“We were? We were.” Tay nodded—very convincingly—at Dakota’s side-eye.
Dakota pulled on a three-quarter-length, wool coat the same hue as his eyes, shrugging to settle it on his shoulders.
Tay swallowed hard. Fuck. He loved himself a well-dressed man.
“That’s right,” Dakota said, pulling a red scarf off the hanger and draping it around his neck. “Tay’s agreed to be our signatory for our next direct mail appeal.”
Say what now? What the hell was direct mail?
“Oh yeah?” Xappa leaned against the doorjamb. “That’s real nice of you, Tay. I did it last year.”
“Right. Nice. I’m a nice guy.”
Dakota coughed to cover a laugh. He was last out of the room, following Calder and Andy, passing close enough to Tay that he saw the small beauty mark near Dakota’s ear. Deliberately close.
Yeah, Tay didn’t miss things either. And he was half-convinced that the best feeling in the world was when attraction was returned.
“See you tomorrow,” Dakota said, voice pitched low enough to tingle in Tay’s balls. Jesus fuck and all that was holy.
“Bye, Tay,” Andy said.
“Bye, Andy.” Tay watched them go, wishing Dakota’s coat didn’t cover his ass. When he turned back, Xappa had both eyebrows raised. “What?”
Xappa shrugged. “Nothing. Just that you’re super obvious.”
Good. He wanted Dakota to know he was attracted to him.
“You’re lucky there’s no press around.”
Opening his mouth to argue, Tay snapped it shut again. “Shit. You’re right.” He had to be more careful. Not that he expected the few bloggers and reporters in attendance to find him flirting with a guy in a coatroom, but still.
“Tay!” Stanton ran up, eyes enormous even with his contacts instead of glasses. “Listen, listen.” Grabbing Tay’s shoulders, Stanton bounced on his feet. “Hear that?”
Tay cocked his head. “Is that . . . the ‘Cha-Cha Slide’?”
“Come dance with me.” Stanton pulled him along by the hand, Xappa following close behind with a muttered, “You’re both nerds.”
Turning to grin at him, Stanton said, “You know you want to dance too.”
“Maybe.”
Hmm. Interesting. Xappa wouldn’t have agreed so readily had Tay been the one teasing him. Was there something else lurking underneath his dutiful best friend duties? Tay mentally added him to his secret list of Queer Brigade members.
“But Tay owes me a drink first.”
Dakota was pulling out the last of his supplies when a knock on the door preceded its opening.
“Knock, knock,” Calder called out.
“Kitchen.”
The sound of shuffling from the front—Calder removing his winter gear—then muffled thumps on the wooden floor as he made his way to the back of the house on socked feet. He entered the kitchen wearing his Sunday morning best: holey black sweatpants and a stretched out, long-sleeved T-shirt faded to soft blue from too many washings. There was a hole in his sock.
He placed a box on the counter from which he pulled out four cupcake carriers holding a dozen cupcakes each.
“Lemon,” Calder said, pointing to the word scrawled on a piece of masking tape on the lid of one of the carriers. “Chocolate. Vanilla. Red velvet.”
Dakota nodded. “Thanks. And thanks for bringing them over so early.”
“What time’s the shower?”
“One. I’ve got to drop these off by noon.” He checked the time. Barely seven. Four dozen cupcakes to decorate in five hours? He’d done more with less time before.
Calder packed the carriers back into the box and set it on the table in the breakfast nook as the patter of little feet sounded from upstairs. Despite how late Andy had gone to bed last night—he’d still been hyped up when they’d arrived home from the Drake Hotel, refusing to fall asleep in the car—he was still up at his usual 7:00 a.m.
“Don’t run on the stairs,” Dakota yelled.
Andy, of course, chose not to listen. “Uncle Calder!” He burst into the kitchen at his usual hypersonic speed and flung himself at Calder’s legs.
“Hey, kid. How’s my fake nephew?”
Dakota snorted a laugh. Calder was his cousin, which made him Andy’s . . . second cousin? Cousin once removed? Little cousin? Whatever it was, “uncle” was simply easier. And given that Calder was a huge part of Andy’s life—him being the only other Cotton in the city—“uncle” was more appropriate.
Dakota brought his supplies into the dining room. The limited kitchen counter space in his small bungalow didn’t allow enough maneuvering, so he always worked at the dining room table. He went back into the kitchen—where Calder lounged on the bench seat in the breakfast nook, Andy talking a mile a minute in his lap—grabbed the box of cupcakes, and brought it into the dining room too.
That was pretty much everything.
Their system of Calder baking and Dakota decorating had worked for years now. Most months they barely broke even, but they weren’t in it for the money. It was a fun side gig neither of them had expected to evolve out of high school or outside their circle of family and friends. If they’d once had dreams of opening their own bakery, well . . . it was like he’d told Tay—life happened. And here they were, in their mid-thirties, Dakota using his marketing and communications degree to raise funds from a very small pool of local donors, and Calder working for a bakery franchise that didn’t let him experiment or create his own desserts.
A high-pitched giggle from the kitchen drew his thoughts to a halt. He might not be making good on his once upon a time dreams, but he had a stable job working for a cool organization that did great things for kids. Steady income and 8:30 to 4:30 days meant he had a work-life balance most people would envy. It left him time for the most important thing in his life; nothing else mattered.
As if on cue, there was another patter of little feet—this time on the kitchen’s tile floor—before a laughing Andy bounced into the dining room. “Daddy, Imma watch TV.”
“Do you want breakfast?”
“Not hungry yet,” Andy said, retreating across the hall to the family room.
As Dakota reached for the icing sugar on the end of the table, Calder sat on the other side, rubbing a palm over his bearded jaw. “Let’s talk.”
Dakota knew exactly what Calder wanted to talk about. The same thing he’d tried to bring up in the car last night before Dakota dropped him off at his apartment, but Andy kept interrupting with inane chatter about the party.
Cautiously, he said, “About?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about how it looked like you and Taylor Cunningham were about to do the nasty in the coatroom when Andy and I found you last night?”
Had they been in private, they probably would have done the nasty. More than once. As it was, Dakota had been seconds away from breaching those few inches between their lips when Andy and Calder had appeared. Good thing too—kissing one of the better-known players in public wasn’t a good idea.
He’d wanted to ask about that last night, about Tay’s sexuality and who knew he was into men. But if the lack of privacy in a coatroom wasn’t a good place to kiss someone, it also wasn’t a good place for that particular conversation. Anyone could’ve walked in on them or been lingering in one of the adjoining rooms.