Chapter Text
How do you explain a kiss?
Do you list the chemical chain reaction, break the desire down into its mathematical formula, a paper snowflake chain of amine ions, carboxylic acid, hydrogen bonds? Do you graph the exact angle of intersection, mouth slanted over mouth, that wet, panting point of connection? The human language is a clumsy thing, surface-level, incomplete—some things can only be described by their silhouette, can only be glimpsed side-long and longing, like the solar eclipse spied through a peephole, through darkened glass. Too bright for words.
The elevator ride from the rooftop down to their room isn’t awkward. Nolan won’t let it be awkward.
“So, um, some view that was on the rooftop, huh? I mean, Times Square from up there is just... all those lights, the billboards, the energy. You can see everything, the whole city just spreading its legs for you. All, wow, you know? I actually thought about living here, like, permanently at one point…” He rambles, can feel blood throbbing in his tender lips with every newly shaped word. He has no idea what he’s saying, mouth on auto-pilot. His whole body feels stirred up, one leg bouncing restlessly as he resists the urge to pace their enclosed metal box like some wild thing. Resists the urge to cross the empty meter of space between them, press Hartley back against the wall and beg—
What is taking so long, he wonders, desperate, are we even moving? Is the elevator broken?
“I mean, I love the city’s energy, I really do, but I think I’d miss having, um, space. Somewhere to unwind, where you’re not surrounded by millions of people all the time. It’s great to dive into for a while, but... living in it? That’s a whole other story."
Nolan is doing such a good job of playing it cool, of not looking at Hartley, forcibly dialing back his awareness of his soulmate’s body to focus solely on the descending numbers of the elevator floor levels that the sudden touch on his shoulder makes him jump.
“Booth, relax.” Hartley commands and Nolan, risking a side-long glance at him, immediately regrets it.
Hartley looks frustrated, his lips—don’t look at them!—twisted downward in a shape that wrings all the softness out of them. His eyebrows are furrowed, almost confused.
“It was just a kiss.”
All of Nolan’s pent-up nervous energy goes suddenly cold, frozen over. His leg stops bouncing, his fingers lay flat at his side. From the outside, it looks like calm, like an acupuncture needle slid into just the right spot to release the tension, instead of what is really is: emotional paralysis.
“Yeah,” says Nolan, even his lips gone numb. “Just a little work smooch. I give those to all my co-workers.”
“We know,” says Hartley shortly.
Ding. The elevator door slides open.
The door swings open and Nolan, nineteen, giddy with excitement, balances the ice cream cake carefully on one open palm. He spent way too long dithering at the grocery store, trying to decide what to ask the bored-looking employee behind the pastry counter to engrave on the top.
Happy 1 month Anniversary! seemed like too much to fit on a small, two-person cake and was technically grammatically incorrect. Thanks for all the great sex was more accurate but a little crude. In the end, he’d gone with Cheers To Us.
Sweet but not coming on too strong.
“Hana, it’s me!” He calls out, hoping his girlfriend’s roommate isn’t in so they don’t have to share—the cake or each other. Her roommate is an actress too and the two of them are always running lines these days, helping each other prepare for auditions, talking about acting workshops and character backstories and dialect coaching and a million other things that secretly make Nolan go cross-eyed with boredom.
Nolan leaves the cake on the kitchen counter and makes his way up the stairs. Her bedroom door is cracked open and he is bounding enthusiastically halfway through the door before his brain registers the glimpse of bare skin, two many arms and legs, tousled hair too blonde to be Hana’s. The world goes slow-motion, that dragged-out hyper-focus Nolan gets when he’s on the job and something is about to go wrong—but by then it’s too late to halt the momentum and he’s pulling up short in front of the bed.
There’s a moment—gut-wrenching—before his girlfriend and her roommate look away from each other when her face is soft and easy in a way he’s never seen before.
“Sorry,” Nolan says, stupidly, “Should’ve knocked.”
“No worries,” says his girlfriend, like it’s no big deal. She doesn’t sound guilty. Just awkward, maybe even a little annoyed, flicking a glance at her roommate who rolls her eyes and tugs the duvet a little higher. “Were we supposed to meet up tonight?”
Nolan is rapidly coming to several conclusions, all of them deeply embarrassing. He can feel his face go hot, feels the corners of his eyes prickle—idiot, he tells himself viciously but it doesn’t help—and all he can do is hope desperately that it doesn’t show.
