Chapter 19 Chase
CHASE
THREE MONTHS LATER
Wilder dropped the bomb everyone had been expecting at our weekly cookout. It was summer, and the bugs were out, humming and buzzing in the background like a weird-ass orchestra warming up.
“So,” he said, a crease furrowing his brow, “me and Avery have been talking, and I’m moving in over there.”
Danny picked at the label of his beer bottle and said, “That’s cool, man. When are you thinking?”
Avery said around a mouthful of burger, “A few weeks? It’s up to you guys, really. I mean, I’d vote for tomorrow if I could.”
Wilder sent him a look that was so full of fond amusement I was almost jealous, except that was dumb. I had my own fondly amused guy to give me those looks nowadays, and he was currently in the kitchen checking on the apple pie and probably bitching about how crappy the oven was.
So it was just Danny and Miller and Wilder and Avery and me outside for the moment.
Gracie was at a sleepover at a friend’s place—her first, and hadn’t Wilder stressed about that until Avery had talked him down?
—and Cash was working an evening shift at Sunny Fields.
It was nothing like old times but that didn’t grate the way it used to.
I liked Miller and Avery, and I didn’t think of them as interlopers anymore.
They weren’t taking Danny and Wilder away—except for the part where Avery literally was, but it was only as far as next door—they were making our weird little family bigger.
I’d started life with one brother, and now I had a bunch of them, and it was okay.
And I’d given them a new brother too. Against all my own expectations, I hadn’t fucked things up with Lee.
Yet. But also, hopefully not ever. And the guys loved him.
They joked that it was mostly for his baking skills, but he fit in well.
He played video games with Danny and Wilder and swapped cookie recipes with Avery, and I’d even caught him talking to Miller about some podcast they both listened to.
And Gracie loved him because he’d made her a unicorn birthday cake, so now he was something like a god in her eyes.
He hung out at the house a bunch, and the sky hadn’t fallen. I hadn’t ripped it down either.
Wilder still looked worried. “I know it’ll leave things tight around here.”
Danny smiled. “Nah, we’ll manage, bro. We always do, right?”
He was right about that. He’d taken Cash and me in back when we’d had nothing, and somehow we’d never gone hungry.
So what if some months had been rougher than others?
We managed, because Danny had decided we were family and everyone looked out for each other.
That was how things worked in this house.
It had taken me a while to learn that, and even longer to trust it, but I finally believed it.
“Uh,” I said. “Maybe I could take Wilder’s old room?”
Bobby and Lee were always talking about hiring more staff and expanding Gobble de Goose’s hours. If it was open all day like they wanted, I could pick up longer shifts and more pay.
The four of them stared at me like I’d grown a second head.
“You want your own room?” Wilder asked.
I shrugged. “Maybe I’m sick of me and Lee getting cockblocked by Cash.”
Avery almost choked on his burger.
I only said it because Lee was inside and Cash was at work. Otherwise I might have found a different way to phrase it, but why beat around the bush for these guys? They were all getting laid on the regular and knew how good it felt.
“That’s fair,” Danny said.
“More than fair,” Miller agreed.
Wilder nodded. “Hell yeah.”
See? They got it.
“I’m gonna go wrap up a burger for Cash,” Avery said and headed inside. A few moments later, I heard him and Lee talking. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but Avery laughed at something.
“Does getting your own room mean you guys are getting serious?” Danny asked.
“No,” I said. “It means I like to fuck, that’s all. And I’d like to do it without having to check Cash’s roster first.”
Everyone’s expressions called me a liar.
I guessed I’d changed in the last few months too, and at least some of that was down to Lee.
Some of it was down to me taking a breath and deciding to trust what Lee and I had too.
That was the hardest part. But I was trying to take a leaf out of Cash’s book and let myself believe the best of people.
Like, I was never going to be the sort of guy who thought people were great, because people in general were assholes.
But specific people? People like Danny and Wilder and Miller and Avery?
People like Lee and Lindsay and Sam? People like Tyler and Bobby and Danny’s grandma?
My people? Yeah, I believed the best of them, because they’d proved it over and over.
Wilder proved it again when he said, “You wanna keep Gracie’s bed? We don’t need it.”
The bed in Gracie’s room had been Wilder’s first, before he’d given it to her and moved onto the foldout couch. It was way too big for a five-year-old but would be just right for a twenty-something who regularly had his boyfriend stay over.
“Really? How much do you want for it?”
He shrugged. “Nothing. It’s yours.”
“Awesome,” I said, grinning.
We spent more nights here than we did at Lee’s place—I still didn’t like leaving Cash on his own, and Lee got that—but my twin bed was a tight fit for the two of us. We made it work, but Wilder’s bed would be a game changer.
I was finishing my burger when Lee came outside and sat next to me on the bench seat. He was wearing shorts, and the sight of his bare thighs, which had turned out to be my new favorite thing about summer, was giving me ideas for later.
