Chapter 35
LINCOLN
Packing up my apartment was easy because I didn’t have much that mattered.
I’d gone through such a massive purge after Silas moved in with Marshall, and I hadn’t even bothered to take the collapsed boxes out to the dumpster yet.
There were a lot of things that would need to wait, but I grabbed all of my clothes, my pictures and books, my sex toys.
My life was contained in a series of boxes that fit on my bed, and while I could have carried them all down to my car one by one, I didn’t really want to.
Sitting down in the middle of my life, I pulled out my phone and called Silas, who of course answered before it went to voicemail.
He was very in love with his new life and his boyfriend, but he was still my best friend.
I was the one who’d been pushing him away since he moved out, not the other way around.
“Hey,” he said, happiness echoing through the phone so contagiously I couldn’t help but smile.
“You busy?”
“Just having coffee while Marshall works a little. Why?”
“I could use a spare set of hands,” I said.
“Yeah,” Silas said without even knowing what for. I could have had a body to bury. It would have made no difference to him. The blind dedication my best friend offered me had my heart expanding painfully against my sternum. “Where are you?”
“My apartment.”
“Now?” he asked.
“Yeah, that would be good.”
“Do you want me to bring coffee?” he asked next.
“I had some already, but it wouldn’t hurt.”
“Cool. See you soon, Linc.”
Silas hung up and I tossed my phone onto the bed and waited. It took twenty minutes or so for Silas to get to my place, and when he walked in and saw the boxes stacked on the bed, he arched a brow at me in question.
“Going somewhere?” he asked.
“Hunter asked me to move in.”
“That’s quick.”
I held up a hand to stop him, frowning. “Don’t start with me.”
“I just want you to be sure you’re making the right decision.”
“I didn’t do this when you moved in with Marshall,” I reminded him. Even though I’d wanted to, even though that had come from a place of jealousy.
Silas shoved his hands into his pockets and gave a quick scan to my apartment, the state of it, the state of me, and then the fight went out of his shoulders.
“You’re right,” he conceded, walking toward me until our chests knocked together. He dropped his forehead down low onto my shoulder, and it was second nature to slide my arms around his waist and keep him close. “That was dumb of me.”
“You worry about me,” I whispered against his ear. “I love that about you.”
“He makes you happy?”
I nodded.
“Okay,” Silas murmured, bringing his face up so we were almost eye to eye. “I just want the best for you.”
“He is.”
My best friend’s mouth twitched up into a smile, and his eyes narrowed like there was a conspiracy between us.
“I never pegged Hunter as submissive.”
The laugh that fell out of my mouth was violent enough to put physical space between us, and the look of confusion on Silas’s face only made me laugh harder. I pulled him to the edge of the bed and tugged him down, holding his hand until I could breathe again through the tears.
“He’s not,” I said, shaking my head. “Not at all. Well…no. He’s really not.”
“But you…”
“It works for us,” I shared, leaning in and pressing our foreheads together. “He’s…”
The word lodged in my throat. It was one thing to use it with Hunter, another thing entirely to use it with someone else.
Silas had always known me as a dominant, and not that it had any true bearing on the nature of our friendship, but would he look at me differently if he knew what I did behind closed doors?
No. That was impossible. He was too good of a person for that, too kind and sincere in everything he did to think less of me for finding something different for myself.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”
“He’s a Daddy,” I admitted. “He’s mine, but sometimes he calls me Sir and sometimes he gets on his knees for me, Silas, and it’s fucking everything.”
His face split into a huge grin, and he grabbed both of my hands, squeezing tight. “I love that for you.”
Tears pricked the backs of my eyelids, and I swallowed hard, not wanting to cry in front of him.
“I love him,” I rasped.
Silas tipped his chin and pressed our mouths together. He smiled against my lips, and I looped my arms around his shoulders before breaking the kiss and burying my face into the crook of his neck.
“I love him so much,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I can tell. And he’s lucky for it. He knows that, right?”
I nodded.
“If he hurts you, I’ll kill him.” Silas could barely get the threat out with a straight face, and his fake bravado had me laughing too.
“No, you won’t.”
“I would try,” he said instead. “Marshall would.”
“I doubt that.”
“Hey.” He grabbed my shoulders, gave me a little shake. “Marshall adores you. If you think he wouldn’t come for Hunter if he hurt you, you’re underestimating his affection.”
I nodded my agreement.
“You got lucky with him, didn’t you?” I murmured.
“Very. And so did you. With Hunter.”
“Very,” I agreed. “But I have to get these boxes and Feeny over to his apartment before lunch, and there’s no way I can do it myself without an hour of whining.”
“Good thing you’ve got me then,” Silas teased, knocking his elbow into me.
It was all I could do to agree with him, even if the words were twisted into a knot in the back of my throat.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been a good friend,” I blurted, which earned me a very unhappy and confused look from Silas.
“How have you not been a good friend?”
“I just…I let you move and I know we see each other on Friday—”
“It’s not enough.”
I huffed a breath that puffed out of my cheeks, and I shrugged at him. Because I wasn’t necessarily sure that was the case.