“Nah, I just, um, thought I’d surprise you.” Nolan tries to smile but it feels weird, he’s not entirely sure what the muscles in his face are doing. “Since I was in the area, you know. No biggie.”
“That’s so sweet,” says Hana after a pause. “Sorry I can’t hang out tonight. But I’ll see you at work tomorrow…?”
“Yeah, it’s all good,” lies Nolan and despite his prickling eyes, he does not look away from her. “It’s not like we were dating."
It’s deeply embarrassing to admit but… Nolan is not good at picking locks. He’s the number two art thief for good reason—he’s got the audacity for it and the soft skills, the ability to blend in when required, and the shark's sense for blood, for weak spots.
Sadly, none of this helps him with lock picking. He gets nervous, excited, shaky with adrenaline, and when he presses his ear to the keyhole to listen for the tell-tell sounds of the lock tumblers, he is instead overwhelmed with the sound of his own heartbeat, his own blood throbbing in his inner ear, balance gone off-kilter, and he misses the momentary snick.
Nolan spins too far, spins himself back out.
“You want it too much,” chastises his juvie roommate, all of fourteen years old but looking half that age with his face screwed up in a mix of amusement and exasperation as he hangs over the top bunk to give Nolan pointers as he sweats and swears over a set of practice handcuffs that he bribed off the boy from across the hall.
(Bribery, thankfully, has always come easy to him.)
“Of course I want it,” Nolan snaps back, lack of progress and sleep making him bitchy. “I wouldn’t be wasting my fucking time practicing if I didn’t.”
His roommate executes a disorienting upside-down shrug.
“Can’t want it too much,” he says again, unhelpfully.
Nolan tries to take the advice, really, he does. But he has never figured out how to want things less. To let go of them, sure, but that’s something else entirely.
Still, what he can’t learn by aptitude, he learns instead by brute force and muscle memory. He cuffs himself nearly three hundred times that summer, until the tiny metal screws and hinges go wobbly and threaten to fall apart, but in the end, taking the handcuffs off is as simple as putting them on.
Zara opens the hotel door, looks between the two of them. She frowns.
“What’s wrong?”
There’s a long answer to that question but Nolan pushes past her, shaping his numb lips into an easygoing grin, flops in one of the overstuffed hotel room chairs, and gives her the short answer instead.
“Turns out Angelo’s an idiot,” he says with a nonchalant wave towards a stoic-faced Hartley. “Thought we were…”
Soulmates, he doesn’t say. Physically cannot get the word out.
“Together,” finishes Hartley after a protracted pause.
“Oh!” Zara says, more enthusiastically than he thinks she means to. “Did the plan…?”
“Salvageable.” Hartley twitches one shoulder in a shrug, two fingers raised to rub at his temples and he looks tired, looks frustrated, that familiar muscle twitching along his jawline. Nolan knows the exact shape of his jaw now, the flex of skin beneath his fingers, the taste. He looks away.
“Oh,” Zara says, dimming, taking a seat on the edge of the freshly made bed. Again, she glances between him and Nolan. “What happened?”
That’s Nolan’s cue to jump in, to say something meaninglessly flirtatious and perhaps a little crude. The show must go on, right? He slouches down further into his chair, kicks out his legs in a messy sprawl. He gives Zara a sloppy wink, sing-songs, “A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.”
The muscle along Hartley’s jaw twitches.
Zara stands up in one graceful motion, so beautiful it must be practiced—a slow uncrossing of legs, a flash of sun-kissed inner thigh, one perfectly manicured hand smoothing down the ripples of her dress, drawing the eye to every curve of form. She moves over to Hartley’s side, drapes herself along his back, and runs her slender fingers along the length of Hartley’s jawline to ease the tension there, the whole time keeping eye contact with Nolan so that he is forced to look at both of them at once.
“Good thing you’re not a gentleman,” she answers in a sly tone.
“Shot in the heart,” Nolan says in a mock gasp, collapsing backward, one hand placed protectively over his chest. He presses hard, feels the thump-thump as if from a great distance. “So cruel, so…”
“Accurate?” She offers, unbothered by his theatrics.
“You always are,” says Nolan and suddenly it all feels terribly difficult—the easy smile, the easy sprawl, the easy banter. Sitting here in this tiny airless room with the both of them so close to him and yet so unfathomably far away. At least, Nolan can’t. Fathom it, that is. Can’t figure out how to reach across the distance and ask them to love him like they love each other. It’s hubris.
