Page 14 of His Holy Chaos

"If you don't stop being such a brat trying to get everybody drunk," he says, and from that point on, his voice is all I hear. "I'm going to take matters into my own hands." A pause. "Do you have a Dom to control you? If you do, they're doing a lousy job."

My hand tightens on the tray. My smile doesn't falter, but my heart is going crazy.

"No," I say, and I want to banter more. But I can't. It's like I forgot all words. I immediately want him to want me. Desperately.

Emmett's eyes don't leave mine. His lips curve. I can see he's having fun, and I love it.

"Probably what you need," he says.

The club disappears. The music, the neon, Pierce's laughter somewhere behind me, the clinking of glasses, all of it. There's only Emmett's gaze. I forget how to breathe, how to swallow. My heartbeat is in my ears. I don't know yet that he will be my biggest heartbreak. All I know is that his eyes are on me, and I am still.

Noa's door opens. His dark curly hair is all over the place. He hasn't styled it today. He's smaller than me, a tiny thing, with his olive skin and full lips. I hear his bare feet, quick, light. I can recognize that sound automatically now, after living with him for so long. I don't look up, but I feel his eyes on me. Those big black eyes that miss nothing, that have seen me like this so many times that the sight of me wrecked on this couch must be as familiar to him as the furniture.

He doesn't ask what happened. He doesn't say are you okay or do you want to talk about it or any of the useless questions people ask when they find someone crying. He knows all I need is some time and a friend by my side. So, he turns and walks to the kitchen. No one can do anything for this pain to go away, but having company helps, especially if we talk about something else. I like to have other things going on in my life. Makes me feel less fundamentally broken.

The freezer door opens. A drawer slides. Two spoons clink together. I hear him prying the lid off something, the scrape of metal. He comes back with two bowls of pistachio, because it's the one we always choose when things are bad. The fancy expensive one, not the green-dyed stuff. It's our emergency flavor. The green is vivid against the white ceramic.

Noa sits beside me. The couch dips under his slight weight. He's wearing an oversized gray t-shirt that belongs to Henry, his boyfriend, and sweatpants that are too long for his legs, the cuffs pooling around his ankles. He places my bowl on the coffee table within reach and balances his own on his knee.

Then he picks up the remote, and without a word, without even glancing at me, he navigates to Hamilton.

The opening notes unfold through the apartment, and I feel better for five seconds. We've watched this musical so many times that the disc would be worn, if discs still existed. I know every song, every camera angle, every moment where Miranda's voice breaks. It's our musical.

Noa drapes a blanket over both our laps. It's the grey fleece one, soft from a hundred washes, pilling at the edges. My breathing is still jagged. I can hear it, these hitching, shallow gulps of air. But the music helps. The familiar progression of scenes helps.

Noa's shoulder presses against mine. A small, warm fact: I am here, and you are here, and neither of us is going anywhere. He rests his head on my shoulder and I rest mine on top of his. I want to thank him, but it isn't necessary. He knows how grateful I am to have him in my life.

The ice cream melts in my bowl. The pistachio green goes liquid at the edges. I watch it for a while. When they're singing about how unstoppable Hamilton was, I decide to pick up my spoon.

Noa takes a bite of his own ice cream at the same moment, as if he'd been waiting for me to go first. We chew in silence, our eyes on the screen. My breathing smooths out, each exhale lasting a little longer than the last, until I'm no longer gasping but simply breathing, the way people are supposed to breathe, the way people breathe when they're not drowning like I am.

Noa finishes his bowl and sets it on the coffee table beside mine. We don't speak. But it's the kind of silence that only exists between people who have sat through each other's worst nights, who have held each other's hair back and wiped each other's tears and watched terrible movies at three in the morning because sleep was impossible and being alone was worse. It's a silence built from years of I know and me too and you don't have to explain and I love you, I wish things were better.

I will survive this night. I have survived all of the others.

Chapter 9. Ford

The café door hasn't finished closing before I'm standing alone at the table. The barista glances up, then away. I collect myself, and I walk to the counter to return the cups. Because that is what a person does. You drink your coffee, you return your cups, you leave. Simple. But my mouth has a bitter taste, and I feel like I'm about to cry, as if I made a terrible mistake, which is absolutely nonsensical. I don't cry for mundane things like this one.

My car waits where I left it, exactly the same. Nothing has been disturbed. Except me. Except how ridiculously empty it feels.

This is what I know: Jude Piaf is a liability. He is twenty-eight years old and possesses no sense of self-preservation. He tracked me down through a chain of acquaintances after a single encounter at a club I barely wanted to attend, showed up at my church uninvited, manipulated me into buying him coffee, and then vanished mid-conversation with a wink and a nickname I didn't authorize. Mr. Dom. The worst part: I chuckle at the thought.

I do not do brats. I have never done brats. My arrangements have always been with submissives who valued order as much as I do. Men who understood that discipline is a gift, not a game. Men who showed up on time, followed protocols, and didn't eat chocolate bars in my car. The last arrangement ended three years ago, amicably, when Zack relocated to Seattle for work. We shook hands. We wished each other well. That is how these things should end.

Jude would leave residue everywhere. He would leave chocolate wrappers and chaos. He is doing that already. I can see it clearly, the late-night calls, the boundary violations disguised as spontaneity, the inevitable moment when his recklessness collides with my need for control and someone gets hurt. Probably both of us. Probably me.

You don't know what I want. That's what he said. He called me arrogant.

A cyclist cuts in front of me without signaling, and I brake harder than necessary, my heart jumping into my throat for one stupid second before settling. I take a breath. Then another.

The problem, and I recognize this with the clarity of a man diagnosing his own illness, is that I keep hearing his voice. The way he said I love to be on my knees to worship, standing in my church with that angelic expression on a face designed for sin. The way his laugh broke open. The foam on his upper lip. The chipped black polish on two fingernails, as if he'd started painting them and gotten bored halfway through. The way his confidence flickered just once, when he admitted he didn't know what he wanted long-term, and his eyes dropped to the table, and for that single moment he looked like someone who had been hurt badly enough to stop pretending it didn't matter.

I know that look. I've worn it in mirrors I didn't mean to glance at.

I pull into the driveway and cut the engine. Why did you accept coming here with me? His question sits in my chest.

Because for twenty-seven minutes in a dimly lit café, sitting across from a man who is everything I should avoid, I felt something I haven't felt in years. Not desire. I've felt desire. Desire is manageable, a biological function I can satisfy. This was something else. And it shouldn't be. We saw each other twice, for God's sake!