Chapter 10
CHAPTER
TEN
Shannon wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong. He was pretty sure nothing, but Dante took off the next day, leaving a note that he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow evening. After the kiss, he had been hoping to do something else on his day off. Now he had nothing to do but kill time.
He would not have said no to spending the entire day in bed with Dante.
Instead, he spent it doing laundry and other sensible tasks.
Lame.
He didn’t want to be jealous thinking about what Dante might be getting up to, though he was pretty damn sure that the supply run was an excuse to head into the city where no one knew who he was. Hell, he’d probably do the same if he was in Dante’s position.
That position being so deeply in the closet wasn’t sure if Dante knew where the door was, even though Shannon was holding it open.
In the afternoon, he headed into town to pick up some groceries so he could make lunches for the week and because he wasn’t an asshole, he’d also cook dinner when Dante returned.
While Dante could cook, and Shannon was never going to turn down a meal that he didn’t have to make, Dante’s cooking was best described as simple.
He made roasts and steak…basically a piece of meat that could be served with vegetables.
Which was fine, except he was used to a little more cultural variety.
Not because he was classy or anything, but because growing up it was cheaper to eat Mexican-style beans, lentil curry, or a bowl of pasta with cheese and not much else.
A fully vegetarian dinner might be pushing their friendship a touch too far, but he could make dahl for his lunches and do something with pasta for dinner tomorrow. Since it was just him tonight, he’d pick something up from the Foggy Basin grocery store.
As he drove, he made a mental shopping list, hoping that the store had what he wanted. If not, he’d make do. He found a parking spot pretty easily and went in.
While he’d been in the store a couple of times, he figured he was still the new face in town, especially now that Pride was well and truly over and anyone from out of town who was visiting had left.
He wandered down the aisles, tossing stuff into his trolley, not rushing because no one was going to ask him why it was taking so long or if he really needed that.
He was going to skip the aisle where all the treats lived out of habit, but no one was going to tell him off for sabotaging their macros and meal plan.
Fuck it, he was going to buy some cookies. No, he was going to make fucking cookies. The big, fat kind filled with choc bits like his mother used to make. It wasn’t as though he had any other plans for the afternoon.
He hadn’t thoroughly checked out Dante’s pantry, so he was going to err on the side of caution and buy everything the cookies needed.
He leaned on his trolley while he searched for a recipe that seemed pretty much the same as what he’d helped his mother make.
It meant doubling back to some of the aisles to buy flour and baking powder, sugar, and two different kinds of choc bits.
Did Dante have baking paper?
He added that to the trolley too. By the time he reached the checkout, he had more stuff than he expected to be buying.
“You’ve been in a few times now… Have you just moved to town?” the tall blond man at the checkout asked.
“Yeah. New paramedic.” He offered his hand because that seemed like the right thing to do in a small town where he’d seen this guy in the grocery store several times. “I’m Shannon.”
“Dillon,” he said as he shook Shannon’s hand. “So you found a place to stay easy enough?” He asked while ringing up the groceries, clearly used to holding the conversation and scanning things at the same time.
“Yes, just renting a room while I get a feel for the area.”
“Good plan.” The man nodded. “Paramedic…so you’ll be staying up at the old horse-riding place?”
Shannon tried to keep the surprise off his face, but was pretty sure he failed. When Dante said everybody knew everyone’s business, he hadn’t been kidding. He had to remind himself it wasn’t stalker behavior; it was small-town friendly behavior. They felt much the same to him. “Um, yeah.”
“The Cutlers were good people. It’s real bad what happened to all of them.”
Was he supposed to agree or pretend like he didn’t know so Dillon could spill the gossip? Before he decided what to do, Dillon filled in the silence.
“But you’d see tragedies every day.”
“Unfortunately. Tragedy doesn’t care if you’re a good person or a bad person.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket to pay, not wanting to discuss his business or Dante’s business with a person he’d just met.
“There you go.” Dillon pushed three bags of groceries toward him. “I hope you find a permanent place to stay.”
