Colin placed his hand on Marek's shoulder, burning him with the lie still standing between them. The craziness and half stories that had been pushing at Marek from the second he laid eyes on Colin again erupted, and he spun around, knocking Colin's hand off him.
“Do you want to know what you've 'felt' for two goddamn years?” Marek raged, and barely held on to the frayed edges of rope keeping him from drowning. “You felt my fucking guilt, Colin. That's what you felt.”
Sympathy replaced desire in Colin's eyes. “I know, baby. What happened to Payton—”
Marek laughed, and it sounded a little hysterical to his ears. “Oh, yeah, that's right; let's not forget about Payton. There's a shitload of my mistakes to go around, and plenty of my guilt is for not being there for Pay when he needed me most.” Every fiber in Marek's being coiled with panic and fear, and his throat constricted so much he could barely form audible sentences. “But that's not what I'm talking about. You want your answer as to why this house chose you, if it really did? It picked you because my guilt about you eats at me every day, and it only got worse when Payton died and I came here.”
Colin took a step back, his brow furrowing. “I don't understand.” His voice wobbled, and the new fear in him cut Marek up inside.
I can't run from it anymore. His heart cracking, Marek finally spoke the words that would lose him everything. “I'm the one who told those guys you were gay all those years ago. I caused your assault.”
Marek's words sucked the air right out of Colin's world. “What?” No. No way. Colin wrapped his arms around himself, feeling the pain of his attack like it was yesterday. “What do you mean you caused my beating? You barely knew me.” All these years, Colin had been so certain the one person he'd told of his feelings for other boys—Jenna Fuller—had let it slip out, surely by accident, even though she always denied having done so. “How did you even know?”
“I'm so sorry.” Marek reached out and curled his hand around Colin's neck, tugging him in. “Colin… Please.”
“No.” Colin spun away and put up the stop sign with his hands. “Don't touch me.” He felt like he and Marek were in a carnival mirror, and everything around them pulled backward and mutated into strange, unnatural proportions. Colin's stomach churned, but he swallowed the bile and forced himself to look at Marek. “Tell me what you did. Tell me how you even knew I was gay.”
Marek heaved a deep breath and put his hand to his chest. “That's what makes it worse, if that's possible.” Wetness rimmed Marek's eyes, and Colin steeled himself not to care. “I didn't know. I threw you under the bus without any real proof. Not that proof would have made it okay.”
“That doesn't make any sense.”
“It happened that day you remembered earlier, where we walked home from the Sumters together. Up to that point in my life, that was probably the best half hour I ever experienced, talking with you, for some reason saying stuff I never would have said to another person. By the time we parted ways at the end of my block, we were having a good time, remember?”
Colin nodded with a sharp jerk. “Yeah.”
“Right.” Marek attempted a smile, but it didn't quite happen. “I was doing some stuff on purpose, you know? Leaning into you, touching my shoulder to you, just because I liked the way I felt with you, and I wanted to be closer to you. I was covering it by laughing so hard, making you think I was falling over at your jokes, but I was really trying to make it seem like touching your shoulder and arm was natural.”
His gaze dropping, Colin stared at Marek's fingers splayed against the counter, and, for a moment, slipped back to being sixteen. “I did the same. I wanted to feel your skin, and I couldn't stop looking at your hands.” Long fingers, tan skin, blunt, chewed-down fingernails, calluses… All that time ago, Colin had wondered what those hands would feel like running over his body. Now he knew. Amazing.
Shaking his head, Colin cleared out the fog of undeniable attraction and hardened his stare and heart. “Make your point. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing. Except when we separated at the end of the street, we weren't alone. You kept walking to your house to get ready for work; I headed down my street, and what's the first thing I see? Tiggs, Street, and Morales”—Marek mentioned three other guys who lived within the half dozen blocks of their neighborhood—“hanging right outside my house, waiting, and looking right at me. At us, just a second before.”
“So?” Colin still couldn't see the connection.
Marek paused and wiped his hand down his mouth and jaw to his throat. He turned and paced to the table, holding there silently for a long moment. Abruptly, he turned around and strode back to Colin, his blue eyes still unnaturally bright. “Shit, Colin, I didn't even like those guys that much, but I grew up around them, and sometimes you hang out and shoot hoops if there isn't anything else happening, just because. That afternoon, I walked up to them sick as hell inside. I thought I was going to throw up because I knew I was attempting
