Page 5 of A Cold Hard Truth

Sebastian cleared his throat, his face heating in unspoken embarrassment.

“Both,” Jace had said with a smile, turning his attention back to Sebastian’s phone.

Six days.

It had been six days since Jace had signed him up on that dating app, and this was his first alert. He’d almost forgotten the thing existed, but here it was right before him. A bright neon icon of two cartoon mouths kissing left Sebastian with no doubt what sort of ideas Jace had for him, and he dragged his finger over the alert, his heart frozen behind his ribs while he waited for the message to load.

Hey.

Sebastian read the message again. He tried to scroll, but the entire message was made up of that one single word, only one syllable. Three letters.

Hey.

He typed out a reply, then deleted it. Typed another reply, deleted that one, too.

Heythere.

Hey yourself.

Big talker over there?

What’s your name?

Nothing he wrote sounded or felt right, and he shoved his phone under his pillow before he sent a message he’d regret.

“You’d regret sending any message,” he told himself. Sebastian stared at his pillow, like the phone beneath it would cause his entire bed to catch on fire, then he reached for it, swiping the phone screen awake and tapping his way back into the app.

The message was still there, bright and glaring in its simplicity and its comfort. He didn’t allow himself to think about the message, instead clicking through to the profile of the user to see what sort of person had reached out to him. He realized he didn’t even know what his own profile looked like, so he started there instead, a picture of himself at lunch the week before filling the screen.

Except it wasn’t him.

Or it was just part of him, to be precise.

Jace had clearly taken a picture of him while they ate, but he’d kindly cropped Sebastian’s head out of the whole thing, choosing instead to focus on the dark charcoal lines of Sebastian’s suit coat and the vintage Rolex on his wrist. Sebastian’s wrist hung limp in front of him, a tumbler full of vodka and soda clasped in his hand. The wedge of lime on the edge of his glass, the only splash of color in the whole picture.

He swiped over to his messaging app and fired off a text to Callahan.

Me: Do I dress boring?

Callahan’s reply came through quickly.

Callahan: You dress like a Brooks Brothers mannequin.

Sebastian tapped back over to the dating app and frowned at the picture, but scrolled on anyway to see what Jace had said about him.

BlondAndBored69.

He read the user name Jace had picked for him, making a disapproving noise in his throat.

“Bored of the usual and looking for a change,” he read under his breath, even though there was no one around to hear him. “Six feet tall, one ninety, no tattoos, looking for something to break me out of this rut.”

He sighed.

Jace wasn’t wrong about that; it was only Sebastian didn’t knowwhatwould break him out of the rut. His responsibilities and the weight of his family name settled in the back of his mind, and he thought about the eye roll Rhys had given him when Sebastian broke the news of his divorce. His parents had been as unamused about the split as they had been about the marriage, and then it was over and done.

Everyone had gone back to normal except him.

But that was because he didn’t want to go back to normal. He wanted a new normal. He wanted something that made him excited and hard and eager… all things he’d lost sight of sometime over the past decade.