“It’s not a breakthrough.”

“Excuse me?”

“Electricity was not a breakthrough until they figured out how to use it without setting the world on fire. You made a drug that works in one person, Noah. One. And the by-product is not exactly rolling out the way we thought it would.”

“It works. That was the breakthrough. I’ll give you more when you stop punishing me.”

“This was supposed to be the beginning of that.”

“Oh, I see. And now that I threw a chair the sanctions are going to stay in place?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“There’s a lot you haven’t said, apparently.”

“Because I don’t know if I can trust you yet.”

“What’s it going to take?”

“Calling me a coward in front of my staff isn’t a good start.”

“Don’t be petty.”

“OK. Then maybe it’s because you almost killed Charlotte Rowe.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. No. Uh-huh. No way.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I’m not relitigating Arizona. Put me on a plane. Throw me in a cell again. I don’t give a shit. Enough, already. You’ve made far more questionable calls than I did with her. And we both know good and well you’re not still pissed because of what I did to Charlotte at that wellness center. You’re pissed about what I did before. To you.”

“Enlighten me, then.”

“I left.”

“I stopped giving what you wanted, you stopped sleeping with me.”

“I left you.”

“Yes, you did.”

He’s fully prepared for Noah to sneer, to turn away, to do any manner of things that would suggest he finds Cole’s resentment tedious and pedestrian and beneath the worthy glare of his attention. But Noah stares into his eyes with an intensity that shortens Cole’s breath.

“See, that’s just it, Cole. That’s where we’re different.”

“How?”

“You drew this big separation between what we did in the bedroom and what we were doing in the lab. But for me, it was all one and the same. It was ours. It was us. And when you shut down the project without a word of warning, you dropped an ax on all of it. On me. I had to find out from the security director because I requested a flight to a lab that wasn’t operational anymore. And then, when I saw you again, you treated me like I’d jilted you at prom, when you were the one who took our dream and shattered it into a million pieces. I wasn’t your high school boyfriend. I was the man you were going to change the world with.”

“You showed up out of nowhere after years demanding I throw together the funding for this on a moment’s notice. I wasn’t treating you like an ex-boyfriend.”

“What, then?”

“I was treating you like a whore because you were acting like one.”

“I didn’t offer to fuck you again. I offered you Charlotte Rowe.”

“She wasn’t yours to give.”

“Apparently she was because here we all are. And I’ve slept with your whores. With you. And they give you a fraction of what I can.”

Maybe it’s the wording, but Cole can’t control his laughter. Noah looks away quickly, turns his back to Cole as he swings his legs to the floor and moves to the side of the bed. Is he trying to hide anger or amusement? Cole’s not sure. Then he sees Noah’s back is shaking, and he realizes the man’s laughing as well. Maybe it’s the hypocritical judgment in the word whore. As if either of them has the right to judge the world’s oldest profession given how many people they’ve killed.

After a while, he says, “I’m not a whore.”

“Sex worker is the more appropriate term.”

“I’m not that, either.”

“And I’m not a coward,” Cole says. “I didn’t build this place because I’m a coward.”

“OK. That’s a fair trade, I guess.”

“I’m glad you agree.”

As the anger leaves the room, it unveils softer, more frightening emotions Cole fears he won’t be able to control.

“Charley’s always said that if you’d told her what Zypraxon could really do, she would have let you test it on her.”

“So we are going to relitigate Arizona?”

“No. I just . . . Bear with me, I’m headed somewhere with this.”

“Charley’s wrong.”

“You think she’s lying?”

“No, I just think she’s wrong. No one can know how they would have reacted after the fact.”

“Guess there’s no point in asking, then.”

“Asking what?” Noah asks.

Cole has stared down killers, made decisions that have cost lives. But in this moment, he’s beset by a fear and anxiety so total he can feel sweat along his spine and a deep chill in his bones. Noah’s intense stare worsens both sensations.

“If I’d discussed it with you first, shutting down our first go at this, I mean, would you have stayed?”

When the silence between them becomes too long for Cole to bear, he says, “I get it. No one can know how they would have reacted after the fact.”

“Something like that,” Noah says quietly.

It’s not the answer to the question that fills Cole with shame; it’s that he had to ask it in the first place. And that, he realizes, is the real curse of having spent time in Noah’s arms. For years, he’d convinced himself he was above all the conventional models of relationships that bedeviled straight people. Told himself that being gay liberated him from the expectation to marry, to raise kids, to compromise his professional obligations to a biological clock. But the truth was darker and more painful, and until Noah he’d been able to ignore it. Deep down, he’d convinced himself that what happened to him as a boy had so damaged him he was incapable of needing someone in a romantic sense. That sex for him could never connect to intimacy, only transitory pleasure. Then along came Noah, and when he realized there was a man in the world who could fuse both things for him, Cole was afflicted by the terrible realization that he’s capable not just of needing someone, but of hungering for them. Obsessing about them.

He’d reacted by searching for a dozen ways to blame Noah for the effects he had on him. To depict Noah as a drug and he the hapless addict. He leaped on the man’s every flaw as if it were an epic moral failing and in the process became such a shrieking hypocrite, someone with the fragile people skills of Bailey Prescott had ended up calling him on it.

In the end, it all feels like yet another reason to avoid romantic entanglements altogether.

But that’s easier to do when he’s got Noah confined to an island half a world away.

“You were going to tell me something, something you hadn’t told me before.” Noah’s studying him, maybe the way he studied Charlotte back when he was pretending to be her therapist. “Is it about the boys?” he asks. Cole is genuinely confused, and it must be showing on his face because Noah adds, “The last thing you said to Charley. About your father. How he forgave some boys who did something to you when you were young. I thought maybe . . .”