5. Byrd

5

Byrd

I forgot about the idiots on the 128, gawking at the lush scenery and crawling past the turnouts at thirty-five miles an hour on their way back to the city. So I'm irritated, irrationally nervous, and twenty minutes late picking up Jericho Wash.

"He's nothing like his brother," Reggie had assured me. "I wouldn't send him to you if I thought he was going to dig up old graves."

From anyone else, I'd take it with a grain of salt and think they were placating me, but Reggie was the one who picked up the pieces when Gabriel and I went down in flames at the end of our senior year. I trust her judgment, the way I should have back then, but I'm still on edge. She sent me the kid's file along with the contract documents, including a link to his first-round audition video, but despite her reassurances, I'm too chickenshit to watch it.

I tell myself it's for all the same reasons I always go into auditions blind—I like my eyes fresh and my critical brain uncluttered by expectation. But my objectivity is unraveling with every winding mile, tidal memories undercutting the promise of novelty .

When I pull around the curb outside the airport, my eyes slide right past the young man in faded jeans, smoking a cigarette with his white Stone Island hoodie pulled up against the insistent drizzle. I'm looking for a slight build, for dark curls and drama. I'm expecting recognition . But the Santa Rosa airport is ridiculously small—one gate, one building, with a pickup lane only four spaces long—and I'm late. After a quick glance at the shadowed overhang guarding the single entrance, I realize this guy is it.

I bring the 4-Runner to a stop in front of him and roll the passenger window down, then lean across the console to call his name.

"Jericho Wash?"

He lifts his head and meets my eyes, and something hot that should feel like relief but is too electric carves itself across my chest. He has the porcelain skin, but that's the last resemblance. The eyes are still blue, but where Gabriel's were dark and fathomless, these are bright and brilliant, the color as unreal as the shock of hair escaping beneath his hood to cling wetly to his face. He looks like a character from one of the video games James and I would play on Sundays while Lara was out with her girlfriends. Something out of Final Fantasy or Assassin's Creed ; beauty like the edge of a knife.

Then he pulls the cigarette from his lips with a half smile, and the wide mouth breaks the illusion, rendering him human, if no less dangerous.

"Toss the cigarette and grab your shit." It comes out colder than I intend, or maybe it only sounds that way through the pounding pulse in my ears.

He ignores me, leaning his elbows on the open window, filling my space with the rich, bitter scent of tobacco and, underneath, something liquid and clean .

"It's organic," he says, meaning nothing. Meaning the cigarette, meaning the way his shoulders fill the window frame and the cerulean tips of his hair drip water on the warm leather passenger seat.

"Just get in," I reply after a long moment of forgetting how to breathe, straightening with a jerk of my head that frees me from his gaze. "Leave the window cracked."

He pinches the filter between his teeth with another smile and turns to the huge black tote bag gathering moisture on the curb. I keep my eyes on the rain while he bends to gather the short straps and tosses it carelessly into the back seat.

You're going to have to watch him do a lot more than that, idiot. What are you gonna do when the sweatshirt comes off?

He climbs in beside me, and I hold out my hand, feeling awkwardly ancient when he stares at it for a long second before giving me his own.

"Byrd." Obviously .

His fingers are long and elegant, warm from the pocket of his hoodie, and I can feel the worn calluses on his palm and the faint ridge of new scars under my fingertips.

"Echo," he replies, pulling his hand back and drawing on the cigarette without taking his eyes from my face.

"We call him ‘Echo' because he's always following me around, thinking he's gonna be the next hot-shit circus god." I remember Gabriel laughing, and how I laughed with him, marveling at his cleverness. Now all I can think of is how Echo and I both carry the weight of Gabriel's ambiguous attention in our names. I wonder how much he knows, and if he'll hold it against me—and what it means that I care.

"Have you ever been to the coast up here?" I ask, pulling into the exit lane with way more attention than warranted by the nonexistent traffic .

"Mermaid country?" Another crooked smile tips those wide lips. "Yeah, spent a couple of weeks in Mendocino over the summer when I was a kid."

Mermaid country. It makes him sound young, and it throws me back to the first time I drove up the 1 and discovered the sinuous coves with their blooming cliffs. I remember the lure. Lara never got it. She liked the cabin because it let her claim my undivided attention, but she always missed the lights of Sausalito and the carnival of culture across the Golden Gate.

"I used to call it Neverland," I confess, "when I first started coming here."

"Got a thing for lost boys?" The tone is light, teasing, but when I glance over, his eyes are on the cigarette in his hand, or maybe on the hand itself.

Once upon a time, I thought I was in love with Peter Pan.

"I prefer adults these days," I say instead. He stubs the cigarette out on the window's wet edge and tucks the butt away in the pack before shifting to face me.

"Find many of those at the Cirque auditions?" he asks, folding a leg up onto the seat so his knee presses close to the gear shift and his jeans stretch tight across his thigh. He catches me looking, and the grin turns wicked. "Or was it all twinks and divas trying to suck your cock to get ahead?"

"Is that what you are? Just another twink trying to suck my cock? "

Reggie was right—I should have gotten myself laid in the city. Shit .

He drags his hood down and leans his head against the window, and I see that his hair is straight and thick, and only the spiky edges are that startling blue. The rest is almost black, scrambled from the hoodie and begging to be tamed.

"No one's called me a twink since I was fourteen," he says. "That was the year I gained three inches on my brother, and he never bothered after that."

"He meant it as an insult?" It's not really a question. I can hear Gabriel's voice in my head, taunting the little brother who dared to outgrow him.

"Didn't you ?" He quirks a black-wing brow.

The left one.

I look away, fighting the faint nausea that tries to crawl up my throat.

I remember lying in bed, both of us laughing while Gabriel tried to teach me the gesture. I never figured out the trick of it.

"You don't seem particularly insulted," I observe before the silence can grow awkward. He doesn't. He seems relaxed, curious, but I notice the way he keeps pulling his sweatshirt cuff down over his right hand.

"I'm more interested in what it says about your sexual orientation that you called me a twink."

I take the bait and blame it on the ghost between us.

"So you are trying to suck my cock?" I absolutely do not shift in my seat, keeping my eyes glued to the road.

"Would it get me out of this evaluation?"

"No." Before I can ask if he wants to get out of it, he continues.

"And it's not my mouth that's broken." Self-loathing flickers across his face, so quick I'd have missed it if I wasn't obsessing over every molecule of him.

"Obviously not." I can't help a wry smile—or fight the way it widens when his gaze drops immediately to my mouth.

"Maybe we can work a few hand jobs into my training routine?" His laugh is ragged at the edges, and he wiggles the fingers of his scarred hand at me while I shake my head and try not to come apart.

I am so fucked.

"Got another cigarette?"