Fox drove back to his office once Axel had gone. He didn’t want to pull an all-nighter, but their guy had to be close, and the quicker Fox got on the case the less time his enemy had to outrun him.

Heading out in rush hour traffic wasn’t the most fun he’d ever had, but at least most of the traffic went the other way as people drove home from Houston.

It had to be late. All the admin staff had left for the night.

Fox carried his cargo like it was made of glass. The hard drives had replaced his spare clothes in his messenger bag, and he held it in both arms as he shouldered open the doors to the server room.

Peter cursed loudly. “Hold on guys, someone just came in.”

Fox froze as the door swung shut behind him, then burst out laughing as he watched Peter yank a headset off. Peter’s screen was pretty incriminating, too, with the bright colors and darting figures of an MMO.

“Are you fucking raiding on the clock?” He laughed.

“No, I’m fucking raiding just after the clock,” Peter said as he ran a hand down his beard like he wanted to be Gandalf when he grew up. “What you got there?”

“Porn.” Fox set his bag down on his desk, and began to unload the drives.

“Oo!” Peter snatched up his headset. “Gotta go. Porn delivery!”

Fox waited until Peter had logged out and—more importantly—disconnected his headset, then grinned at him. “So that insurance place got blown up.”

“Holy shit, no way!”

“Uh huh. Rescued these.”

Peter wheeled over and looked the drives over. “Cheap assholes,” he muttered.

“I know, right?” Fox huffed. At least Peter understood! “There’s gotta be something on here, or why try to destroy it all? The bomb was in the server room. If they just wanted to set the place on fire they could’ve put it in a storage closet or something.”

“Right.” Peter stood and moved to one of his storage racks, sifting through it until he found a suitable external chassis. “We better get these drives spinning so we can start pulling data, then.”

“Naw, get back to raiding, man.” Fox smiled at him. “I can do this.”

“Uh huh. Twice the brains, twice the speed, remember?”

Fox couldn’t argue with logic like that, so he sat and helped Peter plug the drives into their new homes.

* * *

Between them they’d figured out how the drives were striped, and had begun the long process of backing up the drives so that they could begin non-destructive decryption. After that, Fox would send the physical drives themselves away to a lab to have every single bit and byte examined in case data had been deleted but not yet scrubbed clean, but for now all they could do was crack the security on the newly-created backups and then begin the laborious process of sifting through everything available.

Peter had already sensed the coming tedium and cued up a playlist he insisted would keep them awake all night, but the longer the work went on, the more Fox’s mind began to wander.

“You ever think you’ve screwed up so bad that it’s derailed your life?” He swiveled slightly in Peter’s direction to save himself from staring at the data transfer status bar any longer.

“Sure. Every time I get my hair cut, I lose more of my powers.”

Fox slapped his shoulder. “Liar, you never get your hair cut!”

“And you haven’t derailed your life.” Peter leaned back and crossed his arms as he faced Fox. The seriousness which rushed into his expression made his blue eyes gleam with usually-hidden alertness. “What’s wrong?”

Fox stared at him. “You’re at risk of promotion if you keep this going.”

“Nobody would believe you. Talk.”

He let out a long sigh. He didn’t mean to. The damn thing just escaped him when he wasn’t watching it. “There’s this guy.”

“Oooh!” Peter grinned. “Go on!”

Fox leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk, crossing his legs at the ankles. He figured he may as well get comfortable if he was going to spill his guts to a guy he’d only met a couple of weeks ago. Maybe that was the best kind of person to spill to, though. After all, once Fox was out of here, he wouldn’t have to look Peter in the eye again.

“We met once, eight years ago.” Fox shrugged. “I was on a mission, he was heading up the team assigned to getting me out safely. Real beefcake kinda guy, but smart, too.”

“Double threat, huh?” Peter nodded kindly.

“Yeah. Of course, it didn’t go anywhere. Who’s got time for all that testosterone, anyway?” He waved his hands, then set them down again. “He saved my life and I’ve kinda always had him in my mind ever since.”

Peter didn’t say a word. He just waited, damn him.

Fox shrugged, though he didn’t know why. “He’s with the FBI now. I saw him today.”

“Ohhhh!” Peter uncrossed his arms and sat more upright. “And it all came back, right?”

“Worse.” Fox groaned faintly. “I kissed him.”

“Way to go! So you wanna know all the local dating hotspots, right? ’Cause Gringo’s is amazing, and they do literally the best queso.”

