30. Gil

CHAPTER 30

GIL

T he next morning, I woke up early with Rowan plastered against my chest and covered in sweat. Carefully, I peeled him off of me, lamenting the waste of his impressive morning erection, then I pulled on my jeans and headed to the kitchen to make coffee. I hadn’t been blowing smoke the night before when I told him how impressed I was with the work he’d done on the house. He’d moved in barely more than a month ago and everything was nearly finished and new. Clearly, when he hadn’t been bent over the back of my couch, he’d found more than enough ways to keep himself busy here. I was proud of the things he’d done, the man he was.

Proud to call him mine.

In the kitchen, I opened freshly painted cabinets until I found coffee and mugs, then I set a pot to brewing and turned my attention to the fridge. Rowan’s fridge was much better stocked than mine because he had Fisher to feed, and for the first time since I’d confessed my feelings and my intentions for Rowan, I imagined I could get used to a life with him.

I’d just pulled a carton of eggs out of the fridge when something buzzed against my leg. Startled, I slapped my thigh, quickly realizing it was my cell phone. In all the things I grabbed at home before we left, I’d forgotten a charger. I’d forgotten about my phone entirely, evidenced by the five-percent battery life when I swiped the screen awake.

The vibration had been a message from Jack, worried that he hadn’t heard from me the day before, knowing that Sunday was my quiet day and he didn’t want to bother me, but…

I’m fine. Better than. Explain later.

JACK

Does this have to do with the ginger neighbor of yours?

I said later.

Zombie noises from the hallway grew louder, and then Fisher appeared in the kitchen, hair sticking up every which way and his eyes half-closed. He had the new earbuds in, and he slowly blinked me into focus.

“Are those on?” I asked.

He squinted hard and pulled one out. “What?”

“I asked if they were on.”

Fisher nodded and put it back in, throwing himself down at the table, making a pillow of his good arm and dropping his head down with a thump.

“Can you still hear me?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Eggs?”

Another nod.

“Bacon?”

Negative.

“Just eggs?”

Fisher propped his chin on his cast, winced, and readjusted. “Sausage.”

“I didn’t see sausage,” I said.

“The drawer with the meat.” He put his head down again, effectively dismissing me.

I set the eggs on the counter and went back to the fridge, opening all three drawers before I found the meat drawer. I’d never had a meat drawer, and I had no frame of reference if that was a normal thing or not. Philip and I never had one, and Jack definitely didn’t. But the Verne household did.

Duly noted.

It wasn’t long before the kitchen filled with the smell of coffee and breakfast meat, but there was still no sign of Rowan from the bedroom. I shoved a plate of eggs and sausage against Fisher’s wrist and he righted himself with a yawn.

“Do you drink coffee?” I asked him, setting my plate on the table across from him.

“Dad doesn’t want me to do it too much.”

“Your dad’s asleep.”

Fisher grinned and nodded. I slid my half-empty mug toward him and poured a fresh one for myself. I eyed him when he took his first drink of it, nose scrunching up, but he swallowed it down without a protest. We both dug into our breakfast without a word, and I was halfway through the last link of my sausage when Rowan finally appeared in the hallway. He was as wrecked from sleep as Fisher, but probably way more on the inside than he bothered to show. When he saw me sitting at the table with his son, the biggest and softest smile took up residence on his face.

“Good morning,” I said, glancing up at him over the top of Fisher’s head.

Fisher’s eyes flashed, and he shoved his coffee toward my plate. I slid my mug to my right, and smiled back at Rowan.

“Coffee’s ready.”

Rowan scrubbed a hand down his face and shuffled around the table, sinking down into the seat beside me and taking the mug I’d been drinking from while his son drank from mine. I winked at Fisher, who finished off his breakfast in record time and stood with all the awkward speed of a newborn gazelle.

“Your plate,” Rowan said. “Take it to the sink.”

Fisher grumbled something, but did as he was told. Rowan reached over beneath the table and set his hand on the top of my thigh. It was so simple and so casual, and it had been so long since anyone had touched me that way—since I’d allowed anyone to touch me that way, it caught me off-guard. I stared down at the spread of his soft fingers against the dirty frayed denim of my jeans, wondering if there was truly a future for a man like him and a man like me. It would take adjusting for both of us, but if Rowan could whip this house into shape on his own, he could do the same for me.

“Uhm.” Fisher cleared his throat from the sink, knocking his cast against the edge of the counter gently to get our attention.

Both of us turned to face him, Rowan still half-asleep and me once again heading toward an adrenaline crash from all the newness.

“Are you boyfriends now?” he asked.

I snorted, clenching my teeth together and throwing a sideways glance at Rowan. We’d confessed our love, but hadn’t talked about being boyfriends . It wouldn’t be the first thing we’d done out of order and I was sure it wouldn’t be the last. For a supposed one-time thing, Rowan had sure managed to change my life in a thousand ways.

“Is it okay if we are?” Rowan asked back.

“I don’t really care. I just want to know.”

“Yeah,” Rowan answered with a jerky nod. He squeezed my thigh. “We’re boyfriends.”

Fisher looked at his dad, looked at me.

“Cool. Is my bike here or at your house?”

I huffed half of a laugh. “I’ve got it in my garage.”

“Can you fix it?”

I swallowed hard. “No.”

