13
The next day was…normal. My daily call to the hospital.
Texts from Noah, but about plans for Christmas Eve, about his family driving him crazy, about things we needed to buy for the house.
And the day after that was normal too. And finally I realized everything was normal, because whatever that had been, it had been normal.
Just something a couple of guys did when they were horned up and needed to blow a load.
Everything was so fucking normal that I was jacking off twice a day like I was going to pull my cock off. To Noah.
And the next time I saw Noah, he seemed normal too.
He showed up at the house with another unicorn latte as I was having one more fucking go at the pocket doors.
He’d gotten a haircut, and he’d swapped out the choker for a thin platinum chain that looked like starlight against his pale skin, and there was a different dangly earring that looked like a leaf.
It was an elf hat today, and the tips of his ears were red.
When he handed me the coffee, I was ready: if he moved in for a kiss, if he wanted a peck on the cheek.
But he just kept moving into the house, talking about getting a velvet rope to keep people from touching his tree, and I had to tell him this wasn’t the fucking White House.
So, the thing was, I couldn’t not notice his ass.
I mean, he wore those damn leggings. And the oversized hoodie didn’t help because while yes, it fell past his hips, it only drew more attention—every time he bent or turned, every time the hoodie rode up, I was confronted with Noah’s grade-fucking-A bubble butt.
When I caught myself looking, I dragged my gaze away.
And it seemed like that was working. For a while.
Until I realized that when I wasn’t looking at his ass, I was staring at the smooth line of his neck, or the curve of his jaw, or those glossy pink lips.
And I couldn’t help the fact that I knew what he looked like with a dick in his mouth.
I knew what those lips looked like—puffy, raw, gorgeous—after he’d been polishing a pole. My pole. Worshipping it.
And then we were up to three times a day, me pounding my meat in the downstairs bathroom and cleaning up frantically with toilet paper like I was thirteen years old and thought I’d just discovered the secrets of the fucking universe.
But even with all that jacking off, I managed to get some work done.
The house was starting to come together.
Joe had finished the last of the carpentry work.
The toilets and sinks and fixtures were all in place.
The lights were mounted, and now when I came home at night, I walked into that warm glow.
Like it wasn’t just a house anymore. Like it was turning into a home.
And some of that, too, had to do with the fact that the place wasn’t full of half-sheets of drywall and buckets of mudding compound, and instead, piece by piece, Noah was furnishing it.
A sofa that I knew had come from his condo—because he made me and Joe pick it up and bring it over to the house.
A chaise that he’d had in storage since before we were married. A fucking upright piano.
Stuff for the walls, too. Prints and photos and even some actual paintings—nothing personal, but not the junk you saw in some display homes, like somebody had just run to TJ Maxx.
I thought some of the paintings looked familiar; there had been a time when Noah liked to go to markets on the weekend, and he’d gone through a phase of collecting work by local artists.
But I wasn’t sure, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him.
I was getting back from a day of errands—dropping off a load at the dump, followed by trying to figure out why the toilet, which we’d just fucking installed, was already leaking around the base, followed by a fun little trip to city hall so I could argue with the inspector about the fact that yeah, he actually had come and inspected the changes to the house, and yeah, they actually had been done by licensed contractors, and yeah, I had the fucking paperwork to prove it.
Not that it didn’t still take almost two hours.
Which was why I didn’t realize two things until I was pulling into the driveway:
It was Christmas Eve.
And it was getting dark.
“Shit,” I said and hurried inside.
Shower, change, and then haul ass over to the Airbnb where Noah’s parents were staying. Presents—shit! Maybe I could stop and pick up a bottle of wine. Was I supposed to bring something? A dessert?
I was so caught up in those thoughts that I didn’t notice the tree until I was halfway across the living room.
Multicolored lights glowed on every branch, surrounded by ornaments and bows, all of them understated, all of them classic pieces in traditional greens and reds.
It was simple. It was beautiful. And a weird, choked laugh escaped me because Noah had been telling me for three days that the theme for this year’s tree was Trixie Mattel, and when I said I didn’t know what that meant, he’d just called my fucking bluff.
A bottle of wine wasn’t going to do it.
I took the stairs two at a time. Before I could let myself think about it too much, I started pulling out cardboard boxes. The ones in the back, the ones I hadn’t needed to open since the divorce.
It was still there: the little velvet box.
Thank God that somebody, somewhere realized men needed help wrapping gifts, because I still had the bag from Ed’s Christmas gift—we’d gotten lunch a couple of weeks before, and the bag had held cheese and crackers and summer sausage, which was a pretty good gift.
I put the velvet box in the bag. I returned the tissue paper.
I tried to fluff it, realized I had no idea what I was doing, and stopped.
My stomach was dropping like—well, if it were something else tonight, something that wasn’t about Noah, I would have said I was nervous.
Be cool, I told myself. Told myself everything was going to be all right.
All I had to do was stay calm and play referee; you could always count on Noah’s family to run interference.