Andrew Minyard was back. Not the version they were used to, not the medicated shadow who drifted through his days on pills designed to sand down every sharp edge he had. This Andrew—the unfiltered one—was the one the Foxes didn’t know how to handle. Their glances lingered too long, cautious, almost pitying, as if they were waiting for him to snap. He didn’t care. Let them look. He’d already decided their opinions weren’t worth a damn.

What he hadn’t decided was what to do about Neil Josten.

Andrew had told himself, more than once, that the thing he felt—if it even counted as a thing—was temporary. He had chalked it up to the meds, to artificial attraction dulled and stirred by chemical imbalance. He thought once the fog cleared, so would the distraction of Neil’s stubbornness, his reckless mouth, his ability to stand unflinching against Andrew’s worst moods. But the fog was gone now, burned off in rehab, and Neil was still there in the back of his mind. Still too bright. Still too much.

And now there was this: Riko. Riko had threatened Neil using Andrew as the knife. It was laughable—Riko thinking Andrew’s safety could be used as leverage—but Neil had believed it enough to suffer for it. Neil had taken that weight, that danger, and carried it in silence. And Andrew… Andrew hated that more than anything. Not that Riko had dared, but that Neil had been willing to bleed in his place.

So Andrew watched him now, in that deliberate, calculating way of his, searching for some angle, some reason that could explain why his chest tightened whenever Neil’s blue eyes landed on him. He didn’t like questions without answers, and Neil was a question wrapped in too many lies. Andrew wanted to dismiss him, to bury the thing clawing its way up from under his skin. But avoidance didn’t work. Distance didn’t help. Every time Neil opened his mouth, every time he stood his ground when anyone else would have folded, Andrew found himself circling back.

He told himself it wasn’t a crush. That word was too juvenile, too flimsy for the pull he felt. But when Neil’s gaze met his across the room, when he caught the flicker of recognition in Neil’s smirk—like they were both in on some private joke—Andrew knew he was lying to himself.

So he avoided everyone else. He let the Foxes wonder, let them whisper about what the absence of “happy pills” would make of him. But he didn’t avoid Neil. He couldn’t.

Neil Josten was a problem Andrew didn’t want solved.