Page 12 of The Year of Us: August

“You work tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you want me to crash at your place tonight? Or did you want to come back here after?”

“Let’s see. Go back to my tiny apartment with a shower the size of a tic-tac, or come here and shower in a bathroom with a larger footprint than my entire apartment. Tough call.” Reese laughed, but me not being in a relationship in years had me worried that I was misreading his laughter.

“I don’t want you to feel shoehorned into anything, Reese.”

He propped himself up on his elbow and looked at me. His brow was furrowed, and I wanted to reach for him and smooth the worry lines away.

“I don’t. I promise.”

“Okay. I just…” I exhaled and tried to gather my thoughts so I could articulate them in a way that made sense. “I know my move has changed things for us, and will continue to change things for us, but I don’t want it to change how we feel about each other.”

“How could it?” Reese asked softly.

“I don’t have an answer for that.”

“You don’t have an answer because fear isn’t rational. It’s okay to be a little freaked out, babe. You just moved across the country. You changed your fucking client roster, and probably a bunch of other shit, just to be here, with me.”

Instead of focusing on the very accurate way Reese pegged exactly what was going on with me, I smiled up at him. “Babe?” I questioned.

Reese shrugged. “It was that or pookie.”

“Babe is fine.” My heart did a victory lap in my chest. Babe was more than fine. And it was far better than pookie any day.

CHAPTER 10

Reese

The endof August brought the emergence of routine.

Much like his three-week stay over the summer, Cory wound up at my apartment most weekends, and I spent most of the weeknights at his house. The time was fairly split, but I was beginning to believe Cory favored the tight confines of my place over the sprawling landscape of his own, multi-million dollar home. We shared keys, we shared hearts, shared lives…the one thing we didn’t share was an address.

“Just ask him,” Morgan said, reaching over the table and stabbing her fork into a mozzarella ball.

It was a Wednesday. Cory was at work, I couldn’t sleep, and Morgan loved to eat.

I met her for lunch at an Italian place she loved, and I’d done nothing but complain about my living situation the whole time.

“I don’t want to ask him,” I argued with her, smacking her fork out of her hand. It clattered onto the table with a splash of balsamic vinaigrette, and she glared daggers at me.

“Since when don’t you ask for the things you want, Reese?”

Since Cory, that was when.

Before him, I’d been a confident and capable adult, a fucking dominant man who wasn’t scared of asking for what he wanted or chasing after it when circumstance required. But being with Cory had made me soft. When we discussed our limits after he arrived in LA for the last time, I’d made it clear to him I trusted him and was willing to let him lead our relationship where it needed to go.

“Since Cory,” I told her, rolling my eyes. “If he wanted me to move in with him, he would ask me to move in with him.”

Sure, there’d been nights spent tangled in his sheets, when our bodies had been so tightly fused I could feel his pulse in his cock as he shot me full of cum, and sure, he’d pressed his mouth hot and wet against my ear, told me he never wanted me to leave, didn’t want us to be apart, wanted to crawl inside of me and stay there…but he’d never asked me to move in.

“This is like when the two of you first started seeing each other,” she groused. “When I had to steal his number and tell him to come save us all from your misery.”

“If you talk to him about this, I’ll kill you,” I warned.

“He’s my friend now too, you know,” she said, lips tilting down into a small frown.