Page 112 of A Real Good Lie

“I love you,” Jace said again, his expression earnest and his eyes bright with hope.

“I don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve you.”

“Rhys said that too.” Jace pressed a kiss against his parted mouth. “I directed him to the picture closest to the door.”

“I didn’t even see it.” Callahan looked over his shoulder, but a concrete pillar blocked his view. “I came to find you as soon as I got here.”

“I’ll show you.”

Jace led him through the gallery, stopping half a dozen times to smile and shake hands with people who’d identified him as the photographer. They reached the front and Callahan looked up at the picture, and the simplicity of the whole thing had him breathless yet again.

“I meant to ask,” he said, glancing up at the man who loved him back, “why didn’t you use the ones we took…that night.”

Jace’s throat darkened into a deep crimson and he lowered his voice. “Those are not for public consumption.”

“I thought sex wasn’t intimate.”

“I was wrong.” He squeezed Callahan’s hand. “Everything with you is intimate. Everything with you is real.”

“I don’t know how I ever pretended otherwise.” Callahan laughed to himself.

“You tried to tell a real good lie,” Jace said, looking back up at the picture. “And ended up with the truth.”

“The truth?”

“This.” He tipped his chin toward the photograph of Callahan’s bedroom, of the tangled sheets, and the piles of clothes, the upended shoes, and the sunrise peeking over the horizon. “The truth of you and me.”

“That sounds surprisingly deep.”

“I’ll get surprisingly deep later.” Jace raised his eyebrows.

Callahan rolled his eyes, unimaginably relieved that he was gifted once again with the cool and confident man he’d met in line for the bathroom weeks before, and tucked himself against Jace’s side, inhaling a deep breath of the eucalyptus soap and sweat mixture he’d grown so fond of in such a short time.

“Are you sure you love me?” he asked.

“Callahan.” Jace sighed. “I don’t see how we’re compatible in the long term. My life hasn’t been anything like yours. Your friends are horrible, you work too much, your bathroom is the size of my entire apartment.”

He stopped and made a frustrated sound before saying, “I don’t want to do this here.”

Jace tugged him back through the gallery and into a small back room. Callahan thought it might have been a broom closet, but there was a desk in there, and Jace’s things piled on top of it. Jace locked the door and threaded his fingers together behind his neck, turning away.

“None of this is me,” he said. “This suit is too much. Your money, your life. It’s too much for me.”

Callahan’s chest tightened, and he worried the best parts of his life were about to slip through his fingers. Sure, he’d told himself none of the changes he’d made had been for Jace, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want the other man beside him, or…above him, as the case might be.

“But you,” Jace continued. “I want you, and I love you, and I’ll learn to make the rest of it work, even if it makes me uncomfortable.”

“Are we doing this?” Callahan let out a nervous sound and sat down on the ancient and squeaking desk chair. “Because I have some things to say to you as well.”

Jace gestured for him to speak.

“The way I was before. When we were in Mallardsville. That…it wasn’t me. Or maybe it was me, but not the me I wanted to be. It was the person I had to be.”

“I know.” Jace nodded. “I saw the truth of you sometimes. Glimpses of it, at least.”

“Is that why you stayed?”

“I didn’t stay, remember? I left.” Jace leaned against the edge of the desk and clasped his hands together in front of him.