Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 66839 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 334(@200wpm)___ 267(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66839 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 334(@200wpm)___ 267(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
“Is that why you left?”
He seemed slightly thrown off by my sudden question. His shoulders rolled back as he stretched his neck and worked a kink out with a knuckle, a common time-buying technique when someone had a hard question to answer.
“It was one of the reasons, yeah.”
“And the rest of the reasons?”
Jason tilted his head and looked at me, his eyes holding it all: You.
He didn’t say it out loud, so I decided to prod a bit. Even if it made things uncomfortable, I knew that the truth had to be said if we were ever going to move past things.
“What’s the real reason you left, Jace?”
He didn’t look at me this time, and for a second, I thought I had gone too far. He was already upset with me about earlier, and now here I was pushing him to answer a question that had been burning inside me for years.
And then he answered. “It was because of you, Matt. Everything’s because of you. Being in the FBI, every aspect of it reminded me of you. We went into it together and worked on the same cases together. We created the same friend group and managed to somehow link our lives in a way that was impossible to separate.
“Unless I left. It wasn’t an easy choice, not after all the shit we went through to get our badge. But when I knew I couldn’t have you, I also knew I couldn’t be around you. It hurt too much. So I dipped, went freelance, tried to forget.”
Jason went back to intently watching our mark, the home not having shown any signs of life in the past five hours of us sitting here. It was three in the morning, the entire block having gone to sleep long ago. This was beginning to feel like another bust.
“Do you ever regret leaving?” I asked, deciding this to be one of the only ways I could stay awake. We’d do it all the time, staying up until the cool blue light of the morning slipped past the blinds, talking about nothing and everything all at once.
“I…” Jason swallowed. I could see his Adam’s apple bob up and down, highlighted in bold white streaks from the generous amount of moonlight washing in from overhead. “I don’t live with regrets. I keep my glass half-full and my regrets nonexistent. It’s not worth suffering twice over a perception of your past, which could very well be wrong anyway. I don’t know if a lot of the choices I’ve made in life sent me in either a positive or negative direction. There’s no point in regretting things when you don’t even know if there’s a reason for it in the first place. Maybe a decision I made, one that I spend regretting, maybe it set me on the path I needed to be on? And all that negative energy was a waste.”
It made sense, all of it. And of course it did. Jason always had a philosophical way of looking at things. To him, it was never black or white, nor was it ever gray. Jason saw the world in a whole spectrum of colors that always inspired me to do the same. It was another reason why I had always wanted to be around him, and one of the reasons why I was devastated when I wasn’t around him. I started to feel guilty for not being able to contribute anything more meaningful than he already had.
All I could say was “Damn, you’re right.”
“I know I am,” he said, smiling in a way that took the cocky edge out of his words. He opened the book bag at his feet and set the binoculars back inside. “Now, let’s head home. I don’t think we’re going to catch him doing anything. Hell, he might not even live here anymore.”
I gave the property one last look, raking every inch of the unkept front yard and empty-looking home. Jason may have been right—Colton could have grabbed his shit and left after hearing there was attention on him. “All right, let’s go. I’ll take you home.”
Jason thanked me before finishing off the bag of sour worms, saving a couple for me. He handed them over as I pulled out of the tree-covered parking spot, keeping my headlights off until I turned the corner and put a little bit of space between us and the house.
“Well, that was completely useless,” I said. Frustration bubbled up inside me. It mixed with the brain-fog-inducing exhaustion, but even then, the toxic mix of emotions wasn’t enough to overpower one much stronger, much more potent feeling: lust.
I couldn’t fucking help it. Sitting next to Jason, in an empty car on an empty street, his sexy body only an arm’s length away from mine, it had sent my thoughts swirling into waking sex-dream territory. Honestly, it was the only way I didn’t fall asleep during the stakeout. Every time I’d feel my eyelids getting heavier, I’d turn up the notch on my fantasies, and suddenly—like horny black magic—I was back to being wide-awake.