an. This chapter's a bit ucky. I just kinda wanted to get through it so I apologize if it's not great quality.

____

Work was long. Painful. Mostly 'cause Matt knew he'd have to come home to Jess. That he'd have to end things with the only girl who ever saw a future with him. It was the right thing to do, but it felt all kinda wrong.

He stopped by the Sigvard Manor first, took a seat at the table while Jaylin delivered him a beer. His thoughts chewed him down to silence until eventually, Quentin asked, "Is there something you need to talk about?"

Matt had the words—they were just all twisted. Tied around his brain like a tangled snake. He furrowed his brows, thanked Jay as he replenished his empty beer with another. Then Matt looked Quentin in the eye and asked, "How'd you know you liked Jay?"

Quentin stared at him, confused, but with that polite expression—that slight smile he always wore so no one else in the room felt awkward.

Jay slumped down into the seat beside him, blue eyes wide and hungry. "Is something going on?"

Matt took a deep, deep swig and sucked in a burning breath. "You were straight before you met Jay, right?"

Quentin's smile relaxed and broadened. "I was never straight, Matt. Loving Anna didn't make me straight."

"So you knew from the start?"

"Sometime after I turned," Quentin said. "I was maybe sixteen."

"Matt," Jay pressed again. "What's going on?"

Matt took in a deep breath. He looked at the mirror on the wall, the plants in the corner, the chandelier—anything but them. "I think...I mean—I don't think. I did..."

"Did what?" Jay asked.

"I slept with Bailey."

Matt swallowed, braving their faces. Their expressions were strangely off from what he expected. Shock or disgust or anything inbetween—those were the reactions Matt was waiting for. But instead Jaylin looked smug, Quentin exasperated. 

"Dammit," the alpha said, leaning back in his seat and shoving a hand in his front pocket. He took out a leather wallet, cracked it open and slid a few bills toward Jaylin who plucked them up with a grin.

"You fuckin' me right now?" Matt asked. "You bet we'd sleep together?"

"I bet you wouldn't," Quentin said in defense.

Jay pressed his smile into a flat line and folded the bills over in his hands. "Don't be mad."

"Well, I'm fuckin' mad, Jay."

Jaylin laughed—probably at the obvious twang that had infested Matt's voice. "Matt, something like sixty percent of us are bisexual. Thirty percent of us are gay. Heterosexuality is minority in this world."

"But I don't get it!" Matt gripped at his hair, elbows jabbed into the table. "I don't get it, I've never been into guys. I was into girls before and now I'm not into girls. I'm not into anyone, but I—"

"You're into Bailey," Jaylin said. "Just Bailey."

Matt felt like hiding in his hands until the life seeped out through his skin. Until he could leave his mortal body and float away from the heat of the room, the flush on his face, the prickle of his scalp.

"Maybe you are gay," Jay said.

"I'm not gay."

"Let's test it." He stood from his seat and shed his shirt off over his head, gesturing to the slender stomach and rows of faint muscle. "This do anything for you?"

"I swear to God, Jay. I'm about ten seconds from punching you in the dick."

"So that's a no." He moved behind Quentin next, reached over his shoulders and yanked his shirt up to his neck. Quentin sighed visibly, like this wasn't the first time Jay had stripped him in front of a houseguest. "What about this?" Jaylin said.

Matt had always been impressed by the shape and muscles Quentin packed beneath that tan skin—but it was never anything more than that. Jealousy, envy. He wanted to look like Bronx but he didn't wanna fuck him.

Matt dropped his hands to the table with a scowl. "Can you go away?"

"No, I wanna hear about this," Jay said. "Did you like it? Who topped? I wish Tisper were here."

"Jaylin," Matt snapped.

Quentin pulled his shirt back down and reached out for Jaylin's hand to tug him closer. The way he looked up at him dripped of warm intimacy. He spoke with his eyes and Matt caught every word. "Go take Nadaline outside for a while, alright? I'll make dinner here in a bit."

