Let Go

The knock came at eleven at night.

Adrian was sitting on the edge of the narrow hotel bed in his shirtsleeves, staring at nothing, when the sound of fist on wood rattled the door. He was across the room in two steps with a gun he hadn't known he'd reached for. He opened the door a crack.

The corridor light fell on a figure slumped against the frame.

He was soaked to the skin. His shirt was torn at the shoulder, his left sleeve stained dark. A long raw scrape ran down his jaw. One eye was swelling shut. Beneath the filth and the blood, beneath the exhaustion that hollowed his face down to the bone, there was no mistaking the wolfish amber eyes.

"Adrian," Miles said, and fell forward.

Adrian caught him.

Everything else vanished. The gun clattered on the floor. He had both arms around a body that was far too hot and far too light, and he was shouting something to the night manager down the hall, and then he was dragging Miles across the room and onto the bed with hands that would not stop shaking.

"What are you doing here? You're supposed to be in Santa Barbara—Miles. *Miles.* Look at me. What happened to you?"

"Nothing." The voice was a cracked whisper. "Got hit by a car."

"You what?"

"It's fine. It was slow. He didn't even stop." A ghost of a smile. "I rolled."

"Hit by a *car*—" Adrian's voice cracked straight through. "Damn it. Damn it to hell. Hold still. Let me look at your ribs."

"Adrian." Miles caught his wrist. His grip was feeble, but his eyes were fierce. "Did you sleep with him?"

Adrian went completely still.

"What?"

"The barber." The question came out in a hoarse, relentless rush. "The man who looks like him. Did you sleep with him?" A swallow. "Did you kiss? Where did he kiss you? Tell me."

"Is that all that's in your head?" Adrian said, a little wildly. "You're bleeding on my sheets. You've got a concussion. You're burning up, and the first thing you want to know—"

"Tell me."

"*Nothing happened.*"

Miles's eyes searched his face, unblinking.

"Nothing happened," Adrian repeated, quieter. He knelt on the bed beside him. "Gabriel has amnesia. He doesn't remember me. He doesn't remember you. He doesn't remember any of it. He has a shop and a cat and a woman who brings him coffee. We shared one beer. That is all."

"You always told me to go."

"I told you to go to a safe house."

"You told me to go," Miles said, and now his voice shook, "every single way you could."

"Get off me—" Adrian began, and realized with a start that he'd been pulling at the boy's bloody shirt and Miles had been trying to pull him down at the same time. They were a tangle of limbs, both breathing hard. "Stop it. You'll hurt yourself."

"Think I won't lose you?"

"What?"

"If I let you out of my sight." Miles's fingers curled in Adrian's collar. His eyes were glassy with fever. "I'll lose you. That's what I thought. I drove for forty hours."

---

It was Marcus who put the rest of the story together, over the course of the longest night of Adrian's life.

The young master had slipped his guards in Santa Barbara on the third night, going out through a bathroom window and over a wall. He had stolen a car. He had driven across the continent without a single stop for a hospital, with a cracked rib from the boat and a hairline fracture in his wrist, subsisting on gas-station coffee and nothing else. He'd been in a collision in Ohio and walked away. He had stood outside Adrian's hotel in Newport all of last night, in the cold, in a thin shirt, until the doorman called security.

"The doctor says exhaustion," Marcus reported quietly, from the corner of the room. "Fever. Low blood sugar. Dehydration. He should have been in the ER three days ago."

Adrian sat on the edge of the bed with a damp cloth in his hands.

He felt as if someone had hollowed out his chest.

"Are you really going to be this difficult?" he said to the sleeping boy, who couldn't hear him. "You're young, you're healthy, so getting hurt doesn't matter. Is that it? You just throw your body away?" His voice cracked. "Forty hours of driving. Fever. No food. If I'd found out a day later, if I had been in some meeting—" He couldn't finish. "You'd have thrown your life away too."

A hand moved weakly on the sheet.

"I was just scared," Miles whispered, eyes still closed.

Adrian froze.

"You didn't want me anymore."

"Miles—"

"Nothing happened," Miles murmured, drifting, as if comforting himself. "He doesn't know me. You said so."

