Chapter Twenty-Eight
LEWIS IS settling in for a few episodes of whatever Netflix is recommending him when his phone dings at him. It’s Tad, and he’s—downstairs? Tad wasn’t supposed to come over after dinner with Ava. Oh no. Lewis’s heart and gut clench into a tight ball of anxiety. Did it go badly? Did Lewis severely misjudge their friend potential?
He’ll never forget how Tad looked the night before Thanksgiving—his tear-stained face and his hopelessness, the crushing defeat slung over his shoulders. If Lewis put him in a situation that made him feel like that again, he’ll never forgive himself.
He buzzes Tad in, his heart rate ratcheting up with every minute it takes Tad to get from the front door to Lewis’s apartment. Did be betray his boyfriend barely a week after they went official?
When Tad knocks on the door, Lewis flings it open. His mind can’t make sense of what it’s seeing. He’s done such a good job of convincing himself that Tad’s distraught that the beaming man bouncing happily in place in the hall makes him feel like his brain is glitching.
Tad thrusts a pair of shoes into his hands, then snatches them back before Lewis has processed that he’s seeing pink glitter and rainbows. “Wait, I wanted to do like a whole Cinderella thing to see if they fit! Dammit!”
Lewis stares. “Are those my custom Pride Chucks?”
His voice comes out in a whisper. How is this possible? They’re definitely his Chucks, not just a pair that looks like them. There’s the pink glitter/gold eyelet combo he picked out. There’s the rainbow sole. There’s the scuffing on the right toe that he always gets because his right foot turns in a little.
“How did… what?” He shakes his head like there’s something to clear, but he’s pretty sure he’s not hallucinating. “What about dinner with Ava?”
“Dinner was great. The shoes are spoils of war.” Dramatically, Tad hands the shoes to Lewis, who hugs them to his chest. Ew, wait, they smell. Instead, lovingly, Lewis sets them down, pulling Tad inside.
“How did you get them?” Lewis looks at them again, dazzled by their sparkliness.
Rather than answering, Tad kisses him fiercely. He tastes like seaweed and sake. “Does it count as stealing if you’re taking back something that was stolen in the first place?”
“Oh my god. You committed a crime for me.” Is this what ‘be gay, do crimes’ refers to?
“Yes!” Tad looks thrilled. His smile is so bright that Lewis can’t keep his own off his face. “Your scummy, cheating ex was in one of the tea rooms, so I took the shoes and ran.”
Lewis laughs. All these months later, and he still remembers himself walking in on Jonah like it’s a scene from a movie, with a tragic zoom-in on his stricken, heartbroken face. Now it has an epilogue—Jonah finding the shoes gone and having to walk around Manhattan in just his socks. He had to get on the train in his socks . Ha! Lewis isn’t a vindictive man, but he’s not going to feel one speck of bad about Jonah getting his comeuppance.
The fact that Tad gave him this closure makes Lewis’s body hurt with tenderness from his head to his toes. Fiercely, he wraps his arms around Tad, hands wandering and grasping, not able to touch enough. What good are hands and arms if they aren’t full of Tad?
LEWIS IS thinking about his exes, which, given the way his shoes were serendipitously returned to him, isn’t surprising. Really, he’s thinking about how different Tad is. It’s the week following Lewis’s personal Cinderella moment, and the two of them are snuggled under a blanket on Tad’s sofa watching a cheesy Christmas movie. It goes without saying that most of his exes hated cheesy Christmas movies. Most of them didn’t like rom-coms, either. When he tried to watch Love, Actually with Liam, Liam said the plot confused him.
Liam doesn’t like to overthink things he remembers telling Matthew.
Honey, Liam doesn’t like to regular -think things, Matty said. Stacy told him to be nice and Ava exchanged a significant look with Matty.
In the movie, the guy is getting the guy, and they’re doing one of those Hallmark closed-mouth kisses in a white-picket-fence neighborhood while children play in fake snow in the background. It’s saccharine and gag-worthy.
