Page 28

“You’re making even less sense now than you were when you said he was sparkling,” Austin said. “You expect me to believe that, in the throes of passion, Jamie started exuding clouds of glitter?”

“No, god, don’t say it like that,” Jesse groaned, running a hand down his face in frustration. “That makes it sound really… lame. But it wasn’t; it was beautiful. Like a thousand tiny pin-prick stars. They… filled the air around us.”

Okay, that did sound pretty cool.

But also very, very weird.

“You’re sure you’re not having some kind of hallucination?” Austin had to ask. “They’ve got you on some pretty strong stuff for anaesthetics, after all.”

“No, it was real,” Jesse insisted, carefully pushing himself to sit up somewhat in the bed. “It really happened, Austin. I didn’t imagine it.”

Austin wasn’t entirely sure whether or not to believe that.

Jesse seemed to sense that as well. “Fine, then I’ll just have to tell you again tomorrow, once I’m better and you can’t blame drugs,” he rolled his eyes. “But I’m telling you, it was real, and it was extraordinary.”

“And it almost killed you.”

“Will you stop?!” Jesse protested, lying back down on the bed and rubbing tiredly at his chest. “Jamie didn’t do anything! The pain didn’t even really start until a good bit after it was over. I was fine before then!”

“Alright then, let’s pretend you’re right,” Austin wasn’t ready to give in just yet even though he sensed it was time to let Jesse rest. “Let’s pretend that your memory isn’t playing tricks on you; let’s pretend that…

somehow, Jamie’s hair turned white by itself while he was awake—which, as a reminder, wasn’t even natural when it happened in his sleep—and somehow, his eyes turned blue by themselves, and somehow, he created a bunch of glitter when you two had sex. That means—”

“Stop saying it like that,” Jesse groaned.

Austin simply ignored it. “ Let’s pretend all that is true. If all that is true, then… what? He’s got some kind of… weird, hair-changing, eye-changing, glitter-making superpower?”

“I don’t know,” Jesse sighed, followed by something incoherent as he was already starting to drift off again.

Austin patted his shoulder once more, before his leg really started aching and he had to go back to his chair. “You can tell me again tomorrow, like you said. For now, you should probably just get back to sleep.”

“Not tired,” Jesse muttered, slowly closing his eyes.

“Liar,” Austin teased softly.

Jesse didn’t argue. His breathing deepened, and the tension in his body slowly faded, betraying that he was falling back asleep.

Austin shook his head as he settled into his chair. “Trust you to run into the only superpowered amnesiac in America,” he sighed.

* * *

Jesse

Jesse was stuck in the hospital for five more days before they finally discharged him.

He already didn’t know how he was going to pay all these bills.

Even just having the ambulance show up was enough to put him in debt, let alone all the charges for the room and the food and the actual healthcare.

He would have to pick up a few extra shifts to start earning more money, or he’d be forced to drop out of school.

Technically, he was still supposed to take it easy for a few more weeks, but he just…

couldn’t afford it. The burning in his chest wasn’t entirely gone.

It was a constant reminder that he wasn’t fully healed yet, but with a few painkillers, he could manage .

“Hey.”

Jesse looked up from where he was filling out his discharge paperwork with Jazmine, as Nate approached him in scrubs, a clipboard in his hands and a frown on his face, a few strands of his long blonde hair hanging loose from the messy man-bun he’d tied it up into.

And yes, Jesse had to be very careful to call it a ‘man-bun,’ because Nate was particularly sensitive about that sort of thing.

Just one of the many reasons Jesse had never given much thought to coming out to the guy; anyone who couldn’t handle pulling his hair out of his face without having to arbitrarily put ‘man’ in the name of their hairstyle—as if desperate to make sure everybody knew he was masculine as hell—wasn’t very likely to be accepting of Jesse’s so-called ‘alternative’ lifestyle.

Which was why Jesse was so nervous to talk to him now.

“Uh, hey,” he managed to say, feeling the muscles in his shoulders tense.

Nate had been acting weird around him the last few days, especially when Jamie was around.

And Jesse’s medical file clearly said ‘cardiac arrest after sexual encounter,’ though the one detail that was not in there was that it had been with a man .

