Chapter 4
CHAPTER
FOUR
BOBBY
Then
Iwoke up before Granger on our first morning at the cabin and rustled around in the kitchen making a mug of coffee.
Then I slipped on a pair of shorts and went and sat out back.
I wrapped my hands around the mug and watched the sun rise over the little lake.
It reminded me a little of home, though the views at home weren’t as nice as this.
Maybe it was the quietness, the way the light slowly stole the shadows of the night away, and the day opened to the bright chorus of cardinals and wrens.
I’d lived in Richmond for too long, and Hopewell before that, and being here in Goose Run made me realize that I’d missed somewhere I could get the sun on my back and some dirt between my toes.
Nathaniel Bynow-Madsen and assholes like him were more right than I’d ever admit.
It didn’t matter how carefully I watched the way I spoke, or dressed, or acted.
Didn’t matter how much cologne I doused myself in, they’d always be able to smell Buchanan County on me.
So, fuck ’em all to hell.
Except, in the beginning, telling myself that had come with a dose of dogged determination wrapped in spite that had gotten me through most of my college years.
Lately, though, it felt more like grim resignation, like a whole goddamn lifetime of “here we go again” stretching out in front of me, and just thinking of it made me tired.
Seemed like everything was making me tired lately, even Granger.
Fucking Granger Kelley wasn’t my smartest decision, but I couldn’t bring myself to regret it.
Fucking, not dating. Granger had always been very clear on that.
He wasn’t prepared to risk anyone finding out that he wasn’t a model son to one of Virginia’s finest lawyers, and him admitting he liked men—let alone being in a relationship with one—would have shattered that illusion faster than you could blink.
So we fucked around on the down-low and both pretended that was all this was.
And I got it. Hadn’t I just spent the past seven years trying to fly under the radar?
I had to try a lot harder than he did to fit in, but we both had an image to uphold and a lie to maintain.
His was that he was straight. Mine was that I wasn’t some white trash kid from a trailer park in Bumfuck, Virginia.
So yeah, I understood exactly why we couldn’t have more.
But at the same time, I knew good and well that there were plenty of people who’d laughed at the idea of me going to college, and I’d proved them wrong, hadn’t I?
Gotten a scholarship to Lassiter through sheer pigheadedness and a refusal to quit.
Done the same with law school too. So there was a quiet, stubborn part of me that insisted on whispering that maybe we could be more.
And despite the way Granger was, I held onto that hope—partly because I was an optimist at heart and partly because I was a damn fool who’d gone and fallen in love with him, and thinking about my life without him in it hurt like a bruise I couldn’t stop poking at or a loose tooth hanging on by one stubborn thread.
“You keep wobbling that tooth of yours at me, boy, and I’ll slap you upside the head so hard the rest of ’em’ll fall out too!” Aunt Ginny told me once when I was about six or seven.
I’d laughed because we’d both known she was all talk and she’d never raised a hand to me in her life, even when the general consensus around the trailer park was that it would have done me a world of good.
I wondered what she’d say now if she could see me torturing myself over Granger.
I stood up, still holding my coffee cup, and went and stood by the lake.
Let the stringy grass tickle my ankles and scrunched my toes in the gritty dirt.
I listened to the cardinals and the wrens and tried to lift my mood along with their song, then realized that another bird had joined the chorus and I was listening to it instead—the low, sorrowful call of a mourning dove.
“Hell, no,” I told the universe. “I ain’t falling for your bullshit. It’s a beautiful day, I’m on vacation, and I’m going back inside to wake my—to wake a hot guy up with a blow job. So fuck you.”
“Was that an offer?” Granger’s voice was still rough with sleep.
I turned to find him standing a few paces behind me, stretching in the sunlight.
I shrugged. “The fucking or the blow job? ’Cause both are on the table.”
His laugh was warm and low as he moved past me and stepped closer to the water.
He was unfairly gorgeous even when he was squinting into the sunlight.
It turned his fair hair gold and his skin luminous.
His boxers hung off his hips like they were clinging on by sheer force of will alone.
I wanted to drag them down and watch his back arch as he offered himself to me.
He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he was just so effortlessly fucking hot.
