Aiden blinks awake in his bed, sleepy and unwound. He hears quiet movements from somewhere in his attic apartment, and he smiles to himself, closing his eyes.

Pulling Gabby out of her sinking car was Aiden’s first successful rescue since he’s come home. That felt sweet all by itself, but then, that day, he’d thrown himself over Jamie without thinking, overcome with excitement, and hugged him. Pressed his face into his neck, just for one quick second. And Jamie, instead of pushing him off - had laughed, and hugged him back.

Even better, Jamie slept over afterwards, and since then, he seems comfortable doing it. Because he’s here, right now. Maybe in the kitchen, making coffee.

Something bright sparkles up in Aiden’s chest. He puts a hand over his mouth, though he’s laying there alone, and he hasn’t made a sound.

The little noises from the other room are a sweet reminder. He and Jamie are friends, now.

After everything from their past, Aiden’s hope that Jamie would even be willing to talk to him was thin. But now they’re friends, close friends. Aiden doesn’t understand how he’s been so lucky. He can’t believe that Jamie has so readily forgiven him, befriended him, grown close to him.

Aiden has done a thousand things to Jamie he wishes he could take back, and yet Jamie swings by work to bring him coffee, and calls him his Companion Plant, and even sleeps in his bed.

To Aiden, it’s a miracle of no small magnitude.

There’s a very slight impression in the bedding, a place where the sheets are rumpled. The place where Jamie slept last night. Aiden reaches out and presses his hand into it.

He gets out of the bed, stretches, and heads towards the bathroom. He wants to brush his teeth, fix his hair before he says good morning to Jamie.

The bathroom door is halfway open, and Aiden stops outside, seeing a movement. It’s Jamie. He’s not in the kitchen, he’s standing at the bathroom counter, looking into the mirror.

He hasn’t noticed Aiden. The angle of the door is wrong for him to see out, but Aiden can easily see in.

Aiden starts to back up, but finds himself holding still.

Jamie’s fingers are wet from the tap, and he’s twisting them through his brilliant hair, trying to wrangle it into something less messy. He’s wearing a borrowed pair of Aiden’s pajama shorts, and though he’s got the drawstring tight, they’re too big on him, sitting low on his hips.

No shirt. He must have taken it off so it wouldn’t get wet. Aiden sees the curves of his hip bones, the soft dusting of freckles on his slender shoulders. His movements come from his hands, which are still busy with his hair, but Aiden can see the way each motion shifts a connected muscle beneath his skin. A lengthening, or a release.

Every move he makes is doubled in the mirror.

In the early morning light, his skin looks velvet soft. Aiden’s fingers twitch at his side.

As he watches, Jamie’s face scrunches up in frustration. He takes his hands from his hair, scowling.

“Fuck,” he says, under his breath. He wets his fingers beneath the tap again, turns it off, and starts over.

This time he leans closer to the mirror, standing on his toes, and the counter makes a gentle indent into his skin where he pushes against it. A droplet of water escapes his fingers and rolls down his arm. Aiden watches it all the way down, until it drips off of Jamie’s elbow.

Aiden can only stand there. An intense restlessness swirls up within him. He swallows hard. His whole body is warming up, a thousand tiny fires lit under his skin.

Jamie could knock Aiden to the ground with his eyes alone. Watching this, Aiden is hit with a burning desire so powerful that he half expects it to be contagious, to somehow reach and affect Jamie where he’s standing at the sink.

Jamie’s lips are naturally dark against his pale coloring, but he’s chewing on them while he works, and it’s turning his mouth even darker.

Swallowing again, feeling suddenly guilty, Aiden slowly backs away from the door. He hadn’t meant to stand there for so long, watching like that, but he felt almost like he was dreaming, unable to move, glued to the spot.

He gets into bed again and lays flat on his back, trying to get himself together before Jamie comes out.

He wouldn’t have cared what Jamie looked like. He was already in love with his voice, his laugh, his spirit, and he knew those things would be the same. That Jamie looks the way he does, on top of everything else… Aiden feels driven crazy by it, set on fire. He would have wanted him, and badly, even if they’d never met before.

Jamie teases Aiden a lot about how he looked at the airport, his face covered with a beard and sunglasses, his hair covered by his snapback. But Jamie had been wearing sunglasses, too, and even if he hadn’t - Aiden could barely look at him, panicking as he was.

He didn’t get a real look at Jamie’s face until he met him in the flower shop for a ride to look at apartments. Jamie hadn’t recognized him with his haircut and shave, and it turned out to be a mercy, because once Aiden saw Jamie’s face, he had to take a few laps of the shop, getting his breath back.