But if Nate put two and two together, then they were about to have a real interesting conversation— and the frown on his face was bad news.

Still, there was a chance, so Jesse decided to play dumb. “Something wrong?”

“…No,” Nate huffed, looking down at the paperwork. “Are you almost done?”

Jesse could feel the tension building, but he tried to ignore it.

Of course, the news would break one day.

Jesse knew that. He couldn’t keep things quiet forever; not just because he felt like it would suffocate him if he kept hiding like this, but also because it wasn’t fair to Jamie.

Jamie had agreed to do it because Jesse insisted, but he clearly wanted to be with Jesse openly, without complicating the matter with arbitrary secrecy—and he certainly deserved that much.

Really, as dangerous as it still was, the world was changing.

Maybe a decade ago, in the early 2000’s, they’d have had to resign themselves to potentially a lifetime of secrecy, but there was a sense of rising hope these days, hinting at a better future.

They might have a chance.

But not today. Jesse honestly couldn’t imagine trying to have such a conversation with Nate. Especially so soon after a heart attack.

“Yeah,” Jesse turned back to his writing. “Almost.”

The frown on Nate’s face was still worrying, though.

“Are… are you sure everything’s alright?” Jesse had to ask. “You look pretty upset.”

“What, you come in with a heart attack at twenty-one, and I’m not allowed to be a bit worried about it?” Nate scoffed with a roll of his eyes. “Why are you asking how I’m feeling?”

Maybe he was really just worried? Jesse had to let out a laugh, although he still felt a bit anxious. “Good point.”

“Right, so on that note, you need to get plenty of rest,” Jazmine told him, as she directed Jesse’s attention back to his paperwork.

“Go right home,” Nate added. “Watch some TV, order in if you can. No work. No exercise.”

Jesse knew all that. He still wasn’t going to cancel his shift the next day. He needed the money. And even more importantly…

“What about going out tonight?” he asked. “Jamie’s got his dance competition at seven, and I really wanted to be there.”

Nate’s frown returned at once. He looked over to Jazmine, who pursed her lips back at him as if she were upset at him about something.

Jesse felt tense again. “Nate?” he asked quietly.

“It doesn’t matter what I say,” Nate suddenly snapped. “You’ll just do whatever you want anyway!” Turning on his heel, he stormed off before Jesse had the chance to react.

Jesse swallowed hard, trying to push down the lump rising in his throat. That was it then. Nate knew. He knew that Jamie was more than just a roommate; there literally was no other explanation for that outburst.

No, wait. There was still a chance Nate didn’t know the whole story.

Now that Jesse was thinking about it, the comment about ‘ you’ll just do whatever you want’ was pretty clearly a reference to the fact that Nate had told Jesse not to get involved with Jamie in general.

It was possible that Nate was just angry about Jamie being Jesse’s roommate , his friend.

However, Jesse couldn’t shake the feeling that he was giving into wishful thinking.

Nate probably knew.

Jesse quickly finished his paperwork, and turned it in. His head was starting to ache something awful.

“Well, you can go to the competition of course,” Jazmine told him, sighing a little as she took the finished paperwork. “But you better get yourself a ride home, and don’t try to walk anywhere tonight. Not even to a bus stop.”

“…Yeah, that’s the plan,” Jesse replied. “Austin’s coming to pick me up, he was going to take me there and back.”

“Ah, good,” Jazmine said, and then offered him a smile. “Tell Jamie ‘good luck’ from me. I hope his team wins!”

“I will,” Jesse promised. “Um…” He opened his mouth to ask her about Nate—if he knew —but then he thought better of it. Jazmine had always been nice to him, but at the end of the day, she was Nate’s girlfriend.

He didn’t want to drag her into their problems.

“Well, thanks. I’ll see you later.”

He left the hospital, taking in a deep breath of the fresh April air before making his way over to a bench nearby, to wait for Austin. His thoughts were still spiraling, dwelling back to Nate. Why did everything in his life have to be so damn complicated?!

After about five minutes more, however, Austin arrived and took Jesse back to his apartment, to rest up for a while before the show.

He chattered away in the driver’s seat all the way there, about how glad he was Jesse was fine, how much he’d scared them, about how much Jamie had been practicing for tonight—and how Jamie had been holding up this week .