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Not a secret.

Leo tried to make sense of that and couldn’t.

“Things really are different now,” Nate said, watching him. “I could go and marry another man. It’s legal.”

Leo shuddered, trying to imagine it. “People wouldn’t throw rocks at you on the street?”

“No.” Nate looked at him in a sad sort of way. “Did they throw rocks at you?”

“No,” Leo said just to say something.

He looked at the dark window again.

He wasn’t sure where the image of people with rocks had come from. Had he been assaulted?

No.

Maybe?

He shuddered again.

Nate was still looking at him. “The world isn’t a perfect place, but you can be gay in it. For the most part.”

“For the most part,” Leo repeated, wondering.

“In some parts of the country it’s still not the best idea to flaunt it. But we’re safe here. You’re safe with me, okay?”

Why was Nate saying that? Did he think that Leo was…?

Was Leo…?

He looked down at himself.

Blue eyes in his memory. They’d belonged to a boy, hadn’t they?

Oh.

Chapter

Twenty

There had been a boy.

Leo pressed himself into the corner of the turret. He’d floated up here without thinking because the only thing he could think about was that there’d been a boy and Leo had…

Blue eyes. Smoke. A whisper in the dark. A feeling so large it didn’t fit inside him.

It hadn’t fit when he was alive either. It was overflowing, spilling into everything he was and wasn’t anymore.

He wanted more of it. More memories, more impressions. The whisper almost had a voice, almost had a sound.

But there was no sound. What had he sounded like?

Leo reached, digging into a barely formed memory, a fractured thing that couldn’t withstand the force he applied. It scattered.

No, no, no, no!

Leo recalled the boy’s blue eyes. The smell of cigarette smoke. He centered himself. He scrambled for more.