“You staying over?” I asked, looking him up and down.
He raised an eyebrow at me like he knew exactly what I was thinking—and it wasn’t like it was hard to guess, let’s be real.
Cash was working late and neither of us had work tomorrow, so odds were pretty good he was gonna rail me through the mattress tonight.
But he pretended to think about it. “I guess.”
The asshole.
He was lucky I liked him.
The house was quiet and dark when I heard the sound of Cash’s dirt bike coming down the street. Wilder and Avery had gone next door to Avery’s place, and Miller had left already because he had some early meeting in the morning. There was no noise coming from Danny’s room, so he was probably asleep.
All my earlier fantasies about Lee fucking me into the mattress had died a tragic death, what with the night being hot and my stomach being stuffed with apple pie by the time we’d gone to bed.
But we’d made out for a while, finally exchanging slow, lazy hand jobs while the box fan had whirred and clicked in the background.
Lee’s breathing was slow and even, and our skin was stuck together with sweat where he was pressed next to me, but I didn’t want to move.
Turned out I had a thing for big sleepy guys holding me while I slept—or at least, one particular big sleepy guy.
Still, I reached out to grab my phone and check the time.
Cash’s shift had ended over an hour ago.
He was late. A tendril of worry expanded in my gut, then pulled into a tight knot, but then I heard his key in the front door and the measured tread of his footsteps down the hallway, and when he slipped quietly into our room, there was nothing about the way he was holding himself to indicate anything was wrong.
At least until I whispered, “You okay?” and he almost jumped out of his skin.
“Jesus!” he hissed, squinting at me in the moonlight. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry,” I whispered, but I wasn’t. Not even a bit.
He set his backpack down on the floor and sat on his bed. I heard the two faint thumps as he took his sneakers off. Then he kicked them under his bed and left the room again. The old pipes creaked when he turned the shower on in the bathroom.
I was almost asleep when he came back into the room in just his boxers and an old T-shirt. There was a faint creak as he climbed into bed, and I heard a sigh escape him.
“You’re late,” I whispered.
“I helped build the Titanic with Mr. Conrad after my shift,” he said.
I hid my grin in Lee’s shoulder, even though it was too dark for Cash to see me.
Cash was late home from work at least once a week because he’d been hanging out with an old guy who lived at Sunny Fields.
When we were kids, the one thing Cash had really wanted and never gotten had been Lego, so he’d wormed his way into being BFFs with some new resident who had a bunch of it.
Well, maybe I would have wormed my way into playing with the old guy’s Lego collection.
Cash was probably less predatory and more genuine about it.
Anyway, it made me glad that he was getting to play with it now, even though sitting around in silence following a bunch of instructions and sticking little blocks together wasn’t my idea of fun.
Revolutionary idea for me: we were allowed to like different things.
The box fan whirred and clicked, and Lee let out slow, steady breaths.
Cash flopped onto his back, then his side, then his back again, every movement marked by the squeak of his bed frame.
When he flopped onto his belly again, I let out a sigh.
Cash obviously wasn’t going to settle, which meant I wouldn’t either, and I had to be up early for work.
I peeled Lee’s arm away from where it was draped over my stomach, then crossed the space between Cash’s bed and mine and climbed in behind him.
As soon as I did, he stopped wriggling. I shuffled onto my back and he slotted himself against my side with his head over my heart, just like two Lego pieces clicking into place.
Cash’s breath evened out as he slipped into sleep.
Over in my bed, Lee stirred in the moonlight. He swept the bed with his arm and then propped himself up on one elbow. “Chase?”
I hummed in reply.
Lee flopped back down on his back, and I thought he’d fallen asleep again, and then he said, “Nope. This isn’t working.”
“What do you—”
But before I’d even gotten the whispered question out, Lee was climbing out of my bed and squinting over at Cash and me in the moonlight.
Then he pushed my bed across the floor, the legs scraping enough that Cash snuffled awake, and we both watched as Lee lined the beds up next to each other.
Then he shoved the mattresses tightly against each other, climbed back in behind me, and lay shoulder to shoulder with me in our new giant bed.
“Better,” he decided, curling his fingers through mine.
I’d complain like shit if I was the one who ended up stuck in the gap between mattresses—and I would, because I was the piggy in the middle—but for now Lee was right. This was better.
“Uh,” Cash said. “Night?”
“Night,” Lee said, a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth even though his eyes were closed.
So there I was, with one arm around Cash and holding Lee’s hand, staring at the ceiling with my eyes stinging for just how fucking right this asshole was for me.
I was one hundred percent going to end up falling in love with him, and you know what?
It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Hell, I was halfway there already.
I thought of how he’d shoved the beds together.
Okay, three-quarters of the way.
And I was looking forward to the rest of the fall and everything that happened after that. Because for maybe the first time in my life, I trusted that whatever happened tomorrow could only be good and, with Lee beside me, it might even be great.
And I was ready to find out.