Chapter 12 #2
He snorted. “Okay, fine.” He still had that pensive look, though, like the one my five-year-olds got when they wanted something but weren’t sure if they were allowed.
“Just ask, Wilder,” I said gently.
His gaze snapped up to meet mine, and he took a deep breath and said, “How do I know if I’m a top or a bottom?
” His face flamed scarlet—and honestly, a muscled, six-foot stripper had no business looking as fucking cute as he did with a blush staining his cheeks.
At the same time, I had a pang of sympathy.
I didn’t know if he was a top, a bottom—or maybe he was neither.
Maybe he was vers or a side. But it was something he’d have to figure out for himself.
I thought again about how kindergarten teachers allegedly didn’t watch porn. “You’ve got internet, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, casting me a curious glance.
“Okay, great. I’m going to send you some links to a couple of websites. I want you to watch some of the videos there. And then I want you to figure out which of the two guys you want to be. That might give you some indication.”
Wilder choked on air.
“Wait, are you giving me gay porn as homework?” he said incredulously.
“You wanna earn that gold star or not?” I teased.
Wilder laughed, but I knew he’d do as I asked because he trusted me.
“When you’re studying to be a teacher, they throw all this theory at you,” I said.
“Like, so much. If I never hear about Piaget’s theory of cognitive development again, I will die a happy man.
Anyway, the point is, you can read all the books and studies in the world, but none of that counts for shit once you’re actually in the classroom, you know?
Because most of us learn best by doing. So what I’m saying is you can get some ideas of what you like from porn, but then if we try it and you don’t like it, or you think you might like something else better, that’s cool.
We’re figuring it out, you know? There are no right or wrong answers. Learning is a process, not an outcome.”
A crease appeared between his brows. “I only understood about half of that, but I think you’re saying I should watch porn and see what revs my engine, right? Like window shopping?”
“Exactly.”
Wilder nodded and pushed a stray tendril of hair away from his face. “Yeah. I can do that. I’ll need to get some earbuds for my phone, though, because I live with a bunch of nosy fuckers.”
“I have a spare set you can use.”
Wilder opened his mouth, probably to argue.
I said, “Take them. I get having limited privacy. One of seven, remember? Plus all the extras.”
“Extras?” Wilder quirked an eyebrow.
“My folks tend to collect spare kids like Pokémon,” I said, smiling.
“Maybe someone’s parents have kicked them out, or they’re doing it rough and need a safe space, and the next thing you know there’s a new name on the chore chart and you have four brothers instead of three. They’ve always been like that.”
Wilder’s mouth curved up into a smile. “You know Danny and his grandma took me in, right?”
“Yeah, I might have heard something about that.” I wasn’t sure if I should ask what had happened, but the combination of sex and sleep must have put Wilder in a sharing mood.
He gave me a wry smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Long story short, Cassidy and I fucked around and found out, literally. And our folks decided that we’d get married like the good little Christians we were, because god forbid there be a scandal.
Me and Cassidy didn’t want that. Cassidy wanted to go to college.
But she couldn’t exactly tell her parents she was choosing to be an unmarried mother without them pitching a fit and maybe throwing her out.
So I told my folks that I wasn’t marrying her, and they kicked me out instead.
Said I was a disgrace, and I was dead to them.
” His mouth twisted like he’d bitten something sour. “No hate like Christian love, right?”
My heart clenched, even though I’d heard similar stories plenty of times—parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t accept that their kids might fall short of whatever usually arbitrary and bullshit mark they’d set for them.
And while it didn’t surprise me that Wilder had taken the fall to make sure Cassidy was taken care of, I wished he hadn’t had to make that choice.
“So you moved in next door?” I said quietly.
Wilder’s expression softened. “Yeah. Turned up on Danny’s doorstep, took one look at his grandma, and bawled like a fucking baby. She didn’t need to ask what had happened. She hugged me until I got my shit together and told me I lived with them now. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.”
“You and Cassidy obviously still like each other,” I said. “No chance you’ll get back together?”
I was more invested in the answer than I cared to admit.
