shoulders, not letting go even when Nick stiffened. “I only brought you here so we could talk. You just looked like you needed a breather. You can leave any time you want.”
A breather. Nick needed a whole oxygen tank. He swallowed and made himself meet Adam’s eyes. “I don’t want to leave.”
“I don’t want you to leave.” Adam took Nick’s free hand and tugged. “Come on.”
Nick hadn’t held hands with another guy since it was mandated on field trips in kindergarten. It should have felt foreign, uncomfortable. He should have been pulling away.
But it didn’t feel foreign. Adam’s grip felt warm and secure. He could have led Nick straight off a cliff and Nick would have followed. At the bedroom door, Nick’s heart staggered and scrambled to maintain a rhythm, but Adam led him past that, to the couch.
Not like it mattered. They were alone.
Comforting and terrifying at the same time.
Adam sat close, curling into the cushions to face Nick. Their fingers were still loosely twined, and Nick knew Adam was giving him space to pull away. He didn’t.
Nick waited, testing the air. He’d always been able to sense changes in air patterns, from a door opening, from someone coming close. But lately he’d also been able to sense emotion indirectly, from the rate and quality of someone’s breathing.
The air always talked to him, and now, it echoed Adam’s promise. You’re safe here.
He looked at their fingers latticed together. Adam’s thumb brushed against his own, very slowly, very gently, a tentative touch as if he knew that too much would send Nick reeling.
But firm enough that Nick knew he could grab on and cling for dear life.
“I never kissed a guy before you,” Nick said, flat out, no preamble. “My brothers have no idea.” He winced, remembering Quinn’s comments during the landscaping job. “They probably think I’m a total player. Even my twin brother—”
“Gabriel, right?”
“Yeah.” Nick glanced up, surprised that Adam had remembered. “He says I’m the good twin, and that’s why I get more girls.”
“That would make him the evil twin?”
Nick frowned. “If you ask Quinn, she’d say yes. But he’s not. He has a good heart. He’s very loyal. We got picked on when we were younger, and he always took a beating so I could get away. He’s the kind of guy to punch first and ask questions later. Quinn hates him, and I wish I could fix it. But he can be sharp—cruel. He speaks without thinking, and it gets him into trouble.”
“You’re close?”
“Yeah.” Nick hesitated. “I think we’re growing apart this year. A little.”
“And he has no clue you’re into guys?”
Despite the fact that he was sitting here holding hands with Adam, the instinct to reject the notion was so strong that Nick almost denied it. He had to clear his throat. “No. No idea.”
“Do you think he’d hurt you if he knew?”
Nick blinked in surprise. “What, you mean physically?”
“Yeah, I mean physically.”
Nick had never worried about his brothers beating the shit out of him over something like this. Anger, isolation—those he expected. Not violence.
His eyes zoomed in on the scar pulling at the edge of Adam’s lip. Years ago, someone had slammed Adam’s face into a locker at school, causing enough damage that he’d needed plastic surgery to put his face back together.
But Nick couldn’t imagine Gabriel hurting him. Not with his fists, anyway. Disappointment and rejection were another story.
Nick shook his head. “I don’t think he would. But he might not take it well. Gabriel is very . . .”
Adam waited.
Nick ran a hand through his hair, feeling it stand up in tufts. How could he explain Gabriel? “He plays on four varsity teams at school. I think he knows most of the cheerleaders intimately, if you catch my drift. He’s got a girlfriend now, but if anyone’s a player, it’s him. He’s brave—I mean, he’s trying to get into firefighter school. Just very . . . I don’t know.”
“Alpha?”
“Yes. Perfect word.”
“You admire him.”
Nick shrugged.
Adam smiled. “You do. I can hear it in your voice.” He paused. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen. How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
Two years. It felt like twenty. Nick didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t just his brothers, that school would take on an entirely different feel if he had to walk down the halls with all his classmates knowing the truth. Adam could be himself, and he had a safe place to go if the world started to crumble around him.
Nick wasn’t sure he had anything. He didn’t think his brothers would throw him out of the house, but he didn’t want to live there feeling their resentment, their unease. Their judgment.
And he couldn’t stop going to high school. Education was his only way out of this town.
But he still couldn’t bring himself to tear open those college letters hidden in his desk. What if they didn’t want him, either?
“Do your parents know about you?” Nick asked.
“Yes.” Adam smiled. “I was obsessed with dance from day one. I used to make up routines to show tunes in my living room. I asked my parents for hot pink legwarmers for my ninth birthday. I’m a walking cliché. I think they knew before I did.”
“And they were all right?”
“They were all right until I got hurt. They wanted to send me back to school, but they wanted me to pretend to be straight—like anyone would believe that, right? I mean, I get it, they were worried. I spent two weeks in the hospital. They’d seen what those idiots had written all over my Facebook page. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pretend, and I didn’t think it’d do any good. So I got my GED, I got a job, and I moved out.” He paused. “We’re all right. They help me with rent sometimes, since I’m going to school part-time.”
But Nick heard it in Adam’s voice. His parents had asked him to pretend, and that had created a gap that time wasn’t fixing.
Nick spent so much of his life pretending not to be an Elemental, risking persecution for something he couldn’t control. What if he came out and his brothers told him to keep pretending? This felt like a double whammy.
Nick looked into the warm depths of Adam’s eyes. “You spent two weeks in the hospital?”
“I might have played the patient a little more than necessary. I had a hot male nurse.”
Nick smiled and found himself reaching to trace the line on Adam’s face, before realizing what he was doing. He started to pull away.
Adam caught his wrist. “You can touch me.”
But Nick didn’t move. His pulse was choking him. This was so different from the first night they’d come here. Then, he’d been so confused and desperate that he hadn’t even admitted his feelings to Adam until he leapt out of his chair and kissed him.
Now there were too many thoughts in the way. Too many fears. No Quinn to