Aiden thought he had a very clear memory of it, and he did. But Jamie is twenty-six, now, and Aiden hasn’t seen him since he was eighteen. Things are different.

Jamie’s features were delicate before, and they still are, but they’ve become more defined, more angular. Masculine, but in an open, inviting way. His high cheekbones, now much more visible, go nicely with the curve of his mouth, rounding out when he smiles. There’s also a sharpness to his jaw, a firmness he didn’t have as a kid.

Some things haven’t changed. Aiden always thought that Jamie’s face was designed to smile, and that still feels true. The corners of his lips turn naturally up. His freckled nose scrunches up when he laughs hard, which he does a lot, around Aiden.

And Jamie’s eyes are the same. His amber eyes, still warmed from within by kindness and curiosity. Still bright, full of life. Always seeking out Aiden’s. Sometimes Aiden thinks those are the eyes of an angel, and sometimes he thinks they’re eyes that could lure an angel right out of heaven and directly into temptation.

He tries hard to listen, pressing down the internal noise. The tap has been switched off, and light footsteps are approaching. Aiden hasn’t calmed down enough, yet, and he quickly rolls onto his stomach, then scooches over, leaving Jamie’s side empty. He wants the bed to look inviting, because he wants Jamie to get back in.

Although - that probably won’t help, actually. He starts to move again, but before he can, Jamie steps back into the room.

The invitation Aiden was trying to withdraw is immediately accepted by Jamie, who comes over and sits down on the edge of the bed.

“Oh, you’re up,” he says brightly, pulling his shirt back on. “Thanks for letting me crash here, man. Sorry, I would have gone home, but we went so late last night.”

He means they were up late trying to make the glasses work, but Aiden’s traitorous brain instantly applies this sentence to an alternative scenario. 

Stop it, he tells himself.

Looking up at him, Aiden thinks that Jamie could have anyone he wants. But he’s single, and he says he has been for a while.

A cute guy at the grocery store was trying to catch his eye when they went there together last week, and you’d think that Jamie hadn’t even noticed. He’d only returned the flirty smile in a friendly way, then turned right back to Aiden. In fact, Aiden has never so much as caught Jamie texting with anyone - not like that, at least.

Aiden always knew there would be other guys in Jamie’s life. When he decided to come back to Ketterbridge, he told himself that it didn’t matter. He would do everything he could to be the last man standing.

There was only one scenario he didn’t know how to prepare for. If he came home to find Jamie already serious with someone else, he wouldn’t know what to do. It would be wrong to interfere, to mess up yet another thing in Jamie’s life.

He was surprised to discover that Jamie isn’t serious with anyone, and that he never really has been. Aiden considers himself ridiculously lucky, but it also makes him wonder.

What are you holding out for? he wants to ask. What were they missing? Do I have it, whatever it is?

He hasn’t answered Jamie, but his Companion Plant is patient. He’ll wait however long it takes for Aiden to work his way through a thought. It helps Aiden out tremendously, since he’s not wasting half of his focus worrying that he’s taking too long to speak.

“No problem.” Aiden shrugs, his face against the pillow. “Sleep here whenever you want.”

He thinks he’s okay to roll over, so he shifts onto his back, looking up at Jamie.

His vivid red hair is still damp. He actually managed to wrestle it into some kind of order. Aiden knows it took him a while to make that happen, but - unable to resist, he reaches up and ruffles Jamie’s hair.

If Jamie is annoyed that Aiden just undid all his hard work, it doesn’t show. A faint crimson blush rises in his cheeks.

Aiden is starting to suspect that Jamie might be attracted to him, too.

He’s discounted the blushing as a means of determining that: Jamie blushes all the time, so it’s unreliable. But there have been little things, little moments.

A time when Aiden had grabbed his arm to tell him something, and Jamie’s eyes had immediately cut down to look at the place where they touched. The way Jamie sometimes curls towards him when he laughs, like he wants to drop into Aiden’s arms. The way he gets all flustered when Aiden teases him about stuff.

There was one moment, last week. Aiden was stretched out on top of the comforters, his arms tucked behind his head.

“So are we doing this, or what?” he’d asked Jamie, who was standing there looking at his phone. He’d glanced up, taken one look at Aiden sprawled out on the bed, and blushed instantly.

“What?” he’d stammered.

Aiden had raised an eyebrow. “Weren’t we gonna work on the glasses?”

“Oh,” Jamie had said, his face oddly blank, and then, shaking himself - “Oh! Yeah, we - should get started, probably.”

