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“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. I just find this place peaceful. Sometimes I do get overwhelmed with how I feel. I don’t necessarily know where I stand with those two, but that’s mostly because they don’t know where they stand with each other. I thought I knew what my future was supposed to look like, and now it all seems…different.”
Dmitri appreciated Knox’s honesty, down to his very bones, but he knew there was no regrouping from the thing that was tearing him apart. Losing even a piece of Raphael would mean jagged holes in their friendship. He’d seen first-hand the way love consumed other people—the way it stole bits and pieces of attention until there were only scraps left for everyone else. Raphael only ever let Luca touch him, but even those moments were few and far between because everything Luca was belonged to Wilder.
“I’m in love.” He heard his voice rising above the flowing creek, but it still sounded far off.
“Okay,” Knox said.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to, like…make that work. Because I don’t…” He took a breath, and he knew this was another sort of coming out, and he wasn’t ashamed, but God, what if Knox thought love would just magically create this want that didn’t exist inside him. But he had to tell someone. “I’m asexual.”
“Okay,” Knox said.
“I don’t know how to be asexualandalso be in love.” And well, that wasn’t so hard. He held his breath and waited a moment, but Knox let the silence hang between them. “I feel like my only options are finding another asexual person to, you know, be with. But I can’t force myself to love some random person just because we share this one thing.”
“Of course not,” Knox said, very softly. He shifted a little closer, so their knees brushed.
“But then how do I—” Dmitri asked, then stopped. His throat felt hot and tight, and he swallowed past a lump. “How does someone who isn’t like me, love me?”
Knox was quiet a long time, and Dmitri let the silence drift between them. He turned his gaze toward the city and he realized they were close enough that he could just barely hear the fountain in Forsyth Park.
This was home—this washishome. Even when he was gone from it, Savannah had always been like a touchstone. If Raphael packed up and moved on with Rian—if he never saw Dmitri ever again, Savannah would still be the place that called to him.
“I don’t have a good answer for you. I don’t know your situation or how you feel about sex in general. But I can tell you what it’s like to love someone whose body doesn’t always let him be sexual.” Knox turned toward him, but Dmitri could see he was looking out over the water. “Sometimes Roman’s body won’t cooperate, and sometimes his brain won’t. Sometimes he’s so exhausted just getting from the sofa to the bedroom that the very idea of sex is ridiculous. Sometimes he’s angry at himself, and he doesn’t feel attractive, no matter what Aksel and I say. If Roman showed up tomorrow and told me he never wanted to have sex with me again, I wouldn’t want to be with him less. I like to think what we have is so much more than that.”
“But you have Aksel,” Dmitri said quietly.
Knox made a soft noise in the back of his throat. “Aksel isn’t there to fill some sex quota, Dmitri. Polyamory isn’t some sort of cure for sexual dysfunction in a relationship. You either love the person, or you don’t, and if the small matter of sex is a deal-breaker, then it’s not right.”
“There are a lot of people who think it’s a deal-breaker,” Dmitri said, his voice now barely above a whisper.
Knox reached across the space between them and took his hand, lacing their fingers together. His hand was strong, and soft, and he tried not to think about how starved he was for that easy touch. “There are,” he said, and Dmitri pretended like those words didn’t hurt. “They have every right to let sex be important to them, but they aren’t everyone. There are people who will love you exactly in the skin you’re in. I like to think those people are worth the wait.”
Dmitri bowed his head and breathed, then squeezed Knox’s fingers before he took his hand away. “I just don’t know how to stop loving him. Because it won’t work between us ever, and I have to let him go.”
“Time,” Knox said. “That’s all I can think of. I haven’t really been in love before, and I don’t know if that’s where it’s going with Aksel and Roman, so I can’t tell you how to move on. But I can tell you that nothing lasts forever.”
“That’s uplifting,” Dmitri said dryly.
Knox laughed. “Hey, we all die, right? And it’ll end there. And it might end well before death, because I’m a pessimist with childhood trauma who still struggles to let himself have nice things. Sometimes I let myself think about a future where they decide they don’t want this anymore and ask me to leave. And I’ll survive it, and I’ll never regret it, and it’ll be nice to remember that I was worth something once.”
“Well, that’s a fucking mood,” Dmitri murmured softly, and it lit him up just a bit more when it made Knox laugh.
11
He watchedDmitri pace in front of the Manor for nearly twenty minutes before the door opened, and it was pure and utter self-control that kept Raphael rooted to his desk and not reaching for his crutches to see what the hell the younger man was doing. It would have been easier if he could read the look on Dmitri’s face, but his mouth was in a soft line, and only his hands jammed in his pockets gave him away.
Raphael used his crutch to push himself across the room in his rolling chair, and he started the kettle, which clicked off just as Dmitri walked in. He threw two bags of Dmitri’s favorite mint blend into the mugs, then waved him over. “Are we going to talk about it?”
“I don’t know what…”
“Save it,” Raphael said. He filled the mugs with water, dropped in a glob of honey, then passed it over and tried not to pretend like he didn’t notice Dmitri’s hands shaking. “I know something’s wrong.”
“No.” Dmitri lifted the mug to his face, breathing in the steam instead of taking a sip, then he leaned against the coffee counter and sighed. “Nothing’s wrong, I promise. This just feels weird.”
Raphael’s stomach squirmed a little. “Just tell me then. There’s no sense in torturing yourself or me.”
Dmitri looked up at him, then licked his lips. “Remember my, uh…my professor?”
Raphael’s teeth clenched, and he had to work to relax his jaw before he could speak, because his mind instantly went to the worst case scenario. “Did he do something to you? Did he take advantage or…?”
