Page 72 of Try Line Hearts
He didn’t open it.
He opened his texts instead.
Eli’s last message still sat there like a bruise:how’s Hollywood?
Lucas stared at it until his vision blurred slightly.
He typed:Can I come over?
His thumb hovered.
Then he sent it.
He paced while the dots didn’t appear.
His chest felt too tight. His skin felt too warm. He wantedsomething—relief, absolution, an anchor. He wanted Eli’s laugh. Eli’s body in his space. Eli’s mouth on his neck, like a reset button.
He didn’t think.
That was the problem. Thinking required space, and space was the one thing he couldn’t tolerate right now.
The photo of himself and Evelyn sat behind his eyes like a bruise. The ache in his chest had nowhere to go, nowhere to settle. He needed toredirectit. He always had.
His body had learned that trick early.
When feelings got too big—when confusion or loneliness or want threatened to crack him open—there was always the same shortcut: skin. Proof. The blunt language of flesh when words failed.
He pulled his phone back out before he could talk himself out of it.
His hands shook as he undid his trousers, movements clumsy and rushed. There was no heat there, not really—no sharp hunger, no spark—but his body was still his body, familiar and unignorable. Even soft, even slack with tension instead of arousal, he waslarge. He always had been.
It had mattered before.
More than once, it had been enough. A look. A reveal. A quick escalation that let him skip the part where he had to explain himself. Men had responded to it eagerly, greedily, like the size itself was an invitation, like it excused everything else he didn’t know how to offer.
It had worked.
Too well.
He swallowed, staring down like he was assessing a tool rather than himself.
This isn’t about sex,he thought dimly.
Which was how he knew it was a mistake.
He angled the phone anyway. No theatrics. No posing. Just skin and scale and vulnerability caught badly in low light—undeniable, unsoftened. The kind of image that saidlookinstead oflisten.
The shutter clicked.
The sound made his stomach drop.
He didn’t check it. Didn’t adjust. Didn’t give himself a chance to back out. He hit send on instinct alone, like muscle memory kicking in after a hit.
Gone.
The silence afterward was immediate and awful.
Lucas stood there with his trousers still undone, pulse roaring, shame blooming hot in his chest. He fixed himself with numb fingers and shoved the phone away like it might accuse him.
