“Wow, Noah. I’m happy for you.”
Excited arms wrapped around his neck and squeezed him close to choking.
“Why isn’t he here right now? I can bring a second bowl of curry over.”
“He has dinner with the family.”
He swallowed the stone into a tight fist, as if feeling the beat of it would erase that moment, at the end, when Wade had left . . .
He smiled up at Zach. Distract me? “I need to put on a wash. Do you need anything done?”
Zach glanced at the plate of curry.
Noah pulled it to him. “Dinner first.”
Noah whisked around the kitchen, hoping his lasagne wasn’t too horrible to eat. Wade’s gaze followed him, as warm as the stone he kept in his right pocket.
He was all crackling nerves at the centre, and it cost him most of his effort to keep that from simmering to the surface.
“Zach mysteriously have ‘things to do’ again?” Wade asked.
He was leaning against the kitchen island, comfortably clad in jeans and a t-shirt with various sizes of spanner on it. Simple and striking. His hair had been washed shortly before he arrived, strands of it still damp and clinging to his forehead. His shampoo. His soap. That’s where the orange scent came from.
Wade uncorked the red he’d brought, and Noah took in his blunt nails, stained at the edges from car work.
Wade watched him, waiting for something. His brother. Right.
“He’s hiding out with Brandon. But don’t think he’s doing this for . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say ‘us’. Not until Wade had said it first. “He’s over there every night. Sometimes all night.”
“Are they . . .?”
“Not yet.” Lasagne on the table, wine poured, they were ready to eat. The dining room light had been set to dim—that, courteous Zach. Wade, already a beacon in the room, looked gloriously golden, warm.
He glanced out the window toward the bach.
“Yet?”
“Perhaps not at all. Brandon would be perfect for Zach, but Zach needs to come to his own realisation.”
“Making the right choice can be difficult,” Wade said, with a quiet intensity that had the crackling inside Noah dying to embers.
Dinner burned his tongue and he drank—more than a few gulps of wine—to alleviate the sting. Which one, exactly, he wasn’t sure. “Do you mean, the choice between . . . and family?”
“Between . . . Right. Family.” He frowned, kept his eyes averted. “It’s like being a mechanic. With each car, I have a problem to solve. Your safety is in my hands. I must fix things so you don’t get hurt on your journey.”
“People aren’t cars. It’s not your job or your responsibility to fix them so they don’t get hurt.”
“I feel responsible. I want to be, too. Isn’t that part of showing how much you care?”
Noah reached out and tentatively patted Wade’s hand. “It’s okay to be a little selfish too.”
Wade leaned back in his chair. “Dinner is great, thanks.”
“Okay, I hear you.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to . . . I don’t know what I’m doing, Noah.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Yes. No. I’m not . . . I shouldn’t have come. This is messing with both of us.”
“Wade,” Noah said calmly over the sick feeling in his stomach. “This doesn’t need to be anything more than dinner with a friend.”
Seconds ticked by and Wade said nothing, gaze heavy on the darkening yard.
“Please eat with me?” Noah heard the shake in his voice and cleared his throat.
Wade looked back at him. “Of course.”
The conversation pivoted to trivial things, and after two hours of drink and endless discussion, that earlier conversation didn’t feel real. Felt like something Noah must have imagined. Surely his heart can’t have stopped when it now beat so fiercely.
They ended up on the sofa, heads tipped back, staring up at tree shadows shifting on the pretty moonlit ceiling. Their hands shared the middle cushion, their pinkies a whisper apart.
Wade shifted, to talk to him, or maybe it was an excuse to press their fingers together.
Noah briefly closed his eyes. If he knew for certain it was the latter . . . he’d have pulled Wade into a kiss the minute they’d left the kitchen.
As it was . . .
I shouldn’t have come. This is messing with both of us.
He walked his restless energy to the bookshelf for his sketchbook.
Eyes darkening, thighs parting, Wade hooked his hands behind his head and stared upward. From the armchair, Noah scored swift, hard lines over the paper, desire bleeding out onto the page.
Wade spoke huskily. He was taken back to then, too. “You put my, ah, gift up on your wall.”
“Did you expect me to hide the” —he stopped himself from calling them cars. They weren’t, not exactly— “birds?”
“No. I—I like your pride, Noah. I like how confident and clever you are.”
“All practiced, believe me.”
