Xan let out a laugh—too high and too tight—and rubbed his face. “I don’t fucking know.”
“I mean, if you need money to get a place…”
“I’m not broke,” he snapped, then softened. “Sorry. Sorry, I don’t mean to sound like an asshole.”
“You don’t,” Luca said, then stopped. He stared at him for a long moment, and it gave Xan time to study the details of his face— the way his jawline was cut like he’d been carved from marble, and the way his eyes were a little too close together, but somehow it worked on him. He snapped out of it a second later when Luca asked, “Do you apologize a lot for expressing how you feel?”
Xan blinked, then laughed, this time with a little more humor, even if it was self-deprecating. “Probably. Then again I haven’t really been invited to talk about my feelings in a while.” He started to reach for the coffee, then pulled his hand back again.
Luca’s mouth twitched in a half-grin. “Did I fuck it up?”
“What?” Xan blurted, then realized what Luca was asking, and he laughed. “No. It’s not that.”
“Yes, it is,” Luca said, then he leaned forward and snatched the cup off the table, pitching it into the trash a few steps away. “It was actual swill. I got it from the office where no one knows how to use the damn percolator. Why don’t we go to the vending machines? It has to be better than this.”
Xan smiled in spite of the faint tension that was still simmering between them, but Luca’s offer sounded genuine, and Xan knew getting out of the library for a bit was probably the best idea. He glanced over his shoulder and saw it had finally stopped raining, so he shoved his laptop into his bag and draped his coat over his arm.
Luca was waiting a few steps away with one hand shoved deep into the pocket of his jeans. He was tall—god, he was so tall, and his arms were big and looked so warm in his stupid cream-colored sweater.
“So, that hug…” he blurted, then bit his tongue out of sheer mortification. “I mean, um…”
Luca’s quiet chuckle silenced the rest of his words, and he took three steps closer. Xan’s breath caught in his chest as massive arms were wrapping around him, and he was pulled into Luca’s broad chest. He smelled like spices and rain and woods and expensive cologne. Xan felt like he could stand there against that warmth for a hundred years and never, ever want to pull away.
Which was the reason he did because Luca was married, and he was happy, and Xan had no damn business even taking this much from him.
“Thanks,” he muttered.
Luca offered him a confused smile, but he didn’t argue when Xan kept more than a foot apart from him as they headed toward the hallway with all the snack machines. “What about food,” Luca asked. “Have you eaten today?”
Xan snorted. “That’s a hard no. Every time I even thought about it, I felt like I was going to be sick. I’m in the, what the fuck do I do now, phase of this whole emotional breakdown. I think the ice cream and cookie dough phase is at least a few days away.”
Luca said nothing, which made Xan wonder if he’d made things even more awkward, but as they came around the corner to the wind tunnels, he laid his hand on the small of Xan’s back just long enough to make his breath catch in his chest. His steps faltered for a second, but Luca urged him on and dug into his pocket as they came to a stop in front of the coffee machine.
“When I was in high school,” Luca said softly, his lips turned up at the corners, “we had this little gas station down the road from the campus. I lived in this really small suburb where you could walk from one end to the other in less than an hour.” He rubbed the back of his neck and Xan could see youth still lingering in the lines of his face. “The gas station was a fucking hole, but they got one of those fake cappuccino machines that tasted like someone stirred hot cocoa into instant coffee.”
Xan wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, I remember those.”
“They wrecked your stomach, but I got one every goddamn day of my senior year. It made me feel like a grown up.” With