Page 26

Marty stayed for coffee in the morning, then went home to change before his shift. Spencer stood by the door, looking around the empty apartment to see if anything had changed. Obviously everything was exactly where it had been the day before, and he didn’t really feel any different, either. This was still his home, his life, and his boyfriend was going to come over for dinner later, and he’d just let his . . . lover, maybe? . . . out the door.

Spencer heaved out a sigh. He wasn’t sure how he had gone from hooking up with randoms sometimes to having a boyfriend and whatever this was. It struck him as next-level emotional labor that he wasn’t even really sure he was qualified for. But maybe also it was just fine? He felt fine, and Ian had seemed fine with the idea. Hopefully he still was when they talked about it later.

Spencer also hoped that his friends’ night had gone well. He had been dealing with his own thing, but he knew Ian had been wary of opening himself up again and asking for help. He couldn’t imagine a scenario in which Ian’s friends weren’t sympathetic to that, but Spencer’s own friends maybe weren’t the template for normal human interaction.

He changed his sheets, and then, lacking anything else to do, headed to Cat’s to pick up Norman.

Cat had her mouth open to ask about Marty as she answered the door, but Spencer held up a finger. “Ah. I haven’t talked to Ian about it yet, so I’m not ready to talk to you.”

Cat rolled her eyes and let him in. “Fine. But you better text me later. I have not been watching you flirt with that man for years to not get any details.”

“I will.”

He followed Cat out to the yard where Norman and Penny were playing.

When they made it to the patio, Cat caught his arm and spun him toward her, looking into his eyes searchingly. “I just want to know you’re good.”

Spencer felt a pang in his chest. Cat would harass him mercilessly, but he always knew it was because she cared. “I’m good,”

he said, pulling her into a hug.

“Good,”

she said, squeezing back.

———

It was five by the time Ian texted that he was going to pick up Chinese on the way over and past six by the time Spencer heard him let himself in. “Hey there.”

Ian kissed him on his way to the kitchen to set down the food, Norman following in his wake.

“Hi,”

Spencer said. He watched Ian move around the kitchen, taking the food out of the bag, grabbing utensils from the drawer. He waited for guilt or shame or really any of the emotions he’d expected to come over him. They didn’t. He felt exactly the same way he always did when Ian turned that radiant smile toward him—like warm ocean water was lapping at his feet.

Ian handed him his container of moo shu pork and a pair of chopsticks and plopped down on the couch next to him. Spencer loved that Ian knew him well enough now to know what he ordered every time he ordered American Chinese food and that he preferred his own reusable chopsticks to the disposable ones the restaurant stuffed in the bag.

“How was last night?”

Spencer asked, hoping that smile meant that Ian’s friends had been accommodating.

Ian finished chewing his bite of beef and broccoli before he said, “It went really well. I would have loved for you to come, but I think you were right that I had to go by myself and talk to everyone.”

“I’m glad it worked out, baby. I’d be happy to go with you next time if you want.”

Spencer wanted to meet Ian’s friends, wanted to become a part of his life in that way. But he knew Ian’s first friends’ night back wasn’t the time for that.

“They were all asking about you,”

Ian said. “I promised to bring you next time. Unless you’re busy, of course.”

Then he asked, “How was your date with Marty?”

Spencer watched Ian intently, the set of his shoulders, the slant of his brow, as he said, “It was really fun.”

But rather than tense up, Ian looked pleased, his eyes crinkling in the corners. “I’m glad.”

“You’re not . . . upset about it?”

Spencer asked, wanting to make sure he wasn’t missing any nonverbal cues. He set his take-out container down on the coffee table so he could pay full attention to the conversation.

Ian’s eyes went wide, and he set his food down next to Spencer’s. “Sweetheart, we talked about it. I knew what was going to happen. Why would I be upset?”

“I didn’t know if the reality would be different than the hypothetical.”

Spencer shook his head, feeling suddenly silly.

“Was it different for you?”