Vital and strong and golden, like some goddamn artistic ideal of youth or what-the-fuck-ever, because it wasn’t enough that Granger Kelley had been born rich—he had to be fucking beautiful too.
He stretched, and the muscles in his back shifted while I drooled like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
Because ding-fucking-ding. Everything Granger did rang my bell.
“Coming back inside?” I asked, holding out a hand. I pretended not to notice the moment’s hesitation before he took it, telling myself that Granger had always been cautious. Just because we were here alone didn’t mean those instincts disappeared.
I led him inside and into the living room and pushed him gently down onto the buttery-soft leather couch and straddled his lap.
He flashed me an easy smile, and I leaned in and kissed him, running a hand through his hair as I chased the taste of him.
He was intoxicating in every way, even more than the bourbon we’d been drinking the night before, and I couldn’t get enough.
He ran his hands down my sides, his touch lighting sparks under my skin, before grasping my hips and holding me in place. I could feel him getting hard through the thin cotton of his boxers, and I rocked against him as we kissed hot and dirty, desperate for anything he’d give me.
Ding-fucking-ding.
Granger pulled back, but only so he could mouth a trail of soft kisses up the side of my throat, setting me alight and pulling a needy sound out of me. “Fuck, yes,” I groaned, tipping my head back to give him better access.
He laughed softly, his breath warm against my skin. “You like that, huh?”
Like we hadn’t done this a hundred times before and he didn’t know exactly what it did to me. I ground down against the bulge in his boxers in reply, grinning when he sucked in a sharp breath. I knew a thing or two about taking him apart too.
He buried his face in the curve of my throat and reached down, shoving a hand inside my shorts and boxers and wrapping it around my dick, stroking it firmly. The heat of his palm had me arching my back as I thrust up into his touch.
“Love it,” I confirmed, already breathless, already close to mindless. “Love it. Love y—”
I didn’t even get the word out—the stupid fucking word—before Granger pushed me off him and I landed on my ass on the floor.
Hard. It wasn’t until I took in the sight of him, half-standing, eyes wide with panic, every muscle tensed like he was ready to run for the hills, that I even realized what I’d almost said.
And the look on his face told me there was no laughing this off.
“Hey,” I said, ignoring my sore ass and my confused dick that was flapping in the breeze. I kept my tone soft and calm, like I was trying to make friends with a junkyard dog who could tear my throat out at any second. “Granger, hey. Can we talk about it?”
He dragged a hand through his hair, eyes wild. “What the hell, Bobby?”
I climbed to my feet. Pulled my shorts up to preserve the dignity I had left. Which was in negative numbers, probably. “We can talk about it.”
He stared at me like I was crazy. “No, we can’t, because there’s nothing to talk about. We’re not—” His jaw shook. He clamped it for a moment. “This isn’t anything. We aren’t anything.”
We were nothing? I was nothing? The past seven years was nothing?
Fucking ouch.
I mean, I couldn’t say I was surprised, but it still hit like a gut punch.
And not the sort of punch a guy like Granger Kelley knew how to throw.
This was the sort of punch you only learned in dive bars, trailer parks, and gutters.
It was dirty, and it knocked the wind right out of me.
I barely had enough breath in me to push out my next words.
“What happens when we go back to Richmond?”
Granger’s brow creased. “What do you mean?”
“You and me,” I said, my voice rasping. “Now school is done.”
Because here we both were at a pivotal point in our lives, and I had the sudden, stark realization that we were about to pivot in very different directions, and that Granger had always known it. Always planned on it going that way.
You met a lot of different kinds of people at school, folk always said, though they didn’t always agree on if it was a good thing or a bad thing. What they didn’t mention was that after school, water found its own level again.
And Granger was already looking at me like he was watching me trickle down a rusty drain, heading for the sewer.
He gave me a disbelieving look. “What happens back in Richmond? We grow up, Bobby.” He dragged his hand through his hair again. “Jesus!”
Hurt and rejection crashed over me like a tidal wave, gathering momentum with every second until I was drowning in it.
But still that stubborn part of me, the one that refused to take no for an answer, persisted.
“Why? Why does this have to be over? We could—I could move in with you. Nobody would think anything of it. Plenty of people have roommates!”
“You know we can’t do that. What if someone figures it out?”