Chapter 45

“What’s up?”

Nick’s voice was suddenly very low, very soft—albeit still with that underlying rasp, like damp sandpaper—and Tab’s lip wobbled involuntarily. And dangerously.

“Been visiting my mum,” he managed, and hated the way his voice sounded. Thin and reedy. Close to cracking.

“Your—” Nick started, then glanced over his shoulder at the sign for the mental health unit. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Tab croaked.

“Bad day, then?”

Tab bit down hard on his lip, hard enough to taste metal, and Nick groaned, a deep and reverberating kind of sound.

“C’mere,” he mumbled, and then a warm hand was on the back of Tab’s neck and his face in rough cotton and he could smell some cheap, standard deodorant, and the edges of leather, and feel a molten heat flooding off Nick’s shoulder and chest, and a rock-hard body under too-loose clothes

He clung back, the stupid misery shaken up a little by the shock offering, and clutched fistfuls of the black fabric.