“You do,” he said gently. “You deserve me. Come on, you haven’t backed down from a fight yet, Tenner, even if we’re just arguing over the remote control. Can’t you trust me to come home when you give me such a good home to come to?”
Tenner nodded against him. “If you come back to me, you gotta know, I’ll twine around your heart like ivy. I’m not ever letting you go.”
Well, good. Ross might need a little ivy to hold him together after that kersplat his heart did on the pavement. “Okay,” he whispered. “It’s a deal. But if I come back, you and me are holding hands in public, and when Piper’s over, I’m staying in your bedroom still. We’re together, like a couple, in front of everybody. I want to be a part of your family, Ten. Can you deal with that?”
Tenner nodded again, raising red-rimmed eyes to meet Ross’s. “Can you deal with the extra work to make Nina be okay with it? With trying to make her part of our little family? I know some guys would be jealous, but you’ve got to know it’s not like that—”
Ross smoothed his hands back from Tenner’s face and kissed his forehead. “You don’t want her to be alone. It took me a while to figure it out, you know? Most other guys would be losing their shit with her, torching her reputation to her friends, bitching about their evil ex. But you care about her, and you want her to be happy so Piper is happy, but also, so she’s okay herself.”
“Yeah,” Tenner said, biting his lip. “She… all she wanted with me is what I want with you. A life, a good life, of having someone she can laugh with and someone who loved her and someone who wanted to touch her in a way that made her happy. I couldn’t be that guy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be her friend. I….” He looked embarrassed. “We were truly good friends there, for the first couple of years.”
“Do you really want that with me?” Ross asked, getting it.
“So much. I’m so afraid to hope—you know that. But God, I want you to get off the plane and come fall into my bed and never leave.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do,” Ross said softly. “If you can hang on for those two months, that’s what I’ll do when I get home. I promise.”
Tenner still looked a little terrified, but he swallowed and said, “Then tell your boss you want to come back. You’ve got family waiting for you here.”
Ross smiled softly. “I will—on one condition.”
Tenner waited, eyes sober. “What?”
“Sometime, and I’m not saying this week or the next, but before I get on that plane, I want you to hold my hand in front of Piper. Deliberately. So she can tell her classmates that her daddy’s boyfriend is far away, but he’ll be coming home to you. She thinks I’m going to take care of you. She needs to see you have faith in that, or she’ll never believe I’m part of her family forever.”
Tenner swallowed. “I can manage that,” he said gruffly. He gave a grimace. “I think you’re right—I’m pretty sure it won’t surprise her much.”
“I’m pretty sure it won’t either,” Ross murmured. He kissed Tenner’s temple. “Sleep, okay? And dream of tomorrow, when I’ll keep biting you until something really interesting happens.”
Tenner went limp against him. “I can do that,” he said.
Ross’s heart fluttered in his chest like a struggling moth. Tenner had said it, said it out loud. All Ross had to do was believe in that promise and tell his boss that he meant it too.
“As long as there’s no clown cars,” Tenner added.
Ross narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, no clown cars?”
“You keep talking clown cars and a trapeze, and seriously, just you is fine.”
“Fine?” Oh, that wasn’t going to slide.
“Great!” Tenner amended. “You’re great! We don’t need a clown car! Or a trapeze!”
“Don’t you trust me to catch you on the trapeze?”
“Of course I do! But that doesn’t mean I need a clown car up my ass while we’re swinging from the ceiling.”
“Heh, heh, heh, heh….”
Tenner pulled back. “What?”
“Nothing.” Oh God, he really really wanted to do that thing in his head.
“No, seriously, what?”
Ross’s sadness, the threatened heartbreak, eased up. God, even if Tenner couldn’t trust in fate, hadn’t that always been Ross’s best thing? And even if Tenner couldn’t—even if he broke Ross’s heart by telling him to fly and be free or some other horseshit that was basically a stand-in for the fact that the guy was afraid to get his own heart hammered—Ross still wanted to spend as much time inside that marvelous body as possible, still wanted to fly with Tenner inside him.
“I think it’s going to be a surprise,” he said with some satisfaction.
Tenner narrowed his eyes. “Clown cars up your ass are never a good surprise.”
“They’re only bad when you fart and run over the cat,” Ross said, spoiling the joke by snorking on his own laughter in the middle.
But it didn’t matter because Tenner was laughing openly on his chest, and for all Tenner’s doubt, Ross had an abundance of faith.
And Better or Worse
MAKING LOVE to Ross was always such a whirlwind. A roller coaster. A hurricane cluster in a tsunami.
All Tenner could do was hold tight and hope Ross could navigate the maelstrom.
After their afternoon nap the day before, Ross had borrowed Tenner’s car keys and returned an hour later, giggling to himself like an unhinged asylum inmate. Tenner had an idea of where he’d gone, but not what he’d gotten, and he glared.
“No clown cars,” he threatened direly.
“You will be begging for clown cars,” Ross assured him, that easy smile on his face. He was a little pale and a little thin, but God, he was still the irrepressible man who had barged into Tenner’s life and not taken no for an answer.
“Why can’t I just beg for your—” Tenner swallowed, realizing what he almost said out loud, in the middle of his kitchen, as he was preparing their first nonsoup meal in a week. “Uh. You.”
“Heh, heh, heh, heh….”
“Shut—”
“Nope, that’s a rule.”
Tenner narrowed his eyes. “I would prefer it if we kept all discussion of a sexual nature confined to the bedroom,” he said primly, setting the chicken in the oven to broil.
The expression on Ross’s face was not promising. “Oh, really?”
Oh, no. “We are not having sex in the kitchen!” he said, somewhat panicked.
“Sure, we’re not,” Ross said, and then he dropped his cargo shorts—since he’d been out—and his underwear right there on the kitchen floor. Just dropped them, and stepped out of his shoes.
Tenner wouldn’t have been more surprised if he’d turned into a rabbit.
“What in the actual hell?”
Ross grabbed one of the cushions from the wooden kitchen chairs and threw it on the ground on top of his clothes, then deliberately looked from the cushion to Tenner.