He could always start his search for his boyfriend tomorrow. Enjoy one last night of what promised to be really great sex.
Ramsey leaned in more. “Come on,” he murmured, his pink tongue peeking out from between even pinker lips. It was unfair. Even playing dirty. Nate should feel gratified that Ramsey was pulling out all the stops to convince him, but he wasn’t.
He was only frustrated.
Because Ramsey wasn’t a normal kind of hookup. He was that kind of guy you talked about years later, when you’d had one too many beers and you got maudlin and sentimental.Wish I could’ve had more than one night,he could imagine saying. Could imagine, too, the memory ruining him for anyone else.
“To be clear, you’re not going to want me to call you tomorrow.”
“Baby, you’re not even going to be able to call me tomorrow.” Ramsey actually smiled, like he knew what a boon that was. Like Nate was like all the other guys who were looking for hot anonymous sex and not for any kind of strings.
It was the first thing Ramsey had fucked up since he’d appropriated Nate’s table and brought him a beer.
“Sorry, then, no.”
Ramsey’s smile didn’t waver. Not exactly. It just got more forced. More artificially charming. Nate wondered, before he cut the thought off hard and fast, if that was the kind of smile theotherguys got. If this was Ramsey’s normal mask, and maybe Nate had seen behind it. If he’d been one of a very select few. The exception that proved the rule.
But if he thought like that, then Nate might change his mind, and he wasn’t going to.
“You’re serious,” Ramsey said flatly.
“Yeah,” Nate said.
“You already have a boyfriend,” Ramsey guessed.
Nate shook his head.
“Ah, youwanta boyfriend. And I’m . . .” Ramsey waved up and down his body. “I’m going to fuck that up.”
“Something like that.”
Ramsey sighed. “What if I told you a boyfriend was overrated?”
“Like you know anything about that,” Nate said. He wasn’t going to say it—that might be more honesty than Ramsey deserved—but it came out anyway, thanks to the frustration, sexual and otherwise, curdling in the base of his stomach.
“Not me, but . . .yeah. It is. Boyfriends fuck you up.” Ramsey had the nerve to look sincere about this confession.
“And you wouldn’t?”
“But the trip would be so good.” Ramsey slid around the table, and Nate stupidly didn’t take a step back. Couldn’t get his feet tomove. “We’d have so much fun. All night long. I want to pull you apart. See what makes you tick. Turn you inside out.”
There wasn’t anything particularly interesting in Nate’s innards. But he didn’t say that. Instead he said something much stupider. “Would you let me see, too?”
Ramsey tilted his head. “What makes you think you don’t already see?”
“I’d want to see it all.”
Nate could imagine them lying next to each other, Ramsey’s head pillowed on his chest, blue eyes sleepy and languorous, all his truths laid bare. It was the most appealing image yet, and Ramsey had been nearly irresistible from the first moment.
Nearly.
Ramsey drummed his fingers on the table. Looked away. Like he was afraid Nate already saw. “I don’t do that,” he said quietly.
“I know,” Nate said. He’d never be able to parse the truth from the lies. Not all of them, and he’d drive himself crazy trying to untangle them.
“I don’t like this,” Ramsey said, a little bitterly.
“You could always go back to the bartender.” But Nate would leave, before he had to witness that.