But his eyes said I love you terribly.

Matt's mouth tasted bitter.

Jaylin frowned and sighed and dragged himself off toward the foyer. "Fine, but I'm calling you later, Matt."

Once he was gone, Quentin leaned forward, crossing his broad arms over the tabletop. "It doesn't have to be as complicated as you're making it."

"It doesn't get much more complicated than this," Matt said. "What the hell does this make me?"

"Sexuality's not a black-and-white concept," Quentin said. "Maybe you're only attracted to someone once you develop a bond with them. It doesn't matter, Matt. It's only different from what you know."

"It's called demisexual," Jaylin said poking his head out from around the foyer.

Matt threw his hands out wide an animated. "Get the hell out, Jay!"

"I'm going, Jesus!"

Quentin waited until his footsteps faded up the creaking steps of the staircase, then the muscles in his jaw shifted.  "Listen, Matt. There's something you need to know about Bailey."

Matt glanced up from the beer bottle in his hands—same brown as Quentin's deep-set eyes.

"Bailey has lived his entire life as a commodity, not a person. He's been bought and sold and traded. He doesn't know who he is anymore than you do."

A furious feeling cracked through Matt—sudden and inexplicably angry. He reigned in his voice and said with tempered control, "What you're sayin' is he's broken goods."

"No. I'm broken goods. Bailey's..." Quentin leaned back in his chair. He ran his hands back through his hair and thumbed a bead of sweat from the neck of his beer bottle. "Bailey's a kid who's been trapped in a cage for so long now, he thinks the world is full of bars. He falls in love with the gaps in between. The warm lights and soft voices. And then when things get tough, he goes back to his cage and he cowers. Because that's all he knows."

The warm lights and soft voices, Matt thought. Like Bronx. Everything suddenly made terrible sense. "What do I do?"

"You make a decision. And if that decision's Bailey, you don't ever let him go back to the bars."

Matt arrived home as sun was setting. He parked his Wrangler by the guest house, made his way to the pasture where Billy followed along the fence, spitting grunting sounds through his nose and shaking the horns on his head for Matt's attention. Matt pet his thick neck while the sun set over the forest caps, watching a farmhand in the distance as he heaved hay over his muscled shoulder. Usually, Bailey would be fussing with the chickens. Collecting eggs or stroking feathers or tossing feed around in the pen. But he wasn't in the chicken coop or out in the field, or in the orchard or minding the cattle. He wasn't anywhere to be seen.

10-o'-clock, muffin, Raven said. Matt followed his directive a few degrees to the right, where a puddle of blood stained the gravel and spattered the wall of Bailey's barn.

He was out runnin' again.

Matt let out an exhausted, "Damnit, Bailey," and left to fetch the hose.

After minutes of spraying the gravel down, there was a flutter of batting wings, then a sharp set of claws in Matt's shoulder. He jumped at the crow that'd perched on is clavicle, blinking this way, twisting its head that way. Light curled around it's strange, slick eyes like wet stones.

Stop avoiding it, Raven said. You'll never have the balls if you don't do it now.

"Will you fuck off?" Matt swatted the bird from his shoulder. The crow flew off to hop around atop the barn gables, but Raven's voice buzzed in his ear like the murmur of a mosquito.

I'm here for a reason.

"You murdered your own men in cold blood. Not sure I wanna take relationship advice from a guy who committed treason."

I didn't kill anyone who didn't deserve it. But this isn't about me.

"You're right, it's not. Get the hell out of my head."

Fine, said Raven. It's a shit show in here anyway...Cowboy. It was the way he sang the word, the way he teased the edges up that sawed right through Matt's patience.

"Jesus Christ, fuck off!" Matt snarled, slinging the hose to the ground. He shut off the water and paced the gravel driveway until he was sure Raven was gone. Then he made his way to the guest house, heart thwapingin his ears.