Spencer bit his lip, considering. “Yes and no? I mean, I’ve obviously had sex before. But not when I was in a relationship with someone else.”

Ian reached out to him, and Spencer slid closer so they were touching. “Did you enjoy it?”

“Yeah. I did.”

Spencer pressed his face to Ian’s chest, felt his heart beating steadily under Spencer’s ear.

“Then I want that for you.”

Ian brushed his fingers through Spencer’s hair. “To be honest, I spent a lot of last night processing my own grief, so I wasn’t actively thinking about it. But when I think about it now, it makes me happy to know it was what you wanted it to be.”

Spencer looked up into Ian’s eyes. “It’s that easy?”

“I think so.”

Ian relaxed back, taking Spencer with him. “Should it not be?”

Any tension Spencer had been carrying had eased from his body, and he almost wanted to laugh. “I keep waiting for it to feel the way people say it should feel.”

“Why should you feel anything but what you’re feeling?”

Well, why should he? Spencer was happy, and though his natural tendency was to assume everything was going to come crashing to the ground at any moment, maybe Ian’s point was that it didn’t have to. And maybe he could start trusting that.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

Spencer smiled. That honestly sounded . . . fun. He grabbed both of the food containers off the coffee table and handed Ian his. “We went to the wine bar down the street.”

Ian hummed, filling his mouth with rice, but Spencer could tell he was listening.

“It was honestly pretty crowded and overpriced, so I wouldn’t really recommend it, but we weren’t there for very long.”

As far as he knew, only tourists liked that bar. It had definitely been a means to an end.

“Well, you’re fairly irresistible.”

Ian kissed his cheek before getting up to go to the kitchen. He came back with two glasses of water and went back to his beef.

“I don’t know if it was that so much,”

Spencer hedged. “We came back here, and he, um, wanted me to fuck him in the mirror.”

He could tell he was already blushing, which was absurd because Ian had fucked him in the mirror. It wasn’t like he didn’t know what that was like.

“Oh?”

Even if that was a visual he already had, Ian looked . . . interested.

“He was quite . . . enthusiastic about it, really.”

Spencer smiled remembering Marty’s hand on his face, the command in his voice. “He, uh, he rode me while he watched himself.”

“And did you enjoy being inside of him?”

The pitch of Ian’s voice was making Spencer’s blood run hot.

“I did.”

He gulped. Whatever Spencer had expected this conversation to turn into, it definitely wasn’t foreplay.

Ian pressed his lips to Spencer’s ear. “Would you enjoy being inside me tonight?”

All Spencer’s blood rushed to his dick. “Before or after we finish eating?”

he blurted.

Ian tilted his head back and forth like he was weighing the options. “After will do.”

They did finish eating, and then made out on the couch for a while. Then they moved to the bed, stripping down and getting tangled in each other’s limbs.

Spencer knew that Ian didn’t like to be fucked like Marty liked to be fucked. Rather than having him face the mirror, he laid him out in the middle of the bed on his stomach and opened him up slowly, gently, using his hands and his mouth to ease Ian’s tense muscles. Then he covered him with his body, thrusting slow and deep with long rolls of his hips, moaning into Ian’s neck.

Ian bunched the sheets in his fists and panted into the pillows, coming with his eyes squeezed shut and Spencer’s name on his lips.

Then Spencer sped up, knowing Ian liked the prostate stimulation after he came, reveling in the little punched-out sounds he made until he bit down on Ian’s shoulder and spilled into him. “Fuck, you’re perfect,”

Spencer said as Ian grabbed his hand and kissed his palm. “Was that what you wanted?”

Ian turned over his shoulder to look at him with half-hooded eyes. “Exactly.”

———

Spencer woke up the next day and made coffee. They’d fallen into a bit of a routine when Ian stayed over, walking Norman together and getting breakfast at Raj’s before coming back to shower and get on with their days. Often they showered together, but sometimes Ian wanted to actually clean himself off, which Spencer thought was foolish but tried to respect.

