Page 18 of Unbound
As if I had that kind of power. As if Jesse Miller was fragile enough to shatter at my touch.
And yet, I couldn't shake the image of Jesse's face when he'd fled the coffee shop. The genuine hurt in his eyes when I'd pushed too hard.
Maybe Elijah was right. Maybe Jesse was more fragile than I'd realized.
Or maybe I was the one in danger of breaking.
Because somewhere between the bathroom confrontation and the coffee shop interrogation, this had stopped being about a dare. Stopped being about proving a point or winning a bet.
I'd told my friends that Jesse was trapped, that he needed someone to throw him a rope. But, I was starting to wonder if I was the one who'd been caught.
I was pursuing Jesse Miller.
But increasingly, it felt like he was pursuing me.
I lay on my bed later that night, staring at the ceiling, replaying the coffee shop conversation for the hundredth time. Jesse's face when I'd asked about spontaneity. That flash of something—longing? terror?—before he'd shut down completely.
My phone buzzed. A text from Phoenix, the other resident insomniac of the house:
Stop brooding. I can hear you thinking through the wall.
Fuck off.
Make me. Also you're totally obsessed.
I groaned and rolled over, opening my laptop with no particular goal in mind. Just needed to do something other than think about Jesse Miller's catastrophically repressed everything.
Except apparently my brain had other plans, because I found myself scrolling through Google results for "men's underwear boutique Kansas City."
What the hell was I doing?
I knew what I was doing. I was thinking about Jesse's tighty-whities. Standard-issue, probably bought in a plastic-wrapped six-pack from Target by his mother. White cotton briefs that screamed "I've never made a single choice about my own body."
It was tragic, really.
It was also absolutely none of my business.
My cursor hovered over a boutique site. Claude & Stone. Expensive. The kind of place that sold boxer briefs in individual boxes like they were fucking jewelry.
This is insane,I told myself.
I clicked anyway.
The thing was, it wasn't about the underwear. Not really. It was about... permission. Jesse needed permission to want things. To choose things. To acknowledge that his body existed for something other than shame and performance.
And maybe I was absolutely full of shit, justifying this as some kind of noble gesture.
But Christ, the image of Jesse in something that actually fit him, something chosen rather than assigned—
I was scrolling through options before I'd fully admitted what I was doing. Not the jockstraps, not yet. That would send him into cardiac arrest. But there—charcoal grey boxer briefs, modal fabric, sleek lines. Sophisticated. The kind of thing a guy wore when he gave a damn about himself.
And okay, fine, maybe also these black ones. And the navy.
My finger hesitated over "add to cart."
What are you doing, Costas?
I could hear Elijah's voice in my head, warning me about projection. About wanting to save Jesse. About treating someone's identity crisis like a game.
