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“I hate them.”
Sebastian debated forcing another bite down and quickly decided against it. There’d be plenty of food where they were going and that had been intolerable. “What are you talking about? You eat them all the time!”
He closed up the pack, pulled it over his shoulders, picked up the lantern, and racked his memory to make sure that was true. It definitely was. He’d seen Hess chewing on ration bars many times back when they’d been more of a mobile unit—before they’d taken the head of government at Ralscoln.
“Doesn’t mean I like them.” Disgust bubbled up from Hess, and Sebastian almost laughed. After tasting those things with Hess’s mouth, he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to eat one again.
“But your face never showed it.” Sebastian lifted the lantern when they got to a T intersection, checked the nonsense-looking marks he’d scratched into the wall years ago, and went left.
“My face doesn’t show a lot of things.”
“Like how you feel about me?” Sebastian squeezed his eyes shut as soon as the thought happened. He’d always been terrible at controlling his mouth; controlling his thoughts was even more impossible. Then again, he’d berated himself for not getting the words out back in Hess’s room that morning. Maybe this was a good thing.
Hess paused, and Sebastian felt him reach out to stroke affectionately across his consciousness. “Like how I feel about you.”
Despite himself, Sebastian mentally turned to that feeling like a flower to the sun, soaking it in and reveling in it. “You care about me?”
Hess slid closer, emanating wry humor. “Care about you might be an understatement. I’ve been obsessed with you since the moment I saw you. You were trying to convince Farlon to let you join the Resistance.”
“And I’d brought him an entire truckload of guns I’d stolen to make my case.” Sebastian laughed out loud as he remembered Farlon’s bewildered expression—torn between absurd pleasure at the present and deep concern about actually accepting Sebastian into the ranks.
“You captivated me,” Hess admitted, and his consciousness pulled away, but Sebastian followed, needing to hear more. “The way you moved, what you’d done, I couldn’t look away. I still can’t look away.”
Sebastian breathed shakily. He wanted to fall into those words, but he was afraid he’d lose himself in them. Hess had never said any of this before that day in the hangar, had never even hinted, and Sebastian had been buzzing around him for years. “Why did you never tell me?”
“Because I didn’t want to feel this way—”
Sebastian’s blooming heart shriveled up and crashed back down to the ground.
“No, stop.” Hess’s command arrested Sebastian’s quick emotional descent. “It has nothing to do with you being a torvar. I don’t care about that. I can’t even tell you how much I don’t care about that other than how fucking amazing you are when you take advantage of it.”
That…helped. That helped more than Sebastian wanted to let it. If it wasn’t because he was torvar, then what else was so wrong with him? “But then why did you hate having feelings for me?”
“Because they were…” Hess’s consciousness writhed in the confines it had been forced into, and Sebastian could feel an itch to pace in his legs. “…overwhelming. And distracting. And there were—are—so many more important things that need my attention. I couldn’t—can’t—be losing myself every time I see you.”
“So instead, you were cruel to me!” Sebastian shoved at him as he recalled all the dismissive looks, all the sneers, all the times he’d heard “torvar” spat from Hess’s lips. He’d agonized over why Hess hated him for years. He’d worked his fingers to the bone just trying to get Hess to really see him, and all that time, it had never been his fault at all. “You couldn’t face up to your feelings, so you took them out on me.”
“Yes.” Hess oozed cloying guilt. “And I’m sorry. You did nothing to deserve the way I treated you, and I have no excuse. I was wrong, and I’m so sorry, Sebastian.”
Sebastian’s fury sputtered in the face of Hess’s pure contrition. He wanted to be irritated at that too, but he had nothing to say. He wanted to be so many things: irritated, dismissive, unaffected, disdainful, anything other than overwhelmingly desperate to sink into Hess’s affection.
Hess cared about him. Was captivated by him. Him, as he was. That regard of Hess’s that Sebastian had worked for for years… he had it!
But he wished he didn’t want it.
He tried to ignore Hess sitting quietly in his mind—solid and stable and present. But of course, he couldn’t manage that either.
They walked on for hours more. They moved faster with the lantern, and the fresh water from the supply cache helped buoy them along, but they still had a lot longer to go in a body on the edge of exhaustion.
Sebastian scrubbed at his aching eyes for the dozenth time. “Ugh, how do you live like this?”
Amusement. “That’s the second time you’ve asked me that.”
“And I still don’t have an answer!” Sebastian groaned and rolled his shoulders. “I’m so tired.”
“I know.” Their shoulders twitched in a shrug. “There always seems to be something more important to do than sleep.”
“Something more important to do.” Sebastian rolled his eyes. “So there are too many important things for you to sleep, and too many important things for you to be with me—”
