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Nick had never worried about his brothers beating the shit out of him over something like this. Anger, isolation—those he expected. Not violence.
His eyes zoomed in on the scar pulling at the edge of Adam’s lip. Years ago, someone had slammed Adam’s face into a locker at school, causing enough damage that he’d needed plastic surgery to put his face back together.
But Nick couldn’t imagine Gabriel hurting him. Not with his fists, anyway. Disappointment and rejection were another story.
Nick shook his head. “I don’t think he would. But he might not take it well. Gabriel is very . . .”
Adam waited.
Nick ran a hand through his hair, feeling it stand up in tufts.
How could he explain Gabriel? “He plays on four varsity teams at school. I think he knows most of the cheerleaders intimately, if you catch my drift. He’s got a girlfriend now, but if anyone’s a player, it’s him. He’s brave—I mean, he’s trying to get into firefighter school. Just very . . . I don’t know.”
“Alpha?”
“Yes. Perfect word.”
“You admire him.”
Nick shrugged.
Adam smiled. “You do. I can hear it in your voice.” He paused. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen. How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
Two years. It felt like twenty. Nick didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t just his brothers, that school would take on an entirely different feel if he had to walk down the halls with all his classmates knowing the truth. Adam could be himself, and he had a safe place to go if the world started to crumble around him.
Nick wasn’t sure he had anything. He didn’t think his brothers would throw him out of the house, but he didn’t want to live there feeling their resentment, their unease. Their judgment.
And he couldn’t stop going to high school. Education was his only way out of this town.
But he still couldn’t bring himself to tear open those college letters hidden in his desk. What if they didn’t want him, either?
“Do your parents know about you?” Nick asked.
“Yes.” Adam smiled. “I was obsessed with dance from day one. I used to make up routines to show tunes in my living room. I asked my parents for hot pink legwarmers for my ninth birthday. I’m a walking cliché. I think they knew before I did.”
“And they were all right?”
“They were all right until I got hurt. They wanted to send me back to school, but they wanted me to pretend to be straight—like anyone would believe that, right? I mean, I get it, they were worried. I spent two weeks in the hospital. They’d seen what those idiots had written all over my Facebook page. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pretend, and I didn’t think it’d do any good. So I got my GED, I got a job, and I moved out.” He paused. “We’re all right.
They help me with rent sometimes, since I’m going to school part-time.”
But Nick heard it in Adam’s voice. His parents had asked him to pretend, and that had created a gap that time wasn’t fixing.
Nick spent so much of his life pretending not to be an Elemental, risking persecution for something he couldn’t control.
What if he came out and his brothers told him to keep pretending? This felt like a double whammy.
Nick looked into the warm depths of Adam’s eyes. “You spent two weeks in the hospital?”
“I might have played the patient a little more than necessary.
I had a hot male nurse.”
Nick smiled and found himself reaching to trace the line on Adam’s face, before realizing what he was doing. He started to pull away.