"Yes."

"Then we can go home?"

"Once you're better." Adrian smoothed the damp hair off his forehead, and it was the gentlest thing he had ever done. "We'll go home. And we'll never bother him again."

"Can you let him go?"

It was a whisper, and it should not have been able to reach him. It went through him like a blade.

"He has the life he wants here," Adrian said at last. "And I've let go."

"What does letting go mean?"

"It means it's over completely." His thumb brushed Miles's cheekbone. "A final goodbye. Do you understand?"

Miles's lips curved. "Understand."

"Sleep."

"Are you going to eat the porridge?"

Adrian blinked. On the bedside table sat a bowl of congealed oatmeal the night manager had brought up hours ago.

"Are you eating the porridge or not," Miles mumbled, "because I'm not eating it unless you do."

Adrian made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. He picked up the spoon. He ate three mouthfuls of cold, gluey oats, tasting nothing, with tears running unnoticed down his face, and the boy on the pillow smiled and slept.

---

"Back again?" Jay said the next morning, glancing up from a customer's neck. "What are we cutting today?"

"Not cutting." Adrian stood just inside the bell-hung door, hat in his hand. "I came to say goodbye."

"Goodbye?"

"I'm leaving this afternoon. I wanted to thank you for looking after me these past days." He tried to smile. "It was good to meet you."

"Well." The barber set his scissors down. "That's kind. If you pass through Newport again, come by."

"I will."

"Hey." Jay hesitated. He crossed the room and took Adrian by the elbows, looking at him with that steady hazel gaze. "You okay? You look like a man who's lost something."

Adrian said nothing.

Then, because there was no one left in the world to be careful for, he stepped forward and put his arms around him.

Jay stiffened, startled. Then, slowly, he relaxed into the embrace, bewildered but kind. He smelled of soap and sea air and, underneath it, faintly, impossibly, of the old cologne he had worn at twenty-eight. Adrian shut his eyes and pressed his face into a stranger's shoulder.

*This is probably the last time I'll ever hold you.*

"You look like you still can't let him go," Jay said, softly.

"My feelings for him were complicated."

"Not just what I imagine?"

"Not just that." Adrian laughed a little, breathless. "I was young. I was so young, and he was everything. He pulled me out of the worst place in the world and gave me a name. I loved him." He let the word fall into the quiet. "Unrequited. It's not worth mentioning."

"So you finally admit you liked him."

"I did. When I was young." He drew back, a hand still resting on the barber's arm. "Has he gotten old? He's so different from before."

"Do you hate him?" Jay asked, with the curious frankness of a man who was talking about a ghost.

"I do." The answer startled Adrian by how true it was. "The worst of it was that photograph. The last picture. He sent it to me the night before he died, and the next morning the boat went down." His voice shook. "I was on the dock. I screamed his name. You never heard me calling."

Jay was silent.

"I don't know why I'm telling you this."

"I think," Jay said gently, "you needed to tell someone."

"Maybe." Adrian stepped back. He straightened his coat. He looked once more at the face of the man he had loved for twenty-two years, and he said, clearly, calmly: "Goodbye, Gabriel."

"It's Jay."

"I know." The smile came easier now. "Goodbye, Jay."

He turned and walked out into the sun, and the bell over the door rang behind him like a final, tiny hymn.

---

Miles was waiting at the curb.

He leaned against the side of the car, bandaged and pale, in a borrowed coat, his jaw set and his eyes unreadable. He had clearly been standing there for some time. He had clearly watched all of it through the plate-glass window.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

"You shouldn't be out of bed," Adrian said.

"You said goodbye."

"I did."

"And it's really over." Miles's voice was careful and very small. "For you."

Adrian crossed the pavement and stopped in front of him. The morning wind tugged at both their coats. He reached up and, very gently, with the back of his fingers, brushed a lock of golden-brown hair off the boy's bruised forehead.

"It's over," he said. "I let him go. I swear it."

Something shifted in Miles's face, then, a sort of astonished breaking.

"Take me home," he whispered.

"Come on." Adrian opened the car door. "Let's go home."