The Comfort Trap (Warner Park Collection #4)

1. Chapter 1

The Shape of Forever

Patrick [NOW]

My life, in every measurable way, is a fever dream I refuse to wake up from.

Sunlight's blasting through the floor-to-ceiling windows of our ridiculously overpriced LA loft.

I'm sprawled in my favorite chair. The air smells of coffee and the toxic smell of the vintage rug Ricardo insisted on thrifting last weekend, claiming I need to "expand my aesthetic horizons. " Whatever the fuck that means.

My attention lands on the source of this domestic chaos.

Ricardo.

He's hunched over his laptop and notepad, wearing those adorable glasses that make him look like a hot, judgmental librarian who's about to shush me for breathing too loud.

His brow's furrowed. He's got this pencil tapping against his mouth.

A lock of his perfect hair has fallen into his face, and he shoves it back with this adorable little grumble.

He's been staring at the same spreadsheet for twenty minutes without entering a single number.

Twenty.

Whole.

Minutes.

Earlier, I watched him spend forty-five minutes comparing two nearly identical shades of gray for the cell values of the spreadsheet title.

They were both gray. Not metaphorically gray.

Literally, the same gray. I don’t care what he said about the hex values.

And I still don't know which one he picked.

My heart still trips over itself when I look at him. Pathetic.

Ricardo's pencil snaps loud enough to cut through the apartment. He looks up from his notebook.

"Shit. I think I broke it," he mumbles, holding up the two pathetic halves of what was once his favorite writing utensil. The sadness in his expression pulls at my heartstrings.

I slam my mug down on the coffee table, some of the brown liquid sloshing over the sides. "That was the Mona Lisa of pencils! The Holy Grail of graphite! Do you have any idea what you've done?"

Ricardo blinks at me, his expression somewhere between confusion and concern. "Patrick, it's just a pencil. I mean, it was my favorite one, but still—"

"Just a pencil?" I'm on my feet now, pacing the length of our tiny living room like a caged tiger on meth. "Ricardo, that pencil had more personality than most people I know! It had perfect balance, the smoothest glide, and that eraser? Are you fucking kidding me?"

He fights it, I can see it in the twitch of his lips. And just like that, I'm grinning like an idiot too.

"It was a pencil," he says. "I'll be okay."

"Well, you know what? I won’t be," I declare, my voice dripping with mock tragedy.

"My poor, precious Ricardo." I cross the room in three long strides, planting wet, sloppy kisses all over his face—his forehead, his cheeks, his nose—until he's laughing, pushing me away without actually shoving me off.

"Baby, quit it," he gasps, his hands coming up to my shoulders, but it's half-assed at best. I give him one more dramatic kiss right at his temple for good measure before backing off, flopping back onto the couch with a sigh that's entirely too dramatic for the situation.

The audacity of this man, I swear to God. He used to be ready to risk it all to get my number, and now he's telling me to back off when I'm trying to make him happy after committing pencil murder. He’s sitting there like it's nothing, when I know he’s upset.

I lean back into the couch, draping my arm over the backrest. I give him my best coy expression, the one that usually makes him forget his own name, but he's too busy performing CPR on murdered stationary.

Something shifts in his expression as he observes what's left of the eraser end.

He straightens up and grabs the pencil sharpener from next to the laptop.

I watch, utterly fascinated, as he sharpens the broken piece down to this tiny little nub.

That pencil wasn't just any pencil. It was the last one from that ridiculously expensive set I ordered from Japan for his birthday. I spent way too much on shipping, probably could have bought a small island for what I paid, but the way his face lit up when he opened that box? Fucking priceless.

His gaze finally meets mine. He crosses the room and leans down, pressing a kiss to my temple. He smells like the cologne he always uses that drives me wild. "You okay? You look a million miles away."

"I'm right here," I murmur, reaching up to run my fingers through his hair. "I’m thinking."

"About?"

I open my mouth, ready to say "nothing," to brush it off with some sarcastic remark about tax forms or the latest custom coffee order driving me up the wall.

I look into his warm brown eyes, the same pair that used to watch me so nervously across a crowded coffee shop, and the words tumble out. "Do you ever miss it?"

He frowns slightly, straightening up. "Miss what?"

"Us. The beginning. When everything was... I don't know. Electric."

A slow, surprised smile spreads across his face, the kind that used to make me want to run from him but now makes my stomach do that stupid flip thing.

He takes off the judgmental librarian glasses, setting them on the table with a soft click.

He walks over, sinking into the arm of my chair, his thigh pressing against my shoulder.

"You mean when I was a bumbling idiot who couldn't operate a door without injuring himself, and you were a terrifying ice queen who made small children cry?"

