Page 47 of The Play

Close enough that he could see Grant was still in a pair of gray sweatpants.

“Sorry, uh, did we have a meeting this morning?” Grant asked, scrubbing a hand over his face.

“No,” Deacon said. He set his hip on the corner of the big wooden desk. “I came by to talk to you.”

“About . . .” Grant trailed off, and then Deacon watched as his brain finished waking up and he remembered what had happened yesterday.

Rex and all his bullshit “revelations.”

“Right,” Grant said. “God, that happened, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, it happened. And I thought I’d come by and say, whatever you need, however you need me, I’m here.”

For you.

Deacon didn’t say it, but hoped that Grant would hear it, anyway.

Maybe Beck and Micah were right, and he needed to fight for Grant. Fight his certainty that they couldn’t get involved. Convince him that they had something strong enough, something with enough potential, that it was wrong to continue pretending it wasn’t anything at all.

But he couldn’t just come out swinging.

Grant would shut down before he got half a dozen words out.

“I don’t know what you’d do to help,” Grant said wryly, leaning back in his chair.

There was a faint imprint of the wood grain of the desk on his cheek. His hair was messier than Deacon had ever seen it—except in his imagination. Deacon’s heart clenched. He did want Grant. More than anything else. Like nobody else.

“Anything,” Deacon said. “You need me to talk to the media, make a statement—”

“You hate doing that,” Grant interrupted, the corner of his mouth tilting into a smile.

You kissed that mouth. Only two days ago.

It hadn’t been anything like the kisses he’d dreamed they’d share, in that faraway future when it wasn’t a distraction or against the spoken and unspoken rules. But it had still been a kiss.

“I do, but I’d do it, if you needed me to,” Deacon said. He vowed. He could hear it in his voice. I’m trying to tell you something, and you’re not understanding it. You’ve got this huge ass brain, but you still don’t get it.

“I’d do more,” Deacon continued, because he needed Grant to understand. “I’d . . .I don’t know . . .I’d stand by you, at your side, if that’s what you needed. I’d . . .I’d be more than just your captain, your partner. I’d be your everything, if you needed me to be that. I’d . . .” It sounded crazy. He sounded crazy. Wild. All the things that Beck had warned him not to do.

The problem was he’d shown up and Grant had been sleeping at his desk, and it had unwound something in him that he’d always kept so tightly chained.

For a fucking reason.

Grant’s expression was already shutting down.

“You don’t need me,” Deacon said, the realization hitting him like a ton of bricks. Suddenly, he was so empty. All that fight, all that need, just drained right out of him.

No—that wasn’t true.

The fight was gone, but the need was still there, pulsing deep inside him. Inexorably alive, because nothing seemed to kill it.

Not impersonal emails.

Not twelve years of silence.

Not even too-brief kisses in bar bathrooms.

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Grant said carefully, but it was clear he was getting ready to brush him off.

---