Lewis is totally sniffling.
Tad kisses the side of his head. “You’re so cute. I love that you get into these dumb movies even more than I do.”
Grabbing for a tissue to blow his nose, Lewis says, “I love that you get into them at all.”
Tad runs his fingers through Lewis’s hair. “So, um, awkward segue, but I think we need to talk? Not in a bad way! Don’t freak out.”
Lewis’s reptile brain is freaking out, because “we need to talk” is never not meant in a bad way. But Tad’s fingers are still in his hair, and he looks earnest and worried. “Okay,” Lewis says. “About what?”
“Um.” Tad seems like he’s fighting some kind of internal battle. “About the, um, divorce?” He stands up. “Wait here.”
His chest tightens as anxiety washes over him. Sure, Tad told him not to freak out, but that’s easier said than done.
When Tad returns, he’s holding the manila folder containing the divorce papers. “I finished filling these out. All you need to do is sign your part. I just, I didn’t know if… I mean, things are different. Between us. Than they were? And um.” Tad bites his lip and takes a deep breath. “I didn’t want you to like, think we had to stay married, because I know you really didn’t want to. And just because we’re dating now doesn’t mean we should stay married. Right? So in case you’re worried about hurting my feelings by not pushing the issue. I know we can’t file these until May, but… yeah. Maybe we should talk about it now.”
Lewis takes the folder. All he can think to do is tell the truth. “I actually haven’t thought about it since we started officially dating.”
“Oh.” Surprise flits across Tad’s face. “Really?”
“Yeah.” Lewis flips the folder open, scanning the forms. They look right. All Lewis has to do is sign, and in May—six months after their drunken Vegas marriage—they can file them. The divorce will probably be finalized by Pride.
The thought doesn’t make him happy.
He closes the folder. “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but what if I hold off on signing for now? We can’t file for another five months, so no rush, right? I mean, unless you want me to sign them now? If you want me to, I will.”
“Wait a second, are you saying you want to stay married to me?”
“I… don’t know? It doesn’t seem like there’s a right answer to that question.”
Tad hums. “Probably not.” He flops down on the sofa and Lewis pulls Tad’s legs up so they’re in his lap.
If the relationship is working and they’re serious about each other, it makes sense to not divorce. It costs money, it takes time, and what if… well, what if they decide they want to get married in the future? How stupid would that look, to get divorced and then get engaged again?
Sure, neither of them remembers their wedding, and it’s questionable how much their guests remember. And yeah, his family wasn’t there. But if they wanted to, they could have a ceremony down the road. Big deal if the legalities are over and done with.
And big deal if that was never what he pictured when he imagined his wedding—which he did, often and early. He staged his wedding so many times with his My Little Ponies that those things probably could have opened their own wedding planning business by his tenth birthday.
“I’m not trying to rush us into anything,” Lewis says, rubbing Tad’s ankles, then his calves. Tad’s eyes narrow to contented slits, and his head tilts back.
“I know.” Tad wriggles. “Me either.”
“You’re not trying to break up with me?” Lewis teases.
Tad pushes himself up on an elbow and grabs for Lewis’s hand. “No,” he says fiercely. “No, I’m not, I—if either of us is going to break up with the other, it’s going to be you dumping me.”
“I definitely don’t want to do that.”
Tad looks doubtful, so Lewis squeezes his hand. “Hey, I kinda get the sense that maybe you have some baggage from your ex?”
With a snort, Tad asks, “Who doesn’t?”
Rubbing his thumb over Tad’s knuckles, Lewis says, “Well, I mean, yeah. True.” Control freak , Jonah’s voice whispers. Hot mess , hisses Liam. Basket case , adds Jayden, just in case Lewis hasn’t gotten the point yet. He shoves those voices away. He’s with Tad now, and Tad saw him at his worst right away—but here he is anyway. “You were with him for a long time, right?”