“You should see me with a gun.” Zara sighs a little with self-satisfaction, no false modesty.
“Not sure I’ll survive a round two,” he laughs, a little brittle.
They both blink at him, in tandem. He’s so busy repressing his resentment, his yearning envy of their in-sync-ness, that it takes him a moment to realize why.
“So you do remember that night in Paria,” muses Zara. “I had wondered…”
Nolan laughs again; brittle is an understatement.
“Told you not to underestimate my Irish liver.”
They’re looking at him with the same expression on their faces but he has no idea what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling. He wants to look away and finds he can’t, suckered in by the gravity, the intense magnetism of their attention.
There’s a weird pause in the conversation, uncomfortable and unusual. One of them always seemed to know what to say but…
“Look, about the job,” Nolan says abruptly, a clumsy attempt to re-direct the conversation, to put some solid ground under him because he feels lost and unmoored, tugged at by invisible currents he doesn’t understand. He is a strong swimmer but dark waters should always be treated with caution. The ocean is bigger than you was his boss’s mantra the summer that he worked as a lifeguard.
“Let me handle Angelo,” he continues, getting to his feet. “Zara can take over the room service plan and I’ll pretend you and I had some big fight, that I’m trying to make you jealous. I can take Angelo back to—” the rooftop he never gets a chance to finish because Hartley is suddenly shaking off Zara’s soothing touch, all the tension back in his jawline, the vein at his temple gone taut.
“Do whatever you want,” Hartley snaps. “I’m taking a shower.”
He stalks towards the bathroom, shoulders hunched up almost to his ears. Nolan watches him go, watches Zara watching him go, and can’t decide if the suppressed twitch of her lips is annoyance or amusement.
“Is he…?”
Zara waves the implied question away. “Don’t worry, he gets overly attached to plans sometimes.”
“I thought that was you.”
She makes a low humming sound, thoughtful, looking at him slantwise from under her long eyelashes. Definitely amused now, though he can’t tell why.
“We’re both learning to improvise more.”
“About Angelo—“ he tries again but she cuts him off with a quick shake of her head, not angry but sharp and decisive.
“No need,” Zara says, looping her arm through his and gently escorting him to the door. “We’ve got it handled.”
So much for improv, he thinks bitterly. He feels his face go hot with a mixture of embarrassment and anger, feeling the professional snub more acutely than he expected. This whole mess is his fault after all—he’s the one that went off script, the thing he knows they hate doing unless they absolutely have to. Maybe it was hubris, his suppressed longing to play the role of husband making him go temporarily insane.
But to have had the briefest taste—oh, he thinks. Icarus, how warm and sweet was the sun on your face before you fell? Did you regret it?
"Right. Well, I guess I’ll just…” Nolan starts, but his words trail off. He mutters a quick goodbye, pulling his arm away from hers, and hastens out the door without looking back.
He gets in the elevator and paws at the top buttons of his linen shirt, at the diamond pendant hanging heavy at the hollow of his throat, feeling like he can’t breathe. Like his skin is fit too tightly over his body, like his heart is about to go bursting out of his ribcage in a super-nova flare of emotions so strong he can’t even identify them.
(His therapist once showed him a handy chart of emotion words, all color-coded. Sad words had been various blues: hopeless, disappointed, sorrowful, miserable, etc. You don’t have a word for sad and horny, he’d joked. She’d dismissed that as not being a primary emotion but Nolan begged to differ.)
He punches the button for the rooftop without really thinking about it, needing air.
It’s blessedly cool on the rooftop, and quiet, the musicians long since having packed up and gone home. The bar is still open—this is New York City, after all—but only a few stragglers sit around and the bartender is beginning to tidy up. Silhouetted by the city lights as he leans out over the railing, a lone man smokes a cigarette.
Angelo.
He shouldn’t. He really shouldn’t.
But Nolan is already taking out his phone and sending off a brief text.
The mark is on the roof. You’ve got twenty minutes.
At any given moment, Nolan is tracking down a half dozen leads for the art he wants back: Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat, the first thing he’d specifically acquired based on his perception of Bishop’s preferences, which is currently caught up in a fierce three-way international custody battle between Holland, France, and Austria; his early and untitled Temara painting, which is rumored to be in Warsaw; his Kemet plates which have popped back up in an authentication house in Rome of all places; his original Hokusai pornography woodcut—he took a knife to his left arm for that particular piece and he is unwilling to give it up, even if they think it's crude.
