a gentle rush, and he felt the way his fingers spasmed in his hand.
“Why don’t I gather those up for you while you get your clothes,” Sebastion told him.
Xan let his hand go, then he turned and looked at him with wide eyes. “You don’t need to get involved with all this.”
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t. I’m choosing to.”
Xan closed his eyes in a slow blink, then looked up at him and his jaw went tight. “Okay. Then…thank you.”
Sebastion let out a breath of relief that he wasn’t going to have to fight Xan to let him help. He spotted the box the journals must have come from, a few still sitting at the bottom. They weren’t entirely ruined—at least the ones that survived the fire—so he gathered up the torn pieces and tucked them under the cover of the largest one, then gently stacked them all.
He hadn’t lost everything, but he’d lost enough. He could still smell the last vestiges of the fire, and he wanted to know if any of that had survived. “Do you want me to check for…the others?”
Xan was standing at the dresser, and he glanced over his shoulder, his face a little paler than usual. “The ones he burned?”
“If there’s anything left to save, you should take it. Even if you don’t keep it,” Sebastion told him.
After a beat, Xan nodded. “If you don’t mind. It probably smells like ass in there.”
With a very small chuckle, Sebastion hefted the box under his arm. “I can handle it. Meet you in the kitchen after this?”
Xan nodded and didn’t say anything else as Sebastion walked out and turned the corner into the small bathroom. It really did smell—though the pungent scent of lighter fluid had mostly burnt off. The shower curtain had melted some though, and a couple of the plastic soap bottles looked warped. There was a mess of black ash at the bottom of the tub, with some loose spirals, and a handful of pages that had stuck together and hadn’t fully burnt.
He gathered those up, then grabbed a hand towel off the rack and wrapped them up before putting them in the box, then he took a wad of toilet paper and began to swipe the ash and burnt wire rings from the bottom. It was easy enough to pitch into the trash, and even easier to wash the rest down the drain, though he wasn’t going to clean.
He wanted to leave it for Max—he wanted the man to wallow in the mistakes he’d made and the beautiful man he’d lost all because he was an arrogant, abusive asshole.
Max was so much like his ex—like Rhys. So mediocre and so obsessed with himself and what the world owed him. He’d only spoken to him a handful of times since he left, and each time he refused to acknowledge what he’d done—the monster he’d been. And it wasn’t worth it to dwell on him now. He just wanted to make sure Xan was able to break out of that cycle because like Rhys, Max seemed like the sort of man who didn’t like to let go.
Sebastion took a moment to wash the soot from his hands, then he carried the box into the living room and found Luca pacing near the bookshelves. His husband turned when he walked in, his eyes wide and pained.
“He didn’t touch the other journals,” Sebastion said, nodding at the chair where he’d set them down. “Xan’s getting his clothes.”
Luca bit the inside of his cheek. “You know,” he said in a very low voice, taking a few steps closer, “it’s like he didn’t even live here. All of his shit was tucked into that one bin. Everything else belongs to that dickhead.”
Sebastion’s gaze wandered and saw it had to be true. Maybe some of the novels belonged to Xan, but all of the photos were of Max with family, with friends, on vacation. And Xan wasn’t in any of them. It was like he’d been methodically stripped out of his own life and replaced with a shadow that Max could come home and fuck if he felt like it, or verbally punch, and ignore the rest of the time.
“He’s almost done, I think,” was all Sebastion could say.
And it was true. Xan wandered out a few minutes later with two duffle bags hooked over his shoulder, and he let them drop near the sofa. He looked exhausted, and he was probably starving along with his sleep-deprivation, and Sebastion