I laugh, swatting his leg. "I was not an ice queen—"

”Patrick.”

"I was mysterious."

"You threatened to call the cops on me."

"You deserved it."

"For asking you for your number."

"Uh, yeah, like… five days in a row."

"You were an ice queen," he insists. "You were so sharp, so focused. It was intimidating. And hot as hell."

I feel a flush creep up my neck, betraying my cool facade. "And you were... persistent." Understatement of the goddamn century.

He shrugs. "I knew what I wanted. Even if I had no fucking clue how to get it."

I lean my head against his leg, the solid warmth of him a comfort that's both reassuring and suffocating. "It was exciting. The chase. The first time we kissed, it was like… a collision."

We've got our little dance routine down pat.

Coffee at seven, where he makes some artisanal bullshit while I chug black coffee straight from the pot.

A kiss at eight that tastes like caffeine.

I go deal with the entitled masses at the coffee shop, wondering if today's the day I finally snap and pour hot espresso on someone's Uggs.

He goes to play with numbers and talk car parts with Eli.

We eat dinner, maybe catch some indie film, have Aubrey and Eli over so we can all pretend we're functioning adults. It's a well-oiled machine, alright. A beautiful, successful, loving partnership. We built it. We're proud of it.

And some nights, when I can't sleep, I lie awake wondering how long it takes for something this perfect to inevitably explode into a million tiny, glittery pieces.

On those nights, when Ricardo's passed out beside me, I'm still wide awake.

The fear swirls relentlessly through my brain while I stare at the water stain on the ceiling that's shaped disturbingly like Patrick Swayze.

Ricardo's hand starts stroking my hair, his fingers gentle.

"Ricky," I say. "What if we tried to find that again? That spark?"

He looks down at me, his expression shifting from confused to intrigued. "What do you mean?"

I take a breath, the audacity of what I'm about to say making my heart hammer. I've never voiced this before, not even to myself in clear terms. "What if we got a little... kinky?"

His hand freezes in my hair, mid-stroke. For a split second, pure, unadulterated shock flashes across his face before he smooths it over with that neutral expression he uses when he's processing something big. "Kinky," he repeats.

"Yeah," I say, pushing on before I lose my nerve entirely. "Nothing extreme. Just some mild dominance and submission. Or something. I don't know. I think... Maybe we need to shake things up. Remind ourselves what it feels like to not be in control. To give it up. Or to take it."

He's quiet for a long moment. So long that I start to panic, my mind racing with ways to backtrack, to laugh it off as one of my sarcastic jokes.

But then he lets out a slow breath, his eyes searching mine with an intensity I haven't seen since that first night together—the night that started all this.

"You want to tie me up," he says, a statement, not a question. And damn it, he's not wrong. The idea of Ricardo, my sweet, steady Ricardo, obeying my every command in that way... the thought of ultimate control over him sends a shiver down my spine.

"I think I might," I confess.

He looks away, his jaw working as he processes this. I can't read his expression. "That's a big step, Patrick."

"It is," I say, my stomach twisting into knots. "And we don't have to. I… I only wanted to ask."

The silence stretches.

"I don't know, baby," he says, running a hand through his hair. "You know how I am… I'm a fucking people pleaser, especially with you. What if I get myself in too deep with this?"

"Then we stop." My jaw tightens, a muscle twitching in protest. "We're not gonna dive in headfirst," I say.

"We'll do our homework. There's a lot of talking involved, you know?

Consent is everything here. I'm not talking about tying you up and doing whatever the hell I want.

You'd still have control, you'd still be able to say no. "

He mulls it over. "Alright," he says finally.

"How about this. We can... look into it first. See what the fuck this is all about before jumping in.

" He pushes himself up from the couch, a new energy radiating from him.

"But I gotta finish balancing Eli's books.

Can we... talk about all this later, before I sign off on anything? Tonight, maybe?"

Relief washes over me, so intense it makes me dizzy. I nod. He bends down and kisses me, a quick, hard press of his lips.

As he walks back to his desk, I watch him.

His shoulders are a little tighter, his posture more deliberate.

The comfortable, predictable Ricardo is still there, but now he's standing beside a shadow.

A shadow of the man he used to be, the one who wouldn't take no for an answer.

The one who saw something he wanted and went after it, consequences be damned.

And for the first time in years, I feel that same jolt I did when I watched him wrestle with his car door and those coffee trays all those years ago. A jolt mixed with a healthy dose of fear.

Fear, because I still hear that little voice in the back of my head, whispering that this is all too good to last. That one day he's gonna wake up and realize I'm just some fucked-up barista.