“Three years.” Tad looks down at their joined hands. “We met at a writing workshop—”
“You write?”
Tad turns faintly red. “I don’t… I mean… I used to, a little.”
Every time Lewis discovers something new about Tad, it’s like Christmas morning. “That’s really cool. But okay, sorry, I interrupted. You met him at a writing workshop?”
“Yeah. He came up to me and started talking to me and I—okay, I know you were surprised that I’m so shy, but I swear I am, and I’m really not great in social situations. And like, good-looking men coming up to me and flirting? Not something I handle well. Like, at all. But with John, it seemed really easy. And I don’t know, for a long time, I thought he was the one. Or more like, he had to be the one, because who else was going to put up with me?”
Oh, Tad. Lewis wants to pull him into his lap and hold him. “People aren’t ‘putting up with you’ when they love you.” Lewis skims a hand over the short sides of Tad’s hair. Tad’s been trimming the sides but letting the top grow longer, so his auburn curls flop all over the place. It looks hella gay, not to mention hot as fuck. “If anyone ever makes you feel like they’re just putting up with you, that’s not love.”
Tad’s throat jumps as he meets Lewis’s eyes, and Lewis feels a real oh shit pit in his stomach. He’s going, going, gone for Tad—he’s in love and falling harder every day. It slipped in through the cracks, filling the fractured spaces inside him that he thought were just part of his foundation.
No matter how sure he is, though, it’s too early to say it. Historically, he’s dropped the L word the minute he thought he was falling; this time, he’ll control himself.
“I know it’s not,” Tad finally says. “I just… when I was a kid, I used to stress out about falling in love. I didn’t understand how I could have a crush on someone, and out of everyone in the world, they’d have a crush on me back? It just seemed so unlikely.”
“And then the whole being gay thing.”
“And then the whole being gay thing. And I think, like, that fear never really went away? When I saw you, I thought, god, wouldn’t it be amazing if by some miracle he liked me too. It wasn’t like, oh I’ll flirt with him and I bet he’ll flirt back, and maybe we’ll fuck. Well.” Tad wrinkles his nose. “I did think that after I got drunk.”
“In all fairness, the drunk thoughts were right.” Oh, what the hell—Lewis wraps his arms around Tad and hauls him into his lap. Tad squeals, then laughs, then straddles Lewis, facing him, with his forearms resting on Lewis’s shoulders and his fingertips brushing the back of Lewis’s neck. “I’m glad it all happened.”
“Even though you didn’t want to date anyone?” Tad asks shyly.
Lewis pulls him in for a gentle kiss. “You’re not anyone.”
Tad makes a tiny noise and kisses Lewis again, harder and more urgently. Lewis clutches Tad’s back, one palm slipping inside his joggers, the other going under his shirt to feel bare skin, and Tad rocks on his lap, cock pressing into Lewis’s stomach—
Dolly Parton’s voice blares from Tad’s phone (Lewis has been informed it’s “Coat of Many Colors” in a tone of horrified disbelief that it needed to be said). They both jump, and Tad cranes his head to glance at the screen. “Ugh, that can go to voicemail,” he says, which Lewis is very happy about, since Tad’s hand is pressing against his dick.
They’re just getting into the make-out session when Tad’s phone rings again. And again.
“Um,” Lewis says around Tad’s tongue. He pulls back. “Seems like they really want to talk to you.”
“It’s my brother,” Tad says flatly.
Oh.
Tad hasn’t talked to his family since the fiasco at Thanksgiving. “Maybe you should just see what he wants?”
“Not compatible with what I want,” Tad says. He squeezes Lewis’s cock, and Lewis groans.
“When you put it like that.”
Several texts come through on Tad’s phone and Tad makes a frustrated sound, grabbing it. “I’m putting it on Do Not Distu—”
His eyes widen. “Shit,” he says. “My brother’s outside. He wants to come up.”