It’s frustrating as hell but there’s not even the slightest whisper of a rumor on the current whereabouts of The Kiss, which managed to disappear sometime between his house being invaded and evidence processing in Lyon, France. No word yet on how or who. The why, Nolan assumes, is self-explanatory.
Of course, he’s not bothering to go after everything he lost.
After meeting his soulmates and refining his former blurred best guesses with hard data, there are a half dozen pieces he’s happy to let go of. His three-piece collection of Chagall for example. He’s still torn about whether to go through the effort of requiring Mignon’s The Overturned Bouquet, which always confused him a little but now makes sense as an inside joke, or maybe a prank on him, a test to see if he would jump through hoops to acquire something objectively silly if he perceived they valued it.
(The answer is, embarrassingly, yes.)
But despite his best efforts, his house remains a work in progress, the re-building going painfully slow. It’s his fault, really.
Nolan simply can’t stand the idea of anything temporary in his house so he leaves certain places empty; odd, noticeable gaps in the functionality of the space. He owns an exquisite set of knives, forks, rosewood chopsticks, large porcelain soup spoons, and tiny delicate sugar spoons but no regular ones. His bedroom is almost entirely empty, with nothing on the walls, a bare wood floor. Two nightstands sit comically far apart, waiting like patient sentinels for the arrival of a back-ordered mattress and bed frame from Tuscany. He doesn’t go in there much.
For now, he sleeps on the couch, suspended in limbo, in that place between the idea of home and the reality of it.
Gabriel’s apartment is comically tiny, a little Parisian matchbox, but it’s all he can afford on his salary as a newly hired station chef and he despises living with roommates. The only redeeming feature is the generous wrought-iron balcony, located a half-step from the bed, which nearly doubles the square footage of the place.
Nolan watches the silvery play of moonlight over the muscles of Gabriel’s naked back as he leans out over the railing and smokes a cigarette. He looks like a beautiful sculpture, like he could be added to any number of stunning marble fountains that Nolan passes by on the way to school. He’s playing the wide-eyed foreign exchange student for this con, scamming the University of Paris into a semester of educating him on their dime while he cases their world-renowned library of medieval literature. He’s got a buyer lined up for a gorgeously illustrated Book of Hours manuscript that he’s almost tempted to keep for himself.
“You’re such a French stereotype,” he teases, propping his chin up on his elbow for a better view. Gabriel flips him a lazy middle finger and he chokes back an honest-to-god giggle. He’s still in that blissful dreamy post-sex haze, wrung out in a pleasant way and stupid with it.
“Gabe, I’ve been thinking…”
He trails off with a sinking feeling in his belly, watching the muscles of Gabriel’s back bunching up into chiaroscuro knots of tension. Still, he wets his lips and tries again.
“I know we haven’t known each other that long but—“
“We said no strings,” Gabriel cuts him off without turning around but his voice is kind. Horribly, painfully kind, with no room for negotiation. “I can’t give you what you’re looking for.”
Nolan drops his eyes to his lap, to the pooled fabric of the bedsheets in his lap cast mostly in shadow. Neither of them moves for a long moment—Gabriel smoking at the balcony, Nolan with his head bowed low—and he thinks, the sweet coital haze dissipating in the silence to be replaced with a sardonic self-cutting humor, that they make a perfect Baroque painting. A Lover’s Quarrel, he titles it.
“Yeah, of course,” Nolan says, keeping his voice light. It’s become easier over the years, with practice. “Forget I said anything, it was the orgasm high.”
The tension smoothes away, like rippled water eddying out, and Gabriel flicks the cigarette stub down in the street below—asshole, he thinks with unwilling fondness—as he turns around to face Nolan. There’s a grin on his handsome face, the slight chip in his front tooth on full and devastating display.
“Bet I can make you say something even stupider,” Gabriel promises and crosses the half-step back across the room to press him back down into the bed.
For three months, Nolan lazes about Saint Petersburg as the kept man of the kept women of a minor Russian mobster. He’s twenty-four pretending to be eighteen, still baby-faced enough to pull it off, all youthful bravado and clumsy eagerness to please. Katrina thinks he’s just some lonely, too-pretty kid trying to make it as a professional mistress and is delighted to take him in, in every sense of the word.
