Page 14 of Cohesion

“What makes you think I don’t know anything about your parents?” Jericho asked, glancing at Peyton. “Your father is chief superintendent. I’d be terrible at my job if I didn’t know that.”

“And my mum?”

“What about her?”

“What do you know about her?”

“She birthed you,” Jericho said, deadpan.

Peyton snorted. That wasn’t hard to figure out though his brother Riley was adopted, so it was possible that his mumhadn’tbirthed him. It was a lucky guess. “My mum is a terrifying witch that knows your secrets the second she looks at you. You didn’t find that in your notes?”

“Guess I lost that page,” Jericho said dryly. “Another reason not to meet her. I have too many secrets that should stay buried.”

“Like what?”

“Telling you would defeat the purpose of them being a secret. Nothing that concerns you, don’t worry.” Jericho drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and then sighed. “How would you even introduce me to them?”

Peyton leaned back in the seat, crossing his ankles. Jericho was overthinking the entire thing. “I thought I’d start with, ‘Hey, this is Jericho, my boyfriend.’”

“Boyfriend?”

“It doesn’t have to be boyfriend,” Peyton said. Not just overthinking but completely focusing on the wrong thing. “Sebastian prefers the term partner. I don’t give a fuck what you want to call me.”

“Is that before or after you introduce the rest of them?” Jericho asked.

Irritation prickled at Peyton. Was he looking for any excuse he could find and throwing it at Peyton on purpose? “They already know Quinn since he’s been friends with Riley longer than I’ve known him, and they know Will becauseI’vebeen joined at the hip with him for years.”

“You’re dodging the actual issue of the question.”

Therewasno issue. “You think I’m going to just pick one of you to introduce as my partner?” The thought had never even occurred to him. He wouldn’t hide any of them, for any reason. If there was someone in his life that wouldn’t accept the choices that he made, he didn’t want them in his life. It was that simple. He had enough bullshit to deal with, without making more issues for himself, and especially not ones that included keeping bigots and assholes in his inner circle.

“They already know I’m with three people even if I haven’t named them yet,” Peyton said. “One more isn’t that much of a stretch, and I don’t plan on hiding anything from them.” He paused. That wasn’t quite right. “Okay, there are a lot of things that I don’t tell them, like about the reality of my time in the military, or you know, specifics like how I love bending Will over the kitchen table. Or that one time at a bar when we couldn’t wait to get home, and so we went to the bathroom, but all the locks were broken—what are the odds, right?—and we decided to fuck anyway. They don’t need to hear those things.”

“I could hear a little more about it, though.”

“I don’t think you deserve to right now,” Peyton said pointedly. “I don’t plan on hiding any of this. It’s too important to sweep under some forgotten rug and hope no one notices. You’re part of that importance. If you want to be. If you’re only in it for the short term or because you want a quick fuck, and you have one foot out the door, then you might as well just leave now.”

“That is not at all what I just said.”

“We’re complicated, and we have no idea what the fuck we’re doing”—he didn’t, at least—“and you’re like a million years older than me—”

“Try twelve years, not a million. Let’s not exaggerate things that make me feel like I’m robbing the cradle, please,” Jericho said, grimacing.

“And we want you, however that ends up looking,” Peyton finished, not letting Jericho derail him. He was good at that. Shifting the conversation imperceptibly, enough to guide it where he wanted it to go. Not this time. Not for this. “You’re either in, or you’re out. There’s no half anything, and you can’t straddle that line.”

Jericho didn’t answer, and Peyton didn’t force it. He’d shown his hand. It was up to Jericho now to decide. If the others wanted to keep going with him despite not having a solid answer, that was up to them. But Peyton had spent a lot of years regretting things, and wanting things he couldn’t have, and not understanding why. Years of bleeding and making others bleed. A life filled with a war that had nothing to do with him. He wasn’t going to spend a single minute wasting his time on something that wasn’t at least mutual.

Maybe it wouldn’t work, and everything would fall apart. Most things in life couldn’t come with a guarantee. At least they would all try together.

“Tell me about the team,” Peyton said into the silence, changing the subject. They were in the heart of some random suburb that he didn’t recognise and didn’t know the name of. Where was Jericho taking them? The houses were pretty fucking fancy, and he was almost certain they were closing in on the beach again. “How did you recruit them all?”

“Hunter and I created the team from scratch,” Jericho said. “Six was a doctor, and Hunter met him when he was beingtreated in emergency at the hospital Six worked at. It took a few months of sweet-talking, but Six eventually quit, did the training he needed, and joined us the same year. He and Greer were already together then; he’d been a patient of Six’s, and… to be honest, I don’t have the full details on what went down, or how they got from Point A to Point B.”

“Wait, two of your team members are together?”

Jericho grinned. “Longer than I’ve known both of them. I did say it wasn’t a problem, right? We don’t care who you fuck as long as you can do your job. Greer is a crotchety bastard that you don’t want to get on the wrong side of, but he’s a valuable team member. Spencer and Kendrick—the ones watching Sebastian right now that you missed this morning—are pretty inseparable. Ken was a high school teacher that accidentally got tangled in a case Six and I were working. One day he was just working here.”

“Just like that?” Peyton asked. Time didn’t work that way, and switching from teacher to black ops was… quite a jump.

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