Damon didn’t know what to do.
He felt like he was watching a heart break in real time, and he didn’t know how to handle that when five minutes ago they’d nearly been at each other’s throats, and three hours ago they hadn’t even been on a first-name basis.
When Rian was right:
Damon didn’t know him at all.
Didn’t know him well enough to have any right to hear these things, or to offer the comfort someone intimately closer might be able to give Rian Falwell freely.
All he knew was that Rian was hurting.
That meeting him had felt like a goddamned car crash.
And that Damon couldn’t shake the realization that Rian dated men, and that seemed to draw into stark clarity that the haughty, impudent, entirely annoying man...
Was also hauntingly, arrestingly beautiful, until he seemed like one of his own delicate, whimsical creations, spun from hands whose fingers were made for ethereal magic.
Damon’s throat tightened, and he forced himself to look away from Rian, standing there beneath showers of golden light like some strange fae creature. Forced himself to speak, too; to fill the silence with words, where he couldn’t offer comfort, but he couldn’t disrespect that moment of honest pain by letting it go ignored.
“Listen,” he said, spreading his hands helplessly, then letting them drop. He started to step toward Rian, then stopped. “If someone wants to fix themselves...they gotta do it for them. Not someone else. If they won’t do it for them, they’re not gonna do it for you, either. That’s on them. But it’s on you to let go of the idea that you can fix people, period. Let go of thinking you’re responsible for other people’s problems. Hell...you may not even understand what they’re going through. Some people...they got different lives. They may be going through things you can’t even see.”
Rian turned his head just enough for one eye to fix on Damon through the tangled curtain of his hair. In the speckled light, his eyes were pure, deep honey, moving slow.
“So you’re telling me to let go of responsibility for Chris, too?”
“No,” Damon said. “No. I’m just saying we’ve got to handle this right, or we could do more harm than good.”
“And how would you suggest we do that, Mr. Louis?”
Damon, he corrected silently. Hearing Mr. Louis in that hurting, strangely empty voice...
It hit him hard, in all the dark, deep places inside him.
And he needed to get out of here, and away from this confusing mess of furious, raging, completely inexplicable emotions that stormed to life around Rian Falwell.
“I don’t know,” Damon said, his throat heavy and tight. “But we’ll have to figure something out.”
Chapter Three
By the following day, Damon still hadn’t figured anything out.
Not what to do about Chris.
Not what the hell that entire mess with Rian had been yesterday.
Or why he couldn’t stop fucking thinking about that aggravating, lofty jackass, with his shallow smiles and that one real, terrible, hurting smile that made Damon want to—to—
He hadn’t figured that out, either.
He just knew he’d slept like hell last night, tossing and turning and trying not to goddamned think about almost eerily pale, delicate lips subtly tinged in pink like a washed-out painting that just barely clung to its last hints of color.
And how sad those lips had seemed when Rian had said, That was cruel, Mr. Louis.
I don’t want to be cruel to you, he thought.
And since that made less sense than anything else at fucking all, he just stopped thinking about it entirely, and lifted his whistle to his lips to blow shrilly, loud enough to echo over the squeak of sneakers and the thudup-thudup-thudup of a basketball striking the laminated court.
“Traveling,” he called, and the two teams he’d split the P.E. class into broke apart, shifting their positions. “Pass it over and throw it in.”
The boy who’d been caught traveling—his name was Clark Nevans, a redhead with knobby elbows and a high forehead—stopped, slumping with a frustrated groan that turned into a laugh. Damon thought he might be one of Chris’s friends, a vague memory of fist-bumps and casual conversations on the way to the locker room; a memory that was confirmed as Chris jogged over to clap Clark on the back before, as a member of the opposing team, moving to the sidelines and waiting for the hand-over.
That might be a way in, Damon thought. Keep an eye on Chris’s friends, see if they had changed behaviors to cover for him, see if they knew anything. Check on his roommate, too. While he racked his brain to remember who Chris’s roommate was, Damon watched as Clark handed the ball over to Chris with a quick toss, giving Chris five seconds or less to make the throw-in to an in-bounds player on his team. Chris caught the ball lightly and took half a second to feint left, toward a tall boy another player was already defensively blocking—then with a deft roundabout throw, sent the ball rocketing toward an unguarded player, who caught it quickly and started a hard charge down the court toward the opposing net, dribbling furiously.
Chris was back on the court in an instant; his tall, athletic frame was easy to pick out among the other sophomore boys, when half of them were still fighting with puberty and bones that didn’t quite fit together, Chris had been one of the lucky few who settled into himself quickly, easily. Handsome enough that on weekend nights when the boys were allowed out, there were usually quite a few girls from the public school across the Mystic over down the hill in town, making shy overtures to talk to him, from gossip overheard in the locker room and cafeteria; yet Chris never made lewd comments about those girls, always seeming shyly flustered by their interest, ducking his head and running a hand through his messy light brown hair.
Frequently bigger boys realized they had an advantage over other kids—and used it ruthlessly. Chris, though, seemed to treat his advantage as a responsibility.
And he was just as effortlessly good at keeping an eye out for the smaller kids as he was at, it seemed, everything else he decided to do.
Including basketball, as he shadowed the boy dribbling and used his own body to block anyone trying to intercept as the dribbler continued his determined drive down the court...only to suddenly dive to one side in an unexpected backhand pass that went shooting straight toward Chris.
Chris twisted through the tangles of players to catch the ball smoothly right before it hit the floor. He had a chance to steal the glory, then, open for a layup that would end the game.
And instead he doubled back at the last minute, and shot the ball to gangly, mousy Jimmy who usually disappeared among the other boys and was always last pick for the team. Jimmy caught the ball in a fumble, blinking owlishly, before Chris caught his eye with a grin and jerked his head toward the basket. With a borderline squeak, Jimmy darted forward, dribbling a few steps while Chris positioned his tall frame to guard him, flawlessly blocking every attempt to smack the ball from Jimmy’s hand while Jimmy set up for a shot.