noun

       • the result, especially an unpleasant one.

He regrets it the moment the words leave his mouth, Troye's face twisting into a trench loaded with soldiers just waiting to take fire and blow him to bits in self-defense. He sucks in a breath, tries to take it back by sheer force of will, but Connor can't turn the hourglass over again without losing some of its sand to the holes he's just showered it with.

"I mean, where do you live?" is his first attempt, white knuckles scrambling to hold the grainy flecks of time inside their fragile glass casing. It slips out around his hands, gets under his nails and itches at his skin as it buries his feet until he can no longer move, forced frozen as Troye's gunmen take their aim.

They don't fire, not yet. They're waiting for Connor to draw the x over his short-circuiting brain before they blow him to bits right along with everything they've built here in the month since they met.

Connor swallows. Troye purses his lips.

"I just-" is his second attempt, cutting himself off as his desperation presses thickly against the walls of his throat. Troye's looking at him like one wrong move will send them cliff-diving over separate edges of the world, but deeper than that is something storming behind his hurricane blue eyes like he'd almost been expecting this. Like he'd just been waiting for Connor to do something and screw this all up.

And, yeah, that kind of sits a little unpleasantly at the top of Connor's heart.

"You never talk about your family," he tries for the third time, turning away so those violent winds don't tear him to shreds. "You're not in school. You spend all day out on the streets. You don't even have a fucking winter coat, for Christ's sake. What am I supposed to think? Am I not allowed to worry about you?"

The silence that follows is silent guns cocking and steady streams of sand spilling from punctured glass.

Troye's voice is deadly as his snipers squeeze their triggers.

"No," he snaps harshly. "You're not."