Page 240 of Alessio

Or any way.

He didn’t know what the hell he wanted.

Alessio stopped in front of the room that belonged to Corrado for the night. Stepping aside so he could lean against the wall while Corrado pulled the keycard from his pocket to unlock the door, Alessio asked, “Would you have done that, then?”

Corrado’s hand froze at the card reader, hovering overtop but not pulled down to drag the keycard through the lock. “Done what?”

“That guy—him. Would you have brought him back here had I not shown up? Spent the night with him? Any of it?”

“Why don’t you just say it, huh?” Corrado returned.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re jealous, Les. Say it.”

“That’s half the fucking problem, isn’t it?” Alessio let out a dark laugh, making Corrado’s chest clench from the sound. God, he loved that sound. “The fact you don’t want all that shit to be out there, right? Because once it’s out there, Corrado, we don’t get to take it back. You get stuck in your fucking pride, because you don’t know how to deal, and there we’ll be. That is the problem.”

Corrado’s jaw flexed, holding back words and anger. Because frankly, Alessio wasn’t wrong, and he didn’t know how to admit that without sounding like a fool. Nobody wanted to be the idiot with a foot stuck in his mouth.

“Yeah, I know,” Alessio added when Corrado continued to stay quiet.

Raging blue met dark brown when the two stared at one another in the hallway. The silence stretched on, heavy and loaded with a lot of shit Corrado had been leaving to the wayside where he and Alessio were concerned. Things like feelings and what the fuck was even going on between them. The labels he hated because once you labeled yourself, the rest of the goddamn world thought they got the right to do the same. Or even the fact that he’d never connected with someone on a level like he did with Les—like the man just knew the craziness in Corrado’s mind without him ever needing to open his mouth to say it.

And he recognized those same things in Alessio, too.

These things?

It was too much.

Too deep.

Things that he figured, once they were said, there was no going back. And maybe that bothered Corrado because it scared him. He didn’t like to be scared of shit—didn’t want to be, either—but he didn’t know how to tell Alessio that without the rest of the shit in his mind spilling out, too.

Like the fact he didn’t know how to do this.

How to be someone to someone else.

How to be a them.

A thing.

And despite a part of him not wanting to admit he wanted to be exactly that, even if that meant he would need to deal with things he’d shoved down where nobody could find them, the other part was louder.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Alessio said.

Corrado arched a brow. “You didn’t answer mine.”

“I already said you don’t want me to.”

Right.

“And that’s your problem,” Corrado replied, shoving the keycard through the reader to unlock the room door, “because you don’t listen nearly as well as you fucking talk, Les.”

“What does that even mean?”

Corrado shook his head, opening the door and entering the hotel room. He dropped his jacket to a chair, kicked off his shoes, dropped his bag, and headed for the bathroom. All the while, he ignored Alessio behind him as he called after him.

“Hey, I’m fucking speaking to you. What does that mean?”