There was also that moment when Aiden had jokingly pretended to bite Jamie’s neck, when he called Aiden a vampire. He held perfectly still while Aiden did that. It was like he had to remind himself to push Aiden away.

Aiden knows that he shouldn’t be flirting with Jamie like that, but he can’t help it, especially now that he’s starting to think the attraction might not be one-sided.

Even if he’s right, though, that’s only one small part of what Aiden wants. Attraction is one thing. It’s not necessarily love.

Aiden wants to be loved.

Jamie has forgiven him enough to be his friend. But for Jamie to forgive Aiden so completely that he could come to love him... that’s something else, something bigger.

Aiden won’t make a move until it feels possible. No matter how much he wants to.

God, does he want to.

So badly, he wants to kiss Jamie. Every day, all the time. From the moment he saw him at the airport, up until - and including - right now.

I will, he tells himself. I will kiss him when the time is right. I won’t freeze up, I won’t be a coward about it. I won’t be a coward.

“I have to go to work,” Jamie says, wrinkling his nose like he’d much rather stay here. “Real work. As much as I’d love to hang out with you all day, discovering new and exciting ways to destroy a pair of reading glasses.”

“Which was your favorite from yesterday?” Aiden asks.

Jamie considers.

“Hmm. I liked the pair that snapped right in half.” He smiles, and Aiden’s heart trips over itself. “That one was easy to clean up. Plus, it was kind of sassy, in a way? That pair had attitude.”

Aiden laughs. He never used to laugh this much, not with his real laugh, anyways.

“My favorite was the pair that went off like a firework,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because of how hard you jumped,” Aiden answers, and now Jamie laughs.

“Stop it!” he says, smacking his arm.

It’s still so easy to talk to Jamie. Just like it was, that day at the beach. Even with everything separating then from now, it’s as easy as it was, that one time.

Except when Aiden is going to pieces inside, trying to resist what his body is screaming for him to do.

When they’d walked through the forest looking for Noah, Jamie had complained that he was cold, which gave Aiden an excuse to put his arm around his shoulders. An excuse for closeness, for contact.

He tries to somehow beam a message into Jamie’s mind. Give me another excuse, please.

“You messed up my hair, by the way,” Jamie says, poking his shoulder. “It took me forever to get it into some semblance of sanity. Now I’m gonna have to go to the shop looking like this.”

Aiden fights down a smile. That’ll work. Thank you.

"I'm sorry," he says. "Maybe I can fix it?"

"Oh, I'd like to see you try."

Aiden winds his fingers into Jamie’s soft, brilliant hair.

Jamie makes a face. “I can’t even see what you’re doing, but I can tell that you’re making it worse.”

“Wow. Have a little faith.”

“I have a lot of faith in you, dude, just not about this one thing.”

Aiden’s entire body warms again at this particular comment from Jamie.

He knows he can’t keep his fingers there any longer without giving himself away. He drops his hand back to the bed.

“Well, maybe you should go to the shop with it like that. Make a statement.”

“Okay, what statement does this make, though?” Jamie laughs. He slides his hand into Aiden’s hair, and Aiden blinks, freezing up. “Maybe I should do the same to yours, hmm?”

“I don’t care,” Aiden manages. “You’re the one who has to go to work.”

Jamie takes his hand away, and Aiden wonders what the hell is wrong with him, that he gets so damn nervous like this. He’s never been so powerfully drawn to someone before, never felt this level of heat and electricity. It comes on out of nowhere, and it goes right to Aiden’s head.

It suddenly feels almost intimate, the way he’s spread out on his back gazing up at Jamie, while Jamie sits there with one leg tucked beneath him, gazing down.

Aiden sits up, stretching his arms over his head. Jamie falls back, kneading his palm, then gets to his feet. He gathers up his clothes, flashes Aiden a quick smile.

“I’d better go get changed,” he says, nodding at the bathroom. “I really do have to get going.”

Aiden makes a pouty face. “Okay.”

Jamie laughs, shaking his head.

“I’ll see you tonight, man! Probably after I’m fired for showing up with my hair looking like this.”

“But it looks cute like that,” Aiden answers, before he can think.

Jamie’s cheeks turn rosy again. He rolls his eyes.

“You just feel bad that you messed it up,” he says, and disappears into the bathroom.

Aiden watches him go, then flattens out onto his back again, closing his eyes. He tries to imagine Jamie sleeping here again, but not because he was too tired to drive home.

Sleeping here because he loves Aiden, and he wants to stay close.

Maybe, Aiden’s hopeful heart whispers. Maybe.