Chapter Twelve
Cassian stood in the hallway with his thongs on and his mobile clutched in both hands, running through his itinerary for the third time at Hamish’s request.
“Gelato’s not lunch food, Cass,” Lysander pointed out, barely able to hide his smile.
“Gelato with a slice of pizza?”
Lysander nodded approvingly.
“And you have your mobile?” Hamish asked. Cassian held it up obediently. “All right. Call me if you have any issues.”
Cassian nodded once, drew himself up to his full height, and walked out the front door. The jasmine on the fence rustled as he passed, and then he was through the gate and turning left towards Lygon Street, his blond head catching the morning light before he disappeared behind the banksia.
Hamish stood in the hallway with Lysander, both of them watching the empty path through the open door. “He’ll be fine,” Lysander said, though he hadn’t moved from the doorway and his eyes were still fixed on the spot where Cassian had turned the corner.
“He will.” Hamish leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Look at us. You moved in, we’ve taken joint custody of a twenty-two-year-old cult survivor, and we’re watching him leave the house like a pair of nervous parents on the first day of school.
” He tipped his head back against the plaster.
“We really went all in with each other, Sander.”
Lysander’s smile, when it came, was tentative around the edges. “I feel good about that,” he said simply.
“So do I.”
Hamish closed the door. Lysander was leaning against the opposite wall of the narrow hallway, one bare foot crossed over the other, wearing Hamish’s grey t-shirt and nothing else.
The morning sun was coming through the kitchen window at the end of the corridor, backlighting him in a warm stripe that caught the edge of his jaw and the hollow of his collarbone.
Hamish reached across the hallway and hooked two fingers into the neck of the t-shirt, drawing Lysander towards him.
Lysander came easily, his weight shifting off the wall, his hip bumping Hamish’s as the gap between them closed.
His mouth found Hamish’s in the half-light, and their kiss was unhurried, tasting of coffee and the faintest hint of marmalade.
“Come to bed,” Hamish murmured against his mouth.
Lysander’s fingers were already working his belt.
The bedroom was flooded with midmorning light.
The single unlined curtain did nothing to keep it out, as usual, and the sun fell across the unmade bed in a broad, golden wash that made the white sheets glow.
Hamish pulled the t-shirt over Lysander’s head and tossed it onto the chair in the corner, then pressed him down onto the mattress.
There was no rush today. The cottage was empty and quiet, and for the first time in weeks there was nobody in the next room to account for.
Lysander lay on his back with one arm above his head, watching Hamish shed his jeans and his jumper.
Lysander’s hand wrapped loosely around his own cock, stroking himself into hardness.
Hamish settled between his thighs and kissed him again, one hand cradling the side of Lysander’s face.
Lysander’s skin was smooth and taut over the lean muscle of his stomach, and the scent of him thickened as Hamish’s mouth moved to his neck.
Honey and sun-warmed skin, sweet and heavy, the same scent that had been driving Hamish mad since Thailand.
Lysander’s legs fell open wider, his hips tilting, and the wet heat of his slick smeared against Hamish’s cock where it lay hard between them.
“Like this,” Lysander said quietly. “I want to see you.”
Hamish reached down between them, lined himself up, and pressed in slowly. Lysander’s body took him in one continuous slide, slick and tight and burning hot. His fingers came up and wrapped around the back of Hamish’s neck, positioning him until their foreheads touched.
For a moment Hamish stayed completely still inside him, just looking at the faint dusting of freckles across Lysander’s nose that Hamish had spent entire mornings kissing and tracing with his fingertips.
The sunlight caught the flecks of amber in Lysander’s blue eyes, and the curve of his lower lip.
“I’m fucking obsessed with you…” It was both a statement and a confession.
Lysander grinned up at him, then his hips rolled up against him in a deliberate grind that Hamish met with his own movements.
He fucked into Lysander in deep strokes, pressing their bodies flush from chest to hip.
Lysander’s ankles crossed at the small of Hamish’s back, his heels digging in to pull Hamish deeper on every stroke, and he let out quiet gasps that Hamish caught against his own mouth.
There was none of the theatrical moaning from their first night together.
This was a conversation conducted through the movement of their bodies alone.
