The shaking started to slow. “What about you?”

What the fuck was he good at? He couldn’t even keep Josiah safe. “Don’t know. What do you think? What should I do?”

Josiah paused for a second before speaking. “You can go to school with me. Or work at the coffee house with me. You can do whatever you want.”

“Yeah...yeah, I like the sound of that.” Mateo kept talking. Kept telling Josiah about the future he wanted more than anything but knew in his heart would never be. He told him everything they would do and what he wanted for Jay until he finally fell asleep.

When he did, Teo laid him down before quietly getting out of the bed. He got the bathroom door closed but hardly made it to the toilet before he violently purged everything out of him. His stomach cramped and his throat burned but it kept on coming.

Mateo’s hand slapped down on the handle as he flushed the toilet. He crawled over to the sink and fumbled with the faucet to rinse his mouth out. And then he went down on the bathroom floor, curled into a ball.

And fucking cried. Rocking back and forth, he let the tears fall. For Josiah and all the ways he’d been hurt. For all the ways Mateo had fucked up with him. For his mom who got killed because she stayed with his gangbanging dad. All he wanted to do was love Josiah, to be with him and protect him. Was that too much to fucking ask? He cried until he didn’t have any tears left.

He didn’t flinch when he heard the bathroom door open. Curled into Josiah when he lay on the floor with him. They wrapped their arms around each other, Teo holding on with everything he had, to the only thing in his life that mattered.

They didn’t get up till morning.

He didn’t say much as he tossed the clothes at Jay and told him to get dressed. Teo took a shower and then got dressed again, too.

“Where are we going?” Josiah asked.

“William and Molly’s.”

“What? What if you get into trouble? What if Molly is...”

“William will still help you. It’s the only thing we can do, Jay. You’re going to go there and tell them you don’t know where I am. That you haven’t seen me for a while. They had your birth certificate, your social security card and all that shit.”

Josiah shook his head. “I should have thought to take it when I ran.”

“Be glad you didn’t. You don’t want that kind of shit to come natural to you. Anyway, this is the best opportunity we have. If they don’t have that stuff anymore, they can help you get it. You tell them I forced you to come with me if you have to, okay? I’ll be okay. I won’t leave Yorktown without you, but that’s the only way we have of findin’ out what happened after we left, so we’ll know if people are looking for us. It’s the only way, for you to resurface without me. Make ‘em think we’re not together anymore. Then we’ll get on a bus and go. Wherever you want.”

He pulled the backpack on.

“Together?” Josiah grabbed Teo’s arm. “We’ll go together?”

That question and the need in his voice had the power to take some of the bad shit away. Dios, he fucking loved Josiah. “Yeah... Together.” Because as broken as they both were, together they made something better.

Teo opened the door, and in that second everything changed. Fear cemented his insides as Javier smiled and stepped into the room.

Chapter Nineteen

Josiah

Everything had changed in the month since Javier showed up. They were now living in Brownsville, part of the borough Mateo told them they could never go to. Teo worked with Javier.

Josiah watched as Mateo came in the door and went straight into the bathroom. The water turned on, but it wasn’t enough to cover the sounds as he vomited. Josiah paced the apartment that was slightly better than the first one they had, wringing his hands together as he waited for Mateo to come out.

When he did, he went straight to the kitchen and downed a whole glass of water, without a word to Josiah. Mateo washed his hands, even though he knew he’d done it in the bathroom, too, before he walked over and pulled Josiah to him.

“Hey.” Mateo pushed a hand through Josiah’s hair and pressed a kiss to his lips. “I missed you.”

“Missed the kid, huh?” As soon as the words left Josiah’s mouth, he wanted them back. He had no right to take any of this out on Mateo. Not after everything he did for Josiah. “I’m sorry.”

Teo shook his head. “Don’t be. I fucking hate it, too, but they can’t know what’s going on with us. I had to tell them somethin’.”