“You think queso is what makes a date?” Fox crinkled his nose and glanced to the progress bar, but it refused to save him. “Dude, no. Oh my God.”

“Okay. Serve up that tea, girl.”

When Fox stared at Peter, the guy was stroking his beard again, looking absolutely completely unrelated to the drag queen sounds that had just come out of his mouth.

All Peter did was smirk at him.

Fox shook his head and leaned back to stare up at the off-white ceiling. This had to be the only room in all of Texas without a fan hanging from the light fixture, so he couldn’t even watch that go around. There wasn’t anything here that would save him. “He’s not interested.”

“You ask?”

“I know. Those guys, they’re always straight. Not like Grindr-discreet-straight. Actually straight. They’re all about the wife and kids and settling down and all that stuff.” He wasn’t exactly an expert on what any of “that stuff” really was, but he was pretty sure it involved recitals and summer camps, which were altogether the wrong kinds of camp for his interests.

Peter made a sound like he was probing his teeth with his tongue a moment. Fox didn’t want to look to find out. “Well, what’d he do when you kissed him?”

“Urgh, he just kinda stood up and looked away like I was embarrassing myself. I guess I was, too.” He brought his gaze down from the ceiling so he could rub his eyes.

This was such a dumb idea. Why was he even talking to Peter about any of this? Yeah, they’d struck up an easy rapport within five minutes of Fox’s first day here, but he knew nothing about Peter’s love life, or whether the guy had good advice on the subject. Really, he was just indulging himself, wasn’t he? Or was he using Peter to sort things out in his own head by saying them out loud?

He had to admit that it all sounded pretty damn obvious when he put it into words, though. Maybe that was why he’d started talking. Axel was straight, Fox had screwed the pooch in kissing him, but in the end none of it mattered because Fox would be leaving town soon and that’d be it. Maybe for another eight years, maybe for good this time, but either way he had to get over the one guy who stuck in his head.

The one guy he couldn’t ever be with.

“Maybe he didn’t know what to do,” Peter finally mused. “Maybe he’s in a relationship. Or maybe he thought you’d made a mistake in the heat of the moment and he didn’t want to get his heart broken. You think of any of those possibilities?”

Fox narrowed his eyes at Peter. “No,” he said, and the word stretched out in uncertainty.

“You’re supposed to be the detective, Fox. You’ve tracked your guy—” he pointed to the hard drives “—across the country. You know nothing ever gets solved with assumptions, but when it comes to possibly the most important moment in your life, suddenly you’re relying on guesswork and conjecture? I’ve never heard such bullshit in all my days. You sound like you don’t want him to like you. What’re you afraid of?”

“I—” Fox’s mouth dried up like water spilled in Arizona.

“Hadn’t thought about it, had you?” Peter reached for a pen so that he could chew on the cap. “Stop coming up with reasons not to do things. Stop asking ‘why.’ Ask ‘why not’ instead. This is life, Fox. You get one chance at it, and then your number’s called. Quit messing around. Get data.”

Fox shut his mouth and glowered sullenly at his screen. He didn’t have anything to say because he knew damn well that Peter was right. Fox was making an ass of himself over a man who he already knew wouldn’t take it out on him if he just asked questions. Shit, he’d already kissed Axel and there wasn’t any blowback from that. This wasn’t the kind of situation where Fox had to watch out for himself in case he got a nasty surprise waiting for him in the parking lot after work. Axel wasn’t going to beat him to a bloody pulp for asking a damn question.

But how to ask? That was always the thing, wasn’t it? Oh hey. Do you like guys? No, not in a dudebro way. I mean like, you know… Are you into guys?

Are you into me?

And then even the guys who didn’t seem to mind the question acted weird after, like suddenly they had to talk about sports and beer a lot to remind you how crushingly heterosexual they were. As though gay or bi guys couldn’t possibly like those things. Attraction to men was clearly a barrier no football or beverage could pass through.

Maybe that was his fear, then. As things stood, Axel was distant and unattainable. Like Schrödinger’s Cat, Axel existed in a quantum state, a thought experiment wherein he both was and was not attracted to Fox, and the moment Fox asked the question it removed all that potential and nailed Axel down to a single state of being.

It wiped the fantasy out and replaced it with reality.

“So,” Peter finally drawled, “you gonna ask him?”

Fox rolled his eyes and threw his hands toward the ceiling. “Fine! Okay! I’ll ask.”

“It’s about damn time!”