Chapter Four

Los Angeles. Jack's side of the night.

Jack waits until Adrian is all the way inside before he pulls away from the curb.

He tells himself it's just good manners — the man's exhausted, a long way from home, not entirely steady after two glasses of wine. Someone should make sure he gets through the right door. That's all it is.

The explanation lasts until the first red light.

Jack looks down at the damp patch on his shoulder and starts laughing.

It's been a long time since anyone fell asleep on him like that. Longer still since he sat that still at a red light because waking someone up felt worse than being late.

He thinks back to the shop, to the first real look he'd gotten at Adrian before either of them had said a word. He'd noticed the glasses first, then the carefully kept grey scruff — the kind that always looks a few days from becoming a real beard, and never intentionally quite gets there — and the lines around Adrian's eyes when he smiled.

Under the shirt, he was broader than Jack had expected. Solid. Comfortable in his own body. Jack had tried not to stare. Apparently, he hadn't tried very hard.

He's still thinking about it now, hours later, at a red light that has no business holding his attention this long.

Three days, Adrian had said. Adriano, really — only my family calls me that. Jack turns the name over once, quietly. He likes the sound of it, likes even more that he hasn't earned the right to use it yet.

Jack taps the wheel once, thinking it over. Three days is enough time for another dinner. Maybe enough time for a ride along the coast, if Adrian actually meant it about wanting to sit on the back of a bike.

It's also short enough that this could turn into nothing before either of them has to figure out what it actually is.

That should make it easier.

It doesn't.

He drives home with the radio off, which isn't like him either.

His sister calls before he's even parked in his own driveway.

“Dennis called me,” Sam says, without any greeting at all.

“Of course he did.”

“He said you gave some guy a personal tour of the shop.”

“He wandered in. We talked. It's not a big deal.”

“You haven't taken anyone to dinner since Mark.”

“Sam, don't.”

There's a small silence on the line, the kind that means she's heard exactly what she needed to hear.

“He's here for three days,” Jack says finally, pulling into the driveway, killing the engine. “Then he flies home. It's not really anything.”

“Okay,” Sam says, entirely unconvinced. “Whatever you say.”

“I mean it.”

“Sure you do.” A pause. “You sound different, Jack.”

“Different how?”

“I don't know. Lighter.”

Jack doesn't love that. There's something about someone else hearing a thing in you before you've decided whether it's actually there.

“Sam.”

“I'm done.” And she is, in the way only she can be — she hangs up before he can say anything else, which is very much like her.

Jack sits in the driveway a minute longer, looking at nothing in particular.

Inside, he drops his keys somewhere near the door. Pulls his shirt off, feels the faint cool patch where Adrian's head had been. He should put it in the wash. Instead, he drops it over the back of a chair.

He opens the fridge without being hungry, stands there long enough that the cold air starts to feel stupid against his bare chest, and closes it again without taking anything out.

He'd done this before. Not this exactly, but the part where something good made you believe it might become something permanent. Where you gave it time, and room, and pieces of your life, because for a while the good parts seemed worth everything else.

Until, slowly, they weren't.

Nothing dramatic. No betrayal. No single moment Jack could point to and say there, that's where it broke. Just two people gradually discovering that the things between them weren't getting smaller with time. They were getting harder to ignore.

Jack wasn't afraid of being hurt.

He was tired of being hopeful.

And Adrian is, by any reasonable measure, exactly the kind of thing he should be smart enough to leave alone.

Attraction Jack could deal with. Attraction had rules. It came, it went, and nobody had to rearrange their life because of it.

Except this doesn't seem to be behaving like attraction.

He tries reducing Adrian to the facts, the way he'd reduce a job to a parts list. Cabin crew. Lives across the Atlantic. Three days.

It doesn't stick. His brain keeps sliding back to the useless details instead — the way Adrian had laughed at himself over the bottle opener, the way he said Adriano like he was handing over something small and private, that unguarded half-second before he remembered to compose himself, the exact weight of his head against Jack's shoulder for half the drive home.

And the way Adrian listened.

Really listened.

No waiting for his turn. No trying to steer the conversation somewhere else. Just there.

Jack had noticed that too.

None of it should matter this much.

That's the part he doesn't understand.

He thinks of Adrian getting on a plane in three days, and something in his stomach tightens before he can reason with it.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters to the empty kitchen.

What the hell is this?

Because the problem isn't that Adrian is leaving.

The problem is that Jack already minds.

He goes to bed anyway and lies awake much longer than he wants to admit.