LOGINWyatt’s POVIt had been three days since Jonathan started staying with us, and he had locked himself inside one of the spare rooms in Bryce’s house.He refused to talk to me.I did not know whether he had spoken to Bryce at all during that time. All I knew was that he avoided me completely. If he heard my footsteps in the hallway, the door stayed shut. If I paused outside and said his name, there was only silence on the other side. That silence was killing me from the inside out. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to apologize properly for every lie, one by one, until there was nothing left unsaid between us. I wanted us to sit down in the same room and go through each thing I had done wrong, the mask, the recordings, the jealousy, the cowardice of pretending to be two different men. I wanted to confess everything without protection or excuse. Most of all, I wanted him to know that I loved him, and that I had wanted him long before the first night he ever knelt for a stranger in the da
Wyatt’s POVWe reached the park and Bryce barely finished parking before we were both out of the car. The restroom was near the trees. It looked old and dirty. My heart was loud in my ears. I was scared we would open the door and find Jonathan gone. Or hurt, or already in trouble we could not stop. Jonathan might have come early. He might have panicked and left. He might have been found by someone else.I pushed the outer door open, the air inside stale. One stall door was closed while the others were empty. The light above us flickered once and then stayed on.I did not wait. I shoved the closed stall door open so hard that it hit the wall.Jonathan was there.He sat on the closed toilet lid, with his hands hung between his knees. His shoulders were curled in, like he had been trying to make himself small for a long time. He looked thinner than the last time I saw him. There were dark circles under his eyes. His skin looked almost gray. His clothes hung loose on him. He looked so w
Wyatt’s POVI pushed through the edge of the small crowd and stopped.Paramedics were lifting a body from the road. For one second I was sure it was Jonathan because the body looked thin and familiar.. The fear in me was so strong that I thought I was going to pass out. Then I saw the face of the person only to see that it was Lucas.The accident had been bad. I took a step back without meaning to. My breath caught hard in my throat. Lucas was dead. From the way the cars sat, the things scattered on the ground, and how fast the paramedics moved, he had probably been on his way to the same park we were racing toward. He was going to meet Jonathan, carrying those videos with him, ready to use them.I should have felt bad. A student of mine was dead on the side of the road but instead, the first feeling that I felt after the shock was relief. It felt so relieved that it almost made my knees give out.Jonathan was not the body on the ground. Jonathan was not the one being loaded into t
Wyatt’s POVWe were already close to the park when the full weight of everything I had done settled onto my chest and refused to move.I gripped the steering wheel harder than necessary, my knuckles aching under the pressure, and stared at the road without truly seeing it. The lines on the asphalt blurred together. Anger, sadness, and a deep, sick kind of regret rotated through me in relentless turns, each one sharper than the last. I was devastated, worried, confused and most of all, I was furious, furious at Lucas for the audacity of stealing the videos from my laptop and turning them into a weapon, and even more furious at myself for creating that weapon in the first place.I did not want to imagine what Lucas might still do with those files. I did not want to think about how many clips he had taken, or who else might already be holding copies, or how quickly a single upload could finish destroying Jonathan’s life. The thought of Jonathan’s face becoming public property made my s
Bryce’s POVI and Wyatt did not speak for the first few minutes of the drive.Wyatt’s jaw stayed locked tight, and the split skin on his knuckles left faint red marks each time his hands shifted on the steering wheel. I kept my eyes on the road ahead and forced myself to breathe evenly. If I let the anger rise any higher, I knew I would hit him again, and that would not help Jonathan in any way.Jonathan’s dorm was not far from Wyatt’s house. Even so, the distance felt longer than it should have and every slow car in front of us made my patience thinner.“How long was Lucas in your house?” I asked at last.“A few days,” Wyatt answered. His voice was flat, stripped of the usual control he wore in public. “He told me he needed a quiet place to study. That was the reason he gave, and I believed him.”I turned my head to look at him.“You believed a student who claimed he only wanted quiet, and then you left your laptop sitting on the kitchen counter?”“I was drunk for most of those days
Bryce’s POVI saw the answer on Wyatt’s face before he said anything.His shoulders dropped and he could not look me in the eye. His mouth opened and closed like he was trying to find a softer way to tell me the truth. He had recorded it.I rushed him and punched him in the face.His head snapped to the side as he stumbled back into the counter. A bottle fell and broke and the wine spread across the floor.“What were you thinking?” I yelled at him . “Why would you take a video of the two of you having sex? Why were you not careful with it? How did it get out? What the hell is going on?”Wyatt held his jaw with one hand. Blood was already at the corner of his mouth but did not hit me back. He just stood there, breathing hard, looking at me like he was still trying to catch up with everything I had said. “I promise you,” he said, his voice rough from the drink and the shock. “The video was only for me. I kept it so I could watch it later. I never knew it would get out. I do not know w