“It’s less than before,” I said. “Different from before. But you want to be with Marshall, and I don’t blame you for that. I want to be with Hunter as much as I can be too.”
“Obviously.” Silas grinned, gesturing at the boxes. “We will find something that works for us now. Something new.”
“I don’t want to be an imposition.”
He stood up and scoffed. “You’re my best friend.”
“I know, but—”
“Maybe we can double date,” he suggested, picking up a box without being told. I stood and grabbed one for myself, following Silas toward the door without being asked. “But I think if you call Hunter Daddy in front of Marshall, he might have an aneurysm.”
My keys were on the counter, and I hooked my pinky finger through the loop. Silas managed the door open, and we shouldered our way into the hall together.
“It’s not like that,” I assured him. “That’s…it’s private for us.”
“I love that for you,” he said again, and there was no indication he didn’t mean it. “But I do have to ask why Daddy Hunter isn’t the one helping you move.”
The way he said Daddy was laced with amusement, and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling at how warm it made me feel inside. Even being a joke, I loved the idea of it, loved the feel of it when I thought of how Hunter treated me.
“Finn came over this morning,” I said.
We’d made it downstairs to my car, and together we managed to get the trunk open. Silas dropped his box inside and I did the same, then straightened up and brushed myself off. He leveled a worried look at me, and all I could do was shrug. “Something’s going on with him, but he’s like a vault.”
“All that attitude.”
“Clearly a defense mechanism,” I said, and Silas nodded his agreement.
“I really like Finn, but he’s definitely the hardest of them to get a read on.”
I closed the trunk, and we headed back upstairs to get more boxes.
“Have you met Andrew?” I asked.
Silas shook his head. “You?”
“Today will be the first time.” I grimaced, walking back into the apartment and testing the weight of the boxes to see if I could get more than one on the next trip. “That’s wild, though, isn’t it? About their dad.”
“About their moms,” Silas whispered, like anyone was around to hear. “No wonder Finn plays his emotions close to the chest.”
“Yeah.”
I found two boxes of a tolerable weight and stacked them.
Silas grabbed one, and we were back on our walk.
It took three more trips to get everything, boxes stacked in the trunk and the back seat by the time we were finished.
There were still plenty of things in my apartment, but none of them really mattered.
I didn’t need my bed when Hunter’s was so soft, didn’t need my TV or my nightstand when they were secondhand buys in the first place.
But still, the thought of unloading them when they’d been mine for so many years had me feeling some kind of way.
Like I’d told Hunter earlier in the morning, I had four months left on my lease and while I appreciated his offer to pay any early termination fees, that was a bridge I would cross when we got to it.
“What else?” Silas asked, following my stare around the apartment.
“Just Feeny,” I said.
Silas frowned at the fish. “How are you going to get him there without the water sloshing everywhere?”
I frowned too. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll hold him,” Silas offered. “Then you can just bring me back here for my car.”
“Are you sure?”
“Very,” he assured me.
With the utmost care, Silas picked Feeny up from his home on my dresser, cooing down into the water like my fish was an actual, human baby.
I rolled my eyes at them while I gathered up Feeny’s food.
I didn’t bother giving my apartment one last look.
It wasn’t like I was leaving forever, and the things I was leaving behind weren’t important.
I locked the deadbolt and carefully trailed behind Silas, appreciating how slowly he walked so as to not splash any water over the edge of Feeny’s bowl.
The whole way to the car, he whispered sweet nothings down to the fish, only handing him off to me to hold when he needed to get into the passenger seat. Once he was buckled, I passed Feeny back to him, smiling at the way Silas clutched the bowl securely in his lap.
“Do you and Marshall want to have kids?” I asked, sinking down in the driver’s seat and turning the car on.
He looked at me with a horrified expression. “No.”
“Okay,” I chuckled.
“I don’t have good role model in the parenting department, and neither does he,” Silas reminded me.
“Isn’t that a bonus, though? Like you know how not to act?”
That question landed a little differently, and Silas knitted his brows together in thought while I carefully pulled out of my parking spot and into the street.
“I don’t think Marshall wants to have kids,” he finally said.
“Do you?”
“I haven’t thought much about it,” he said, turning his attention back to Feeny and effectively ending the conversation.
I hadn’t put much thought into the whole thing either, but the way Silas had acted with my fish was so easily paternal, it was really simple to imagine him acting that way with an actual child.
I couldn’t quite imagine what it would be like to integrate kids into the lifestyle we chose to live, but it had certainly been done before.
No matter, if Silas said no, it was a no.
He didn’t say another word to me until we reached Hunter’s apartment. “Is it okay if I come up?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“You said Finn was over. He was upset. I don’t want to intrude.”
I appreciated the sentiment, but if Hunter wanted his apartment to be my home, I was going to treat it like my home.
“It’s fine,” I promised, pulling out my phone. “But if it will make you feel better, I’ll let him know you’re coming up.”
Silas’s shoulders sagged in relief. “It would.”
I helped Silas out of the car much the same way I’d helped him in. On the elevator ride up to the apartment, Hunter’s…mine…I realized we were all in uncharted territory, but we were going to have to figure it out sooner or later, and there was apparently no time like the present.