This isn't weird.

Freak

Indigo was listless.

The silence in the apartment was deafening in the two days since Ben had left without a word. Not that he was owed a word, of course. They weren't in the habit of keeping tabs on one another's whereabouts, and Indigo himself was usually the one mysteriously absent. Ben had once joked that he was like an outdoor cat that wandered off at his leisure to a secret second home with some family down the street, only to reappear a day or two later, sitting primly in the kitchen as if he'd never been gone at all.

He wasn't wrong. Indigo did, in fact, have a second apartment, just one floor below. Usually he kept it set aside for guests, somewhere out of his hair to stick his relations on their rare but taxing visits, but he also used it when he needed to work on a project in absolute solitude, or to afford Ben some extra privacy. Naturally, once Tess had come barreling into his life, it had become a place for them to spend time together without running the risk of her presence overlapping with Ben's.

Ugh, it was preposterous. How had he ever even considered any sort of relationship with someone who could have so much animosity against Ben, of all people?

At the time, he thought he'd understood it. For a few months, Ben had been difficult to get along with, he had made terrible mistakes, he had hurt Millie. And Indigo had been impressed by the ferocity of Tess's love for her friend, her unwavering drive to protect her—there was a purity of intention there that Indigo couldn't help but respect. In time, he had believed, when Ben was well again, amends would be made, Tess would move past it, and he wouldn't have to take such pains to keep them separated.

That thought process seemed so childish now.

Ben was a good person. A wonderfully, impossibly, obnoxiously good person. No matter how dark a place he had been in, no matter how many mistakes he had made, anyone with a heart and a single functioning brain cell could see that. Indigo should have thrown her out the very second she opened her mouth to speak ill of him. Why had he spent so much time making excuses for the inexcusable? He knew better. He knew better.

But that night...

The night she'd come barging into his room in search of the friend she was so protective of, wandering right into the epicenter of his maladjusted inner world, as she'd taken in her bizarre first impression of him, sitting alone in the dark, staring up at a wall full of people, normal people, enjoying the sort of fun and connection he, himself, would never be capable of...

Anyone else would have turned around and ran right back out into the party, shouting, "There's cameras everywhere! There's a creepy pervert watching us!"

But not Tess. 

Tess kicked off her heels and made herself right at home.

"Damn, birthday boy, you're a freak."

He'd been called a freak many times in his life—usually as an insult, occasionally in good humor. Ben would tease him with it from time to time, always fondly. But Tess wasn't even teasing him, wasn't being ironic in any way. She said it like it was the highest compliment the English language had to offer.

Tess didn't understand his behavior per se, but she wasn't horrified by it the way most people were. She was fascinated by him. For hours, she'd sat on his floor, grinning ear to ear as she asked him blunt questions that nobody else had ever dared to ask and listened to his answers raptly, without judgment. It had caught him completely off balance, and he'd been stunned by how much she'd been able to draw out of him, one eager question at a time.

Before he even knew it was happening, he had told her more than he'd ever told anyone about his lonely upbringing as the firstborn child of a part time model, full time heiress and the shrewd investment banker who had turned her multimillion dollar portfolio into a billion dollar one. How they had been thrilled, at first, to have a son, but their enthusiasm waned quickly as he grew into a child who was increasingly... off.