She teaches him all manner of useful things, including how to make himself cry on command.
“Very good,” she praises him from her perch in his lap, hand-feeding him pomegranate seeds in-between kisses, the sweet-tart burst of them mingling with the taste of her mouth and the salt of his tears until his lips are swollen and slippery with juice and he is begging her to stop—or to fuck him already.
“Baby boy,” she croons. “Always hold something back, remember that.”
The day after he’s stolen a matching ruby necklace and earrings set from her Russian mobster, he gives Katrina one last call as a courtesy, a heads up that she should either firm up an alibi or find another wealthy sponsor. He is expecting anger, maybe betrayal, but she only hums approvingly—a sound that, over the last twelve weeks, he has been trained to react to and even with two countries between them for safety, Nolan begins to salivate.
“You are like a Matryoshka doll,” she tells him with the tap tap of her long fingernails against the phone. “A thing within a thing within a thing, a pretty deception.”
“I don’t understand,” says Nolan but he’s afraid that he does.
“You use the illusion to distract from the truth—that you are the same on the inside as the outside. Baby boy, you wear your heart on your sleeve.”
She’s still laughing at him when he hangs up.
Usually Nolan packs his stuff in a half-blind rush but this time he’s got an extra two hours to kill and several gift bags to somehow fit into a single carry-on bag, counting they love me, they love me not under his breath with each folded shirt and pair of pants.
He’s not sure it will all fit. There’s a chance he’ll end up wearing an awkward amount of layers at the airport but Nolan, who once left behind five thousand dollars cash in a checked suitcase because he was too impatient to wait for the delayed baggage carousel, does not consider leaving a single item behind. Not even the socks.
If Angelo is surprised to see him, he hides it well.
“Oh no,” he says with grating false sympathy. “I hope I was not the cause of any trouble with your husband.”
Nolan sighs, extending an open hand in a ‘gimme’ gesture. Angelo passes him a cigarette and steps closer, entirely unnecessarily, to light it for him. He takes a long drag of the cigarette, sucks the sweet poison of it into his lungs and holds it there, letting himself go a little dizzy.
“Thanks,” says Nolan finally, exhaling smoke. And then, because the other man is clearly dying to ask why he’s up here alone, he instead adds: “Winstons? Very nice, haven’t smoked these in a long time.”
Angelo’s smile tightens at the corners, going stale.
“My wife hated them, always tried to make me quit.” He pauses, corrects himself. “Ex-wife.”
“Ah,” says Nolan.
Angelo hasn’t stepped back after lighting his cigarette and Nolan doesn’t either. He turns his head slightly to the side to exhale more smoke, still keeping his eyes on Angelo, watching the man watch his mouth. It makes him feel satisfied, as it almost always does to know someone is attracted to him, but not like—whatever that had been earlier, with Hartley. Like comparing apples to orchard dirt; coming from the same point of origin but otherwise worlds apart.
“Do you still think of her, every time you kiss someone else?”
Angelo jerks like he’s been shot. Bang.
“Will her memory always haunt you, turning every other kiss to ash? Did your soulmate ruin you for everybody else?” Nolan continues ruthlessly, not sure what exactly he’s doing but yielding up to the words that have been crushed up under his tongue with the cigarette smoke. They come out heavy, laden with toxins, with all his suppressed fears and frustrations. It’s not exactly therapy but he hasn’t slept with Angelo, which already makes this situation more ethical.
“I—I don’t—“
Angelo stumbles a half-step back, the hand holding his cigarette thrown up between them like a warding gesture. The tip of his cigarette glows red-hot in the darkness.
Nolan doesn’t care, steps closer.
“Tell me how you do it,” he asks, nearly begging. “How do you keep going afterwards, when they leave you?”
“I don’t—it was just a dance—it’s not my fault.” Angelo gasps on a ragged breath and there’s something else that lays festering just under the surface, some guilty resonance to the excuses running too deep to be about a stranger.
“You blame her for leaving,” Nolan guesses and when Angelo flinches—bang bang—he can’t help adding, with a touch of cruelty, “But how many times did she stay?”
Angelo’s eyes are red-rimmed. The tip of his cigarette has cooled from its ember glow and when his hand trembles, it ashes the ground between them. Nolan shakes his head, obscurely disappointed. This isn’t a man with any answers.