Lysander’s hand drifted from Hamish’s neck to his face, his thumb following the shape of Hamish’s jaw beneath his beard. “I’m fucking obsessed with your beard.” He rubbed his face against it, scratching at it in a way that made Hamish groan in satisfaction and lean into his fingers.
“Shall we stop fucking so I can focus on you giving me scratches?”
Lysander laughed, and his fingers curled into Hamish’s hair as he pulled him down into a kiss that was deeper and messier than the ones before, his tongue sliding against Hamish’s while his hips matched the pace Hamish was setting.
Hamish’s hands slid down to his arse and kneaded, fingers digging into the flesh.
The sheets were damp beneath them. Lysander’s slick had soaked through to the mattress, and the wet sounds of their bodies together filled the room alongside the creak of the bedframe and the distant rattle of a tram on Lygon Street.
Hamish could feel every part of Lysander pressed against him, the ridge of his hip bones, the hard line of his cock trapped between their stomachs, the flutter and grip of his body with each thrust.
Lysander came first, his back arching off the mattress as his whole body went taut. He didn’t cry out. His mouth opened against Hamish’s neck in a series of ragged, shaking exhales, his fingers digging into Hamish’s shoulders while his cock pulsed hot and wet between them.
Hamish buried his face in Lysander’s hair and followed him over, his hips stuttering forward as his knot swelled and locked them together. The pressure of it made Lysander gasp, his body clenching around Hamish in a way that dragged the orgasm out.
They lay tangled together in the sunlit mess of the bed, Hamish’s weight settled onto Lysander, his knot still buried inside him. Lysander’s fingers traced lazy patterns on Hamish’s back, his touch light and aimless against his damp skin.
Lysander pressed his mouth to the hinge of Hamish’s jaw. “He’ll be fine,” he said again, softer this time, as though he’d been turning it over in his head the whole time.
Hamish smiled against his collarbone. “Yeah. He will.”
? ? ?
They showered together, which took twice as long as it needed to because Hamish kept pulling Lysander back under the spray to kiss him, so that by the time they were dressed and caffeinated, it was nearly noon.
Hamish surveyed the cottage with a critical eye.
He’d been too preoccupied with sex and Cassian to notice his domestic standards slipping.
The kitchen bin was overflowing. The bathroom needed a new shower curtain after Lysander had ripped the old one off its rings in an incident that Hamish had been assured was “not my fault, the plastic was already weak.” Three of the ceiling lights had blown, and they were down to their last roll of toilet paper.
“Right,” Hamish said. “We need to go to IKEA.”
Lysander looked distinctly unimpressed by this suggestion. “An IKEA trip. This early on in our relationship?”
“We need a shower curtain, storage boxes for Cass’s room, and at least one bookshelf that isn’t a stack of milk crates.” He took his keys off the hook. “I’ll buy you lunch.”
The Richmond IKEA on a Saturday afternoon was a circle of hell that Dante would have lacked the imagination to describe. Hamish grabbed a trolley from the bay and steered them into the showroom.
Lysander abandoned the recommended path within forty-five seconds.
“This way’s quicker,” he said, cutting through a mock kitchen to reach the bathroom section, threading between a display island and a family of six who were blocking the aisle as they argued about drawer organisers.
“It’s not quicker.” Hamish reversed the trolley out of a dead end between two wardrobe displays. “They’ve laid out a path for a reason, Sander, and you’re forcing us to work against that logic.”
“The reason is to make you walk past three hundred things you don’t need so you buy a scented candle and a bag of tea lights on your way to the shower curtains.”
“Wrong. It’s about the logical product flow.” Hamish pushed the trolley back onto the main path with a pointed clunk. “Bathroom accessories are after textiles. If you skip textiles, you miss the towels, and then you’ll complain that we don’t have matching towels, and we’ll have to come back.”
“I have never once in my life complained about towels.”
“You complained about my towels on your second night here. You said they felt like sandpaper.”
“They do feel like sandpaper. Your bachelor towels are offensive to my skin.”
Hamish turned the trolley into the textiles section. “Then we’re getting new towels.”
They got towels. They got a shower curtain, three storage boxes, a desk lamp for Cassian’s room, and a set of kitchen canisters that Lysander picked out and Hamish approved on the basis that they matched the splashback tiles.
