His breath shuddered out of him, and he became aware of Dante behind him, arms wrapped around his shoulders. He allowed his spine to go soft and leaned back.
“It really happened,” he rasped.
“They’re working to move us,” Dante confirmed. “And you and me, we got seven days to take care of our shit.”
Cully gave him a stern look over his shoulder. “I, uhm, went first,” he said pointedly, but then he grimaced. “And that’s not fair. I’m pretty sure you were ready to go next, but, uhm….” His face grew warm.
“Things happened,” Dante said, voice dry. And then Dante shifted as he stood and Cully did the same thing. “So, uhm, Princess, I really want to, uhm, shower and change, but we are literally straddling the horns of a dilemma.” He thrust his groin, which was growing hard again, if Cully knew anything about the matter, gently against Cully’s backside.
Cully made a sound of frustration. They both wanted to shower, but if they split up to shower, the odds of them finding their way back to each other before the next morning were not great. And if they stayed in one place to shower, well, things might happen they weren’t ready for. They’d waited so long to make love, so long to be the couple they were meant to be from the beginning. The day before had shown them how easily their world could spin out of control now that they’d finally touched. They needed to clear the air, to own up to their feelings and figure out why they’d put off being together for so long that it apparently warped the fabric of reality.
“Wait,” Dante said. “I’ve got an idea. Here, you and me, we’re going to your room to get your clothes. Then you come with me to my bedroom and wait while I shower in the en suite.”
Dante paid just a little extra rent for the slightly larger bedroom with the en suite bathroom. When they’d first moved in, Dante had said, off-the-cuff, that he’d do that because his parents kept trying to throw money at him, and this way if either of them had trouble making the rent, he had a backup to tap. Until this moment, Cully had never fully appreciated how Dante would have hated to use his parents’ money, and how cashing even one of those checks they’d sent him for his birthday or for graduation would have hurt his very soul.
But he’d offered to do it so Cully could stress a little less about making a living in a business that depended on word of mouth and contacts—in addition to raw talent, creativity, and the ability to sew his fingers to the bone.
Frequenting every drag show for a hundred-mile radius had helped; not all the queens knew how to sew, and he’d made his first few commissions helping out friends during college.
But Cully hadn’t known it would pay off then, and Dante had taken the worry on his shoulders. Because that’s what Dante did.
“Sure, Dante,” Cully said, trusting him now in a way he hadn’t when they’d first met. All those opportunities. All those times he’d thought he had to do it himself. “Lead the way.”
The Goodest Witch
DANTE didn’t let go of Cully’s hand the entire time. It should have seemed stupid, two grown men afraid to take their showers separately, but they knew better now. Years of lost opportunities and they’d been taunted for the last month with the knowledge the other person was in the same physical space—but light years away.
They weren’t doing that again.
And Cully seemed to trust that Dante’s plan was a good one, which was nice. He didn’t always do that. All those years of being doubted by his father and Cully’s biggest damage seemed to be an inability to let anybody else take the reins, even for a moment. Dante knew that what frequently came off as demanding—searching for the pink pots, for example, or not letting Glinda have anything but the stainless-steel water dish—was more a matter of Cully proving he was self-sufficient than anything else. Cully’s father had told him so often that it would be too hard to be himself in a brutal world that Cully needed to prove he could be as much himself as anybody else could.
It meant small moments of trust were to be savored. As Dante stood—hand on the small of Cully’s back, the satin heat seeping into his palm—while Cully sorted clothes, he couldn’t help but remember the first time Cully had trusted him.
“OKAY, but where are we going?” Cully’s voice pitched fractiously, but Dante couldn’t blame him. He’d been living on caffeine and stress for the past week while he finished his first major show. The show itself was in the Bay Area, and while Cully and Kate had traveled down together to get all the measurements and a list of costumes Cully would need, he’d taken that information home and had proceeded to wreak magic with his sewing machine and some valiant thrift-store shopping, at one point dragging pretty much everybody but Josh to every thrift store for miles to be able to complete the commission within his budget.
He’d had a huge meltdown the day before, and Dante had stepped in. The group of friends had jumped to help with the packaging and mailing, and Cully had been able to get the commission out in time. He’d go down to the theater in a week to make alterations, but the majority of the work was done.
Dante felt like he deserved a reward for that.
He also felt like Cully needed a reminder of sorts. Dante had spent their college career watching Cully get wrapped up in the next project or the next assignment and forget basic things like food and sleep and taking care of himself.
Dante knew Cully’s weakness. He knew how to get Cully to stop doing that.
He just needed one little thing….
“We’re going to a place,” Dante said calmly.
“But we’re out in the wilds of Elk Grove. I mean, we’ve been driving for an hour!”
“Yeah, well, that’s the place.”
Dante’s GPS told him to get off the freeway, and he did. “Now can you hold your water for… well, another three miles?” he said, peering at his phone.
“Sure, but what’s in three miles?”
“I told you, a place!” Dante laughed. “Wow, you’re hard to impress.”
“Dante, I’m exhausted—”
“I know you are. And you’re happy, and you’re proud, and so am I. And you got your first big commission in, and I’m collecting a steady paycheck, so I thought we should celebrate.”
Cully glared at him suspiciously. Today, he was dressed in plain old jeans and a T-shirt, pretty much the uniform of every boy in California. The jeans were low-cut, but not too low, and the T-shirt was a little snug and left his belly button bare. For Cully, it was understated, but he looked sexy in it too.
It helped that the T-shirt was lavender.
“Are we celebrating in a cow pasture?” he asked, looking around. Most of Elk Grove had been built up in recent years. It had become one giant suburb, part of the Sacramento sprawl. But some parts of it, apparently, still consisted of big stretches of property—in this case, horse property—and as Dante’s GPS told him to keep on going, Dante was privately glad that the person he’d spoken to on the phone the day before had told him the place was in the middle of Southeast of Hoorah and to keep driving.
Finally—oh, there it was.