“Do yourself a favor,” says Nolan. “Take better care of your son before he leaves you too.”
Angelo makes an odd sound—part whimper, part curse—and flees.
It’s only then that Nolan notices they have an audience.
“Oops,” he says, attempting a smile. “That probably wasn’t twenty minutes.”
Hartley steps up to the railing to join him, his body language oddly hesitant. He ducks his head, looking out over the city—still beautiful, still lit up—instead of at Nolan. To stop himself from saying anything stupid like please tell me you didn’t hear all that, or worse yet are you mad at me?, he takes another long drag of his cigarette. He’s starting to feel the nicotine buzz in the back of his teeth, feels the grit of the smoke settling unpleasantly on his tongue.
“I didn’t—“
“I wanted to—“
They both start at the same time. They look at each other, share an awkward laugh. Nolan executes an elaborate bow in Hartley’s direction, letting him go first.
Hartley takes a deep breath, squaring his broad shoulders, and turns to face him head-on. His gut is already sinking, a dozen unpleasant conversations jumping to mind starting with it’s been fun but I think we should see other people or whatever the equivalent is between a couple of freelancing professionals sharing a niche field of work.
“I wanted to apologize.”
Nolan blinks.
Hartley takes another big, gulping breath and says in a rush. “I—I shouldn’t have assumed or taken one of your jokes for permission to… and especially not when the job meant you weren’t actually in a position to say no without blowing our cover. It was badly done of me and I’m sorry.”
Nolan blinks again, thrown entirely off-kilter in the face of such unexpected and overwhelming sincerity. His throat feels dry; he licks his lips and tastes the residue of soot. Bitter, a hint of clove. He wishes there was something else spliced in, some chemical compound he could blame for the sudden giddy rush that has him swaying in place beside his own emotional weakness.
“Oh,” he says, voice soft.
Hartley makes a aborted gesture, like he wants to reach out and thinks better of it. Instead he shoves his hands into his pockets and looks away again, out across the wash of city lights.
“You’re still in love with your soulmate, aren’t you?”
Nolan feels the bang of it, feels his body shudder from the impact. He spares a second to feel sorry for Angelo, for his emotional ambush. The silence stretches between them like taffy, the weird rushing distortion of time that happens when you’re held under moving water. Smeary-slow and fast at the same time. He takes another long drag of his cigarette to buy time, to plug up the sudden wound.
“Nah,” says Nolan eventually, his voice rough from the smoke. “That was a long time ago.”
“I see,” Hartley says, looking unconvinced and increasingly—not awkward exactly, something else. Nolan’s own emotional equilibrium is too messed up to leave him any room for guessing how anyone else is feeling. “Either way, I’m sorry for overstepping.”
“It was—“ fine he doesn’t say. Fine doesn’t begin to cover it. The best kiss he’s ever had, but he can’t say that either.
He swallows, tries again.
“You can seduce me whenever the job requires,” he ends up offering. The words come out casual, completely lighthearted, and he’s almost proud of himself for how steady he sounds. A lifetime of brute force practice brought to bear upon this single moment. “Blanket permission for you and Zara.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Hartley jerk his head away from the city and back to him. Good, thinks the part of him that’s been shriveled up and attention-starved for too long but for his own sanity, Nolan does not look back. He brings the cigarette back to his lips and tries to keep his fingers from trembling.
“Every job should have its perks,” he adds, smiling a little crookedly.
It’s not their fault, what they do to him. Not so much a seduction as a subduction, pulled so deep that he is melted down and re-forged. They will leave him a different shape than they found him. I love you is a pale imitation of what he really feels, like the shadow on Plato’s cave wall. I am sick with you gets closer to the truth, or I crave the jungle heat of your mouth. Nolan wants to be crushed flat beneath the animal weight of him until their atoms touch and ignite in a shower of sparks. He wants to be sublimated.
Instead, Nolan gestures with his cigarette, a careful motion to disguise the tremor.
“I’m just gonna finish this,” he says. “Don’t wait up.”
He feels more than hears Hartley linger another moment, fights to keep his posture loose and casual, as if lost in thought. Finally his footsteps retreat and Nolan is alone. His casual sprawl becomes a slump, his free hand drifting down to the divot of his right hip. His heart throbs inside his chest.
“Fuck,” he whispers. He’s in so much trouble.