While Ian took his own shower, Spencer pulled up the renderings of the Brown Street kitchens. He was going to need to get the cabinet order in soon, then go to Rae’s stone yard to pick a slab once he knew the square footage of the counters. He heard the water turn off, and then soon after the pocket door sliding open. “Hey, baby, since you’re here, can you come look at something with me?”

“Can I put some pants on first?”

Spencer turned in his chair to find Ian stark naked, toweling off his wet hair. Spencer didn’t really want to talk about cabinets anymore, but he tried to focus. “If you must.”

He started pulling samples out of the boxes under his desk.

The apartment wasn’t big enough for Spencer to keep everything he needed on hand. Especially when he was showing clients kitchen and bathroom options, he ended up driving around to his suppliers to get all the different finish samples he needed. But he could show Ian what he did have, and if they needed to make a trip to his carpenter’s showroom, they could find a time to do that.

“Okay, what am I looking at?”

Ian came up behind him and wrapped an arm around his shoulders.

Spencer held Ian’s hand in his while he scrolled on his trackpad with the other. “This is the kitchen layout you picked.”

It was actually two kitchen layouts, mirror images of each other, one for each side of the duplex. “We need to decide on the cabinet finish, and then based on that we can look at tile for the floors and backsplashes.”

He gestured to some small squares of wood on his desk. “We could go with something light with gray undertones.”

He held up one of the samples. “Or more of a midtone. This one is warmer.”

He let go of Ian’s hand to hold up another square of wood.

“Sweetheart, you must know this all means nothing to me.”

Ian came around to his side to look at the various samples Spencer had laid out, shifting them around with his hand.

“You really don’t care?”

“It’s not that I don’t care.”

Ian smiled down at him. “It’s just that you look at all these tiny pieces and see a completed kitchen. I see . . . little squares.”

Spencer played with his rendering, turning the cabinets all the lighter stain color. “How about that?”

Ian bit his bottom lip.

“Not that one?”

He switched to the midtone with a few clicks.

“I think . . .”

“It’s okay. You’re not going to hurt my feelings.”

Lord knew clients had said some truly heinous things to him over the years.

“I just don’t want to make any changes to your design because I know you’re much better at this than I am.”

“Baby, tell me what you want.”

Ian paused. “You know that table you have in your storage unit? The dark-wood one with the white top?”

“The farmhouse table?”

Spencer grabbed his phone and started scrolling through his photos. He took a picture of every piece he had in his storage unit as a way to stay moderately organized. “This one?”

He showed Ian his phone.

“Do you think that could go in the side I’m not renting out? Instead of the island?”

Ian looked uncertain.

Spencer turned toward him so he was sitting sideways on his desk chair and Ian was standing between his knees. “Ian, are you trying to turn me on?”

A smile slowly spread across Ian’s face. “Is it working?”

“I fucking love that idea. I didn’t know you’d want that.”

“I didn’t, either, honestly. But when I saw it, it reminded me of something my grandma used to have when I was a kid. And I thought it might be nice to have something like that back in the house.”

“I think that would be beautiful. We should probably try something different for the cabinets, though.”

Spencer popped up, almost headbutting Ian in the nose, and went into his own kitchen to where he stored a bunch of other samples in one of the lower cabinets since he didn’t actually have all that much cookware. “We could go with a painted cabinet, like a navy or an olive.”

He tossed down some paint chips. “And maybe we can see if Rae has a big enough piece of soapstone to contrast the marble.”

“What’s soapstone?”

Spencer handed Ian a square of black stone with white veining. Ian ran the pad of his thumb over it.

“I think that could be nice with the green.”

He laid the two samples together on the desk as though he really could see it now.

“I think so, too.”

Spencer wrapped his arms around Ian from behind and kissed his cheek.

“Is this how all your client meetings go?”

Ian teased, leaning back into Spencer’s arms.

“This is how absolutely none of my client meetings go.”

Spencer bit Ian’s earlobe and then ran his tongue over it. “But I wouldn’t be opposed to it in the future.”