“Same.” But he hadn’t even been looking. He blamed settling into a new job, and that he didn’t know the town well enough to decide where he wanted to live, but the truth was he was enjoying living at Dante’s…or was he enjoying the proximity to the man?
Both could be true.
And if they were, it was all the more reason to be looking for his own place because it was clear that living together was not working out.
He had not come to Foggy Basin to jump into a new relationship. Not that they had a relationship. They had a hook-up and a whole lot of lust.
Relationships had been built on less.
Which was part of his problem…
“Thanks.” Shannon put the bags into the trolley and wheeled them out to his SUV.
As he loaded the bags, he was stunned to think he preferred the anonymity of LA.
He could go to the shops in a mood and in his sweats, and no one knew him…
and if they recognized him because it was his local store, they didn’t stop for a chat.
If he did that here, people would be asking what was wrong—and worse, expecting him to tell them. That was the part of this move he hadn’t thought through. Did he really want to make nice every time he came into town?
What was the difference between friends and busybodies?
He didn’t have any answers and had no idea what he was going to do about Dante and where to live in town…though he was starting to understand why Dante lived out of town, as it gave him a little more privacy. He was pretty damn sure he could not afford to rent a property like that on his own.
When he got back to Dante’s place, he put all the shopping away and started making the cookies.
While he waited for them to chill in the freezer—a step that had seemed like torture when he was a child—he pulled up the real estate listings for the town and the wider area, the same way he’d done before applying for the job.
The fact that his relationship had imploded and the job listing had come up at the same time had seemed serendipitous.
He’d checked out the town and applied, and when he’d been offered the job, it had seemed like it was meant to be.
Maybe he’d listened to his mother a little bit too much about things happening for a reason because now that he’d had the chance to slow down, he was starting to develop some doubts about the move.
The only thing keeping him in Foggy Basin, aside from the job, was the way everyone expected him to return to LA, as if it was the only place he could exist. Trouble was he wanted more than existing. He wanted more than making sure he was living in the right area and meeting the right people.
Knowing what he didn’t want was one thing, but figuring out what he wanted was something else, and it was much harder to do because how could he tell what he was missing out on if he didn’t know that he was missing out?
He scanned through the property listings, hoping that something would catch his eye and that it would be an easy decision.
Most of what was there were family homes, and while in theory he could rent out a room to someone else the way Dante did, he wanted his own space.
He bounced between his parents’ place and his boyfriend’s apartments his entire life.
There was an apartment in Hartsville, but it was a soulless new build in what they called a thriving community hub…which meant as busy as fuck. And it only had one parking bay, which was a problem as he needed somewhere to park his bike.
The timer went off, and he shoved the two trays of cookies in the oven, reset his timer, then he got busy making the dahl so he had lunches for the rest of the week. It was not enough of a distraction from his Dante dilemma or his housing situation.
By the time he finished cooking and dishing it up into tubs, all he wanted to do was sit down with a coffee and enjoy his cookies in what was left of the sunlight.
So that’s what he did. He sat out on the deck with his legs hanging off the edge, basking in the sun like the stray cat they’d fed for a couple of years before moving when he was a teenager.
He’d loved that cat and been devastated when they’d moved house, and his parents had refused to let them take it.
Spark, the family dog, had fortunately come with them.
She’d like it here with all the trees and open space.
He refused to think about how much nicer it would be sitting there with Dante. Instead he worked his way through the stack of cookies and his coffee, knowing that when he went inside, he’d put his lunches in the fridge and then he’d go down to the garage to work out.
Maybe after that he’d heat the grocery store pizza and eat it in the bathtub while he watched a movie. The only way to make the sound of that more depressing would be if he got drunk and texted all his exes.
If Dante were there, they might’ve watched a movie together, from separate sofas so there was no risk of touching.
He wanted to do a whole lot more than touch.
And he was damn sure Dante wanted more…so why the fuck was he making it so difficult?
It’s not as though he was going to walk into town waving a banner stating that he was fucking Dante Cutler.
He smiled at the idea. What would Dillon in the grocery store have to say about that? Probably a bit too much, which was exactly why Dante didn’t want his business all over town. Having got a taste of it, Shannon completely understood.