He didn’t say goodbye to the guy, who was now slipping off the stool that had been beside Corrado’s, and moved further down the bar away from them entirely.
Corrado only looked at Alessio.
“Better?” he asked.
Alessio wasn’t going to lie.
“Not yet.”
“Yeah, I can tell.”
“Don’t sound so fucking smug about it,” Alessio returned.
Corrado smirked. “Kind of hard.”
Jesus.
Alessio needed to get off this conversation. He didn’t need his weaknesses available to the rest of the world for public consumption. “Do you have a room here?”
“And a fake ID, some cash ... twenty-four hours to do whatever I want.” Corrado shifted from foot to foot, glancing away. “I didn’t know you were back.”
“Clearly.”
Okay, that came out cold as hell.
Even he heard it.
Corrado looked back at him, a fire blazing in his gaze. “Do you have something you want to say to me, or what?”
Why lie?
“Yeah, but I don’t think you want to hear it.”
14.
Corrado
“Which room?”
Alessio didn’t even look over his shoulder when he asked that question. Corrado watched his hand flex tightly around the black bag that dangled from his fist, and the way his shoulders tensed with every step he took.
Pissed all over.
Or ... Alessio was something else altogether.
Jealous.
“Room 208.”
Alessio made a noise under his breath, still walking straight down the hallway without bothering to look at Corrado behind him. “All right.”
He wanted to deal with the fact that Alessio randomly showed up when no one was supposed to know where he was—that was Cree’s deal, right? If he made it back to the complex before the sun went down, then he would get one free night to do what he wanted without babysitters watching him the whole time. So, how the fuck did Alessio know where to find him?
At the same time, he didn’t mind. Or rather, he didn’t care that it was Alessio that showed up. Except going into that meant handling the fact Alessio was jealous. Because he didn’t like what he found when he showed up.
Not that it had been anything.
Or meant anything.
Corrado didn’t even know that guy’s name, or what the fuck he wanted. He’d been trying to have a drink before he went upstairs, and passed out on the king-size bed. He’d wandered around the city for a while earlier, trying to decide what he wanted to do. And maybe, had Alessio been there with him, he might have picked a half of a dozen things just because.
Instead, he wanted to be alone.
Drink.
Sleep.
Feel fucking normal.
He’d been content to ignore the guy at the bar, whether his friendly attempt at conversation was just that—friendly—or whether it was a hint for something else. Which was exactly what he had been doing when Alessio showed up.
Not that Alessio realized that.
Or saw it.
Corrado could tell.
The bigger problem?
He liked it.
Corrado wasn’t a liar, or he tried hard not to be. So, it’d be a damn lie if he tried to say the warning—one for him, and for the other man at the bar—that flashed across Alessio’s face because he thought he knew what was going on there didn’t make Corrado feel some kind of fucking way.
Not that he wanted to feel that way.
Or any way.
He didn’t know what the hell he wanted.
Alessio stopped in front of the room that belonged to Corrado for the night. Stepping aside so he could lean against the wall while Corrado pulled the keycard from his pocket to unlock the door, Alessio asked, “Would you have done that, then?”
Corrado’s hand froze at the card reader, hovering overtop but not pulled down to drag the keycard through the lock. “Done what?”
“That guy—him. Would you have brought him back here had I not shown up? Spent the night with him? Any of it?”
“Why don’t you just say it, huh?” Corrado returned.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re jealous, Les. Say it.”
“That’s half the fucking problem, isn’t it?” Alessio let out a dark laugh, making Corrado’s chest clench from the sound. God, he loved that sound. “The fact you don’t want all that shit to be out there, right? Because once it’s out there, Corrado, we don’t get to take it back. You get stuck in your fucking pride, because you don’t know how to deal, and there we’ll be. That is the problem.”
Corrado’s jaw flexed, holding back words and anger. Because frankly, Alessio wasn’t wrong, and he didn’t know how to admit that without sounding like a fool. Nobody wanted to be the idiot with a foot stuck in his mouth.
“Yeah, I know,” Alessio added when Corrado continued to stay quiet.
Raging blue met dark brown when the two stared at one another in the hallway. The silence stretched on, heavy and loaded with a lot of shit Corrado had been leaving to the wayside where he and Alessio were concerned. Things like feelings and what the fuck was even going on between them. The labels he hated because once you labeled yourself, the rest of the goddamn world thought they got the right to do the same. Or even the fact that he’d never connected with someone on a level like he did with Les—like the man just knew the craziness in Corrado’s mind without him ever needing to open his mouth to say it.
And he recognized those same things in Alessio, too.
These things?
It was too much.
Too deep.
Things that he figured, once they were said, there was no going back. And maybe that bothered Corrado because it scared him. He didn’t like to be scared of shit—didn’t want to be, either—but he didn’t know how to tell Alessio that without the rest of the shit in his mind spilling out, too.
Like the fact he didn’t know how to do this.
How to be someone to someone else.
How to be a them.
A thing.
And despite a part of him not wanting to admit he wanted to be exactly that, even if that meant he would need to deal with things he’d shoved down where nobody could find them, the other part was louder.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Alessio said.
Corrado arched a brow. “You didn’t answer mine.”
“I already said you don’t want me to.”
Right.
“And that’s your problem,” Corrado replied, shoving the keycard through the reader to unlock the room door, “because you don’t listen nearly as well as you fucking talk, Les.”
“What does that even mean?”
Corrado shook his head, opening the door and entering the hotel room. He dropped his jacket to a chair, kicked off his shoes, dropped his bag, and headed for the bathroom. All the while, he ignored Alessio behind him as he called after him.
“Hey, I’m fucking speaking to you. What does that mean?”
No.
He was done talking.
For one, this wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have. And for two, because even if he did want to have it, he didn’t know where to begin. Not without admitting he didn’t know if he could ever be something with Alessio.