Then Hamish steered them towards the restaurant on the upper level, because he’d promised lunch and because the meatballs at IKEA Richmond were genuinely underrated.
“Hot date,” he told Lysander, taking out a chair at a table by the window. “Only the finest for my omega.”
Lysander sat down, looked up at Hamish through his lashes, and deployed the Cassian. His chin dipped, his eyes went wide and liquid, and his voice climbed to a breathy, simpering register that was so pitch-perfect it was almost frightening. “Can I have a princess cake with my meatballs, alpha?”
Hamish bit the inside of his cheek. “Think big, Sander. You can have a princess cake and some of my almond cake.”
Lysander dropped the act and grinned. “My big alpha provider.”
The meatballs were excellent. The princess cake was lurid green and Lysander ate every crumb of it while scrolling through his mobile with one hand and occasionally feeding Hamish bites of marzipan with the other.
The almond cake was dense and buttery, gone in four bites.
Hamish looked across the table at Lysander licking cream off his thumb and felt that he could do Saturdays like this for the rest of his life.
After lunch, they loaded the car and drove to the Bunnings in Brunswick, because Hamish needed potting mix, seedlings, and a new pair of secateurs after Cassian had used his old ones to open a tin of biscuits.
Lysander trailed behind him through the garden section.
Hamish stopped in front of a display of marked-down plants.
The clearance trolley was filled with leggy petunias drooping over their pots, a rosemary bush that had gone entirely brown on one side, and a lemon tree whose leaves were curling inward.
He picked up the lemon tree.
“No,” Lysander said.
“It just needs a bigger pot and a good feed.”
“It needs a priest to read it its last rites, Hamish. Look at it.”
“It’s stressed, but far from dead.” He turned the pot in his hands, checking the root ball through the drainage holes. They were still pale and pliable. “See? The roots are fine. It’s been sitting in direct afternoon sun with no water and it’s root-bound. That’s all.”
Hamish set the lemon tree in the trolley and reached for the rosemary. Lysander put his hand over the pot.
“You are not bringing home a half-dead rosemary bush.”
“It’s only dead on one side. The other side is perfectly healthy.”
“That’s not how plants work.”
“That is exactly how plants work.” Hamish lifted the pot past Lysander’s outstretched hand and placed it beside the lemon tree. “Rosemary is incredibly hardy. A decent prune and some seaweed tonic, and this’ll be producing sprigs by Christmas.”
“You’re a plant hoarder, Hamish. You collect dying plants the way other people collect vinyl because you’re a soft touch.”
Hamish added a wilting basil to the trolley. “You love it.”
Lysander’s answering smile was all the confirmation that Hamish needed.
By the time they pulled into the driveway back home, the back seat held two IKEA bags, a shower curtain, a lemon tree, the half-dead rosemary, the basil, and a bag of potting mix that had split in transit and dusted everything with a fine layer of soil.
Hamish carried the plants around to the back garden while Lysander hauled the IKEA bags through the front door, and they met again in the kitchen.
Cassian was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor with a plastic takeaway container in his lap and syrup on his chin.
The container was from a bakery on Lygon Street, and it had clearly once held a generous quantity of baklava. Roughly a quarter of it remained, the rest reduced to a slick of crushed pistachio and syrup residue.
“Cass.” Hamish set his keys on the counter and looked down at the wreckage. “How much baklava was in there when you started?”
Cassian held up the container for inspection. “It came with twelve pieces.”
“And you’ve eaten nine of them.”
“The Universe provided. I’ve left some for you and Lysander as an act of generosity and kind regard.”
Hamish rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Well, I suppose you’re not having dinner tonight, then.”
Cassian’s eyes flew wide, and his mouth dropped open in dismay. “What? Why, alpha?”
Hamish laughed. The sound echoed off the kitchen tiles, filling the small room.
Lysander had appeared in the kitchen doorway with an IKEA bag slung over one shoulder, his hip propped against the frame.
Hamish, even when he’d been living alone, had always considered his kitchen a bit too cramped for comfort, but somehow its boundaries seemed to have expanded so that it became exactly the right size for him and these two.
“What do you want, Cass?” Hamish leaned against the counter and looked down at his mobile screen. “I’ll order in. No more sweets, though.”