Page 158 of Stop and Seek
That got Theo’s attention. He tried to push him off.Rude. Noah stayed glued.
Theo grabbed his face. Demanding.Hot.He forced their eyes to meet. Noah blinked slowly, waiting for the nausea to ebb.
“Did you watch it?” Theo asked.
“Three minutes.” Felt like three years. “It—it pissed me off. Not ‘cause of you, baby. Jus’ the way they were treatin’ you wasn’t right.”
“And you killed Jagger.”
Why were they going over the same thing again?
He giggled. A stupid little hiccup of sound.
“Sure.”
If that’s what Theo wanted to hear—why not.
“Are you going to kill Andrew too?” Theo’s voice was hard to read. Not angry, not scared. That was a win, right?
“Hadn’ thought that far out. I found him. He lives in uh, Akron. I’m takin’ care of everythin’.”
“Why?”
For a second, Noah forgot the question.
Wasn’t it obvious?
It was definitely obvious.
“‘Cause I love you, you dipshit,” he said.
Theo sat up. He scrubbed a hand down his face, then back into his hair. Fucked up his glasses, too. Noah reached up and fixed them, thumb brushing the bridge of Theo’s nose. There. Perfect.
His.
Theo didn’t say anything for a while. He sat there, staring at some far-off point like he could disappear into the peeling paint on the wall.
“That shoulda been more romantic, righ’?” Noah asked, quieter now. “Like flowers or… maybe a poem.”
Theo made a strangled sound, somewhere between a laugh and a groan. “You write poems?”
“I could try.”
Absolutely nothing.
Pure silence.
Noah leaned in to kiss him and Theo sighed—long, hard. Slid off the bed and walked out of the room.
Panic flared up Noah’s throat, bitter as hell.
He lurched after him. “Did I say somethin’? I didn’—”
“You didn’t.” Theo’s voice echoed from the bathroom. Water coughed in the pipes. “Get in the shower or my neighbors will complain that I’m keeping corpses in here.”
Noah knocked into the door frame, then the towel rack, then Theo. He let out a little hum of happiness when Theo caught him, both hands pressed to his ribs like he was worried they might cave in.
“You look even worse in the light,” Theo muttered, wrinkling his nose.