Wilder gave a soft laugh. “No. We’re better as friends.
Cassidy’s great, but we don’t feel that way about each other.
I doubt we would have lasted more than a summer.
” He looked conflicted. “Like, I love her, you know? But that’s because she’s Gracie’s mom and, apart from the idiots I live with, the closest friend I’ve got.
I always tell people that Danny and Chase and Cash are my brothers, but I can’t call Cassidy my sister because then it gets weird. ”
“I can see that.” I snorted, even though his answer settled something in my gut.
Something I was trying to pretend wasn’t there.
He’s not hung up on his ex, hooray! As though that cleared some path to Wilder and me, together, official, even though he’d given no indication there was a vacancy, and I sure as hell wasn’t applying for the position.
Was I?
No. Because he was a parent and I was his kid’s teacher and boundaries, Avery.
The voice in my head sounded a lot like Dallas’s, I’d listened to him so much.
Besides, Wilder had specifically said he didn’t have time for a relationship, so it was fine.
Wilder ate the last piece of his steak, then leaned back in his chair with a happy sigh and rubbed his washboard abs. “Man, that was good.”
“Well, you cooked it, so kudos to you.”
“The salad was good too!” he said, and he sounded so apologetic that I laughed.
“Nah, the steak was the best part, and you cooked it better than I would have,” I said. I leaned forward and confessed my greatest sin. “I usually use the air fryer.”
“Aw, Avery,” he said and winced.
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it!”
“I will never try it,” he said. “It’s called standards.” But he was grinning as he said it. He raised his eyebrows. “Guess I’ll just have to come and cook all your steaks for you.”
“I guess you will!” I said, because boundaries were a thing past me had been thinking about thirty seconds ago, which was a whole lifetime, and I was apparently a new and different person now.
But it made us both laugh, so I didn’t regret it, and I’d have plenty of time later to either untangle all my conflicted feelings or just shove them into another part of my brain and try to ignore them completely.
I’d probably do the second thing.
Then, like a gentleman, Wilder took our plates to the kitchen and cleaned up.
That knotted tangle of feelings was going to be pretty hard to ignore.
I didn’t know when Goose Run started to feel like home instead of an extended trip that I wasn’t sure if I was enjoying or not.
Maybe it was when Mrs. Freeman said she’d gotten excellent feedback from some of my kids’ parents or when Alan invited me to pickleball—side note: what even was pickleball?
I said yes, so at some point I was going to find out.
Or it might have been when Dana discovered I liked to crochet and we started trading patterns and yarn.
Or it could have been the afternoon I came home to find that someone had decorated my mailbox with googly eyes, with Gracie sitting on her porch step grinning at me and giggling.
But I thought it was probably when the guys next door began to wave at me when I was leaving for work or coming home, and our spaghetti nights and cookouts became less invitations and more, “Hey, can you bring some chips and salsa?” I wasn’t a guest anymore, I was just one of the guys, and it fit like an old comfortable T-shirt.
But maybe it really started to feel like home whenever Wilder smiled at me through the noise and chaos of hanging out with the guys—noise excluded in Cash’s case, obviously, but he still brought the chaos—and that smile asked the silent question of can you believe these idiots?
Not a private joke, exactly, but a private moment, and I liked them more than was smart.
Wilder hadn’t come back over to my place alone, but I didn’t think it was because he didn’t want to. It was just life getting in the way.
“Daddy?” Gracie asked one spaghetti night at my place. “Mr. Smith gave me homework!”
“I’m a monster,” I said. “You can call me Avery when we’re not in school, Gracie.” Then I said to the rest of the table, “It’s barely even homework! It’s a worksheet about opposites. It has five questions.”
“That’s one for every year of her life,” Chase said. “You really are a monster.”
Cash laughed silently.
“It’s also a coloring page!” I protested.
“Sounds fun,” Wilder said, and Gracie pouted. “You gotta do Mr. Smith’s homework, sweet pea. That’s the rules.”
And he gave me a look that promised me he’d been doing his homework too.
It was suddenly very hard to swallow my spaghetti, and I couldn’t wait until Wilder turned in his work.