When he stepped inside, Jess was sitting at the kitchen table. Her eyes fixed on a painting across the kitchen—a field of sunflowers, a crow on an old wooden fence. He'd gotten it for fifty cents at a shitty yard sale, back before he hated crows with every fiber of his being. "Let's get this over with," she said, her voice dry and edged.

Matt stepped forward. "Jess—"

"Sit down, Matthew."

Matt slid down into the chair across from her, pulse thumping in his throat and his wrists.

The lines around Jess's mouth set deep. She squared her shoulders and looked away from the painting to meet his eyes. "You have something to tell me."

"Yeah...I—" Matt scratched at his nape. "Listen, Jess. I think I wanna stop doing this. With you."

She smiled then—smiled. A strange, ironic, awful smile. "You're breaking up with me?" she said. "You're really doing this, huh?"

"I found your birth control in the trash. You didn't consult with me—"

"My birth control," she barked the words out in a laugh—tears pinking her eyes. "Are you kidding me right now?"

"You were tryin' to get pregnant," Matt said. "And I get no say in that? I don't get a say in whether I have a fuckin' kid or not?"

Jess's face went red. Her brows tucked together—not in a sad way, but a furious one. The kinda angry that was so angry, it looked more like searing pain than any anger at all. "I switched brands, you asshole."

"Brands..." Within seconds, Matt's face flared. The palms of his hands sweat. Switched brands?

"I threw them away because they made me sick. Jesus Christ, Matthew. I wasn't trying to get pregnant!"

"I'm sorry, I thought—"

"That's not what you should be sorry for," Jess said. She took her tiny pink laptop and twisted it around, cracked the screen open. It glowed alight with a video—paused fifteen hours and thirty two minutes in. Matt's face prickled with a cold, sick chill. He brought a hand to his mouth and slouched against the backrest of his chair, his face hot and his nerves shot. His throat felt too dry to swallow, but terrible feelings welled in it.

The image was dark, but he knew the shape of those shadows. The game glaring on the TV screen.

Fuck.

"I'm leavin', Matt," Jess said, her words tight and stifled. The emotional rise before the overspill.

Matt could only stare, fingers trembling. "How...how do you have this? You were spying on us?"

"I'm not stupid," Jess said, snapping the screen shut. "You kept disappearing at night. Kept leavin' with him." A tear fell down her cheek, taking a stain of mascara with it. "You did this because you were mad at me?" Jess asked. "Really?"

"No," Matt said. He tried to swallow but it stuck there at the knot in his throat. "No, Jess. It wasn't about you."

"I know it wasn't," she said, tears growing on the rims of her hazel eyes. "Nothing's ever been about me, Matt. It's about you. It's always been about you. I deserve better than that. I deserve a real man, not a boy who snoops around in the trash and fucks the farmhands." She stood so abruptly, her chair knocked back. It hit the floor with a hard clatter. "God, you're disgusting. I can't believe the year I've wasted on you."

Her words seared and he let them. He let them sit on his skin and burn as he stared down at the tablecloth beneath his fists—the scattered textile pattern of tacky roosters and thorned roses. She was right. She was right about everything.

"I need to know one thing before I go," she said. She turned raw then—the hard outer edges of her flaying away until all that was left was the hurt and heartbreak she'd been hiding under her rage. She wiped the tears from her cheek and crossed her arms over her chest. "Did you ever feel anything for me, Matt? Ever?"

He stared down at those roosters, smeared and blurred by the tears in his eyes and one shake of his head was all he could manage before a slap came down on his cheek, skin searing and welting beneath the snap of hot fingertips.

He didn't say another word after that. He watched those roosters as she gathered her things into her bag and dragged a suitcase out from the bedroom. He watched them as she collected her candles and stray belongings. He watched them as she snatched her toothbrush from the bathroom and mugs from the cupboard. Then Matt watched her leave.

And he ached.