Page 61 of The Long Game

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Jack said. “I don’t care if you don’t believe anything else we say, I want you to know that you didn’t do anything wrong.”

Colton shook his head.

“You did what you had to in order to be safe.”

“It’s a crime, isn’t it?” Colton asked.

Grady shook his head. “No. The people who—whoever paid you, they—”

“The johns,” Colton snapped, though he didn’t lift his head to glare at Grady. “The men who paid me to blow them are calledjohns.”

“The johns—they were wrong.” He held up a hand to stall whatever Colton was going to say. “Because they were adults, I assume, and you are not. But you did nothing wrong.”

Jack squeezed Grady’s hand, ashamed to feel relief. He hadn’t been sure Grady would see it that way. The law certainly didn’t.

“It was the same for me,” Jack said, capturing Grady’s startled gaze. He squeezed Colton tighter, clinging to him as hard as he was being clung to, and risked breaking his own heart to help this boy understand he wasn’t alone. “In prison. I didn’t have a lot of options, and there were guys who…who wanted to hurt me. Whodidhurt me. So I did what I had to in order to be safe.”

Grady didn’t look away, even when the tears that had gathered at Colton’s confession finally spilled down Grady’s cheeks. Grady held Jack’s hand and listened in that way that made Jack feelseen.

“What do you mean?” Colton asked, his voice muffled against Jack’s chest.

“I found a protector,” Jack explained. “He was a powerful man and as long as I was with him, no one dared touch me. It was an exchange. Sex for protection.”

Grady’s thumb trailed over the back of Jack’s knuckles, the tiniest gesture Jack felt all the way down to his soul.

Colton sat up, pulling away from Jack, his eyes red and swollen, more bewildered than angry. “How is that the same?”

“You did it to be safe for a few nights, right?” Jack asked.

“Yes?” Colton agreed, confused.

“I traded sex for safety every day for six months.”

The words hung in the air around them like the toll of a bell on a cold, clear night.

Grady’s thumb gently brushed Jack’s skin, again and again, and the tiny, fierce light Jack had buried deep inside himself in that back room of the Brunswicker Ale House—strapped down beneath years of fear and reinforced by his absolute certainty that there were things he couldn’t have—broke free.

“So you’re okay with it?” Colton asked Jack.

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it,” Jack admitted, picturing the ink hidden beneath his damp shirt, “and I am. It took me a while to figure out that wishing things had been different and I’d had other options wasn’t the same as regretting the choices I made. Because I made the best ones I could in that time and that place. I did what I had to.”

“Yeah, that’s…that’s how it felt. At the time.”

“And now?” Jack asked. “Did you do the best you could with the options you had?”

Colton hesitated, then nodded. “I think so.”

Jack pulled Colton against his chest again. “Then I’m sorry you didn’t have more options, but I’m not sorry you survived. And I’m glad you’re here with us now.”

“Me, too,” Grady added, rubbing his damp cheeks self-consciously. “I just want to give you more options, Colton. Hopefully, you’ll agree they’re better ones.”

“Okay,” Colton whispered.

Jack and Grady went still.

“Okay?” Grady asked carefully.

“Yeah,” Colton said with a small smile. “I’ll move into your super bro-y bachelor pad.”

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