His face fell.

“But you can,” I said. “Once you get that cast off.”

Fisher rolled his eyes at me, reached into his pocket for his phone, turned up the volume of whatever he was listening to, and walked out.

“That bordered on dad joke territory,” Rowan said gently, taking his first drink of coffee. He made the same face Fisher had, and something crashed hard against my sternum.

“Do you want eggs and sausage?” I asked, shoving my chair back and stretching out my legs.

“Sure. Thanks.” He waited until I was at the stove, my back to him, before he spoke again. “Is it okay I told him we’re boyfriends?”

“Aren’t we?” I rolled three sausage links around the pan, listening to the casing snap and sizzle in the grease.

“We hadn’t talked about that part so much.” Rowan sounded terribly unsure of himself.

“Seems to me that things with us just happen whether we want them to or not.” I forked the cooked breakfast sausage onto his plate, topped him off with some of the scrambled eggs from earlier, then brought his plate to the table. I sat back down beside him, nerves spiking when he turned to face me instead of his food.

“I just want to make sure you want this,” he said quietly. “Want us.”

“I do,” I promised him, the truth of it resonating in my bones.

“It’s not like dating a single man,” Rowan went on. “Fisher’s feelings are different. If he gets attached?—”

I cut Rowan off, grabbing his face and bringing our foreheads together. He gasped, a sharp intake of breath against my lips and I dug my thumbs into his cheekbones.

“I know what I’m getting into,” I said.

When Fisher had been missing, I was just as frantic as Rowan about the whole thing. I’d just held myself together better because that’s what Rowan needed me to do. The thought of losing Fisher, of losing him…neither of them were an option anymore.

“Okay,” Rowan agreed, blinking hard. “What now?”

“Now you eat your breakfast.” I kissed him hard on the mouth, then shoved him away. “Normally Sundays are my alone-time.”

“Your whole life was alone-time,” he said with a laugh, digging into his eggs. He’d meant it as a joke, but it was far closer to the truth than he realized.

“I know,” I said softly, barely more than a whisper.

Rowan moaned around a bite of eggs, and I shifted away from him, turning my attention to my coffee. It seemed like a safer place to be than in Rowan’s astute and observant crosshairs.

“You’ll have to tell me what boyfriends do,” he said, a handful of bites later.

“Sorry. What?”

“You’re my first,” he reminded me with a sly smile. “Or did you forget?”

I leaned in close, not wanting to admit that I had, in fact, forgotten I’d been his first. Not because it wasn’t important to me, but because everything about him that had come after that felt too natural to be new.

“I’ll never forget how hungry your body gets for me, Rowan.”

His face flushed pink, highlighting the spread of the freckles that dotted his nose and his cheeks.

“Never forget the way you moan when I eat your ass.”

Rowan’s fork clattered against his plate and he grabbed the edge of the table with both hands.

“Too bad your son is home, with his super human hearing, or I’d do it again right now.”

“Gil,” he whispered.

“I’d crawl under this table and eat you for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

He covered his face with his hands.

“I love seeing you this way.” I slid my hand around his neck and hauled his chair toward me. He scrambled off of it, straddling me and applying just the right amount of pressure against my quickly thickening dick. I’d never been more glad for jeans than I was in that moment. At least the denim was trying its hardest to keep my erection at bay.

“If this is what boyfriends do, can you do it somewhere else?”

Fisher’s voice from the hallway startled us both, and Rowan jumped so far off my lap I thought he was going to crash his head into the light fixture above the table.

“Fish, you’ve gotta stop sneaking up on us,” Rowan begged.

“Do boyfriends take me out for pizza later since I—” He frowned and gave his casted arm a shake in the air.

“We can get pizza later,” Rowan conceded.

“Can I skip school tomorrow?” he asked next, eyes wide and hopeful.

“No,” Rowan and I both answered at the same time, which seemed to surprise all three of us.

Fisher rolled his eyes at his dad, then looked at me like I’d just told him Santa Claus wasn’t real.

“I thought you were cool,” he admonished me before taking a can of soda out of the fridge and leaving Rowan and me alone again in the kitchen. He took all the air in the room with him, and it had to be five full minutes before I turned to Rowan.

“Does he believe in Santa still?”

Rowan barked out a laugh, tangling his fingers through his unruly red curls and pushing them away from his face. “What?”

“Fisher, I mean.”

“No, I know what you meant, and…no.” He tilted his head to the side, giving me a curious look. “He hasn’t for years.”

“Oh.” I nodded, sinking back into my chair and reaching for my coffee. It had already gone cold, and I frowned at the bitterness of it.

Rowan took the mug out of my hands and stood, kissing the top of my head before snaking around the table and making his way to the counter. He refilled both our mugs, then set mine back in front of me from behind, wrapping his arms around my shoulders so his fingers joined together over my heart.

“You have a lot to learn about teenagers,” he said, kissing the top of my ear.

I sighed, leaning back against him.

“I have a lot to learn about you,” I countered.

He hummed, patting my sternum with his fingertips.

“Well, if that’s how you fuck a stranger, I can’t wait to see what you do after we’re better acquainted.”

I laughed, a wheeze that turned into a hearty sound. Covering Rowan’s hands with mine, I angled my face upward and kissed him until he had the answer.

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