Javier took a breath and put his fork down. “Babydoll, I’m going to be honest with you,” he said, reaching across the table for Desmond’s hand. “Things are not good at work. But I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about any of it here. This is our special place, a place where work and everything else doesn’t exist. This is our magical bubble of escape.”
Desmond’s heart overflowed with relief at those words. “It is,” he said. “I feel it, too.” The two of them together, domestic and cozy, was a world without Matthew, without the sins of his past, and without the specters of his indiscretions catching up with him. “This is a place for just you and me.”
Javier smiled and threaded his fingers through Desmond’s.
A second later, that smile turned into something far more calculated.
“I’ve got a crazy idea,” he said, mischief flashing in his eyes and making Desmond hard all over again.
“Oh?” Desmond brushed his thumb over Javier’s knuckles.
“This might be ridiculous, but what if we leave everything else behind us on the weekends,” Javier suggested. “What if weekends are just for us.”
“How so?”
Javier turned Desmond’s hand over so it was palm up and started tracing circles across the sensitive skin that had shivers shooting through Des’s entire body.
“What if, on the weekends only, we forget about everything else? We leave our jobs and our troubles at the door and focus on each other,” he said, fire in his eyes. “On our weekends, we exist in a place where we’ve been together for ages, where everything is bliss and sex and peace.”
“Just on the weekends?” Desmond asked, uncertain if he loved the idea or if it left him feeling desolate. “And we continue the story that we’ve been dating for months?”
“For now,” Javier said. “Until we each get all the other shit sorted.”
Desmond had to admit there was a certain appeal in the suggestion. Grown-up pretend time sounded amazing. Hiding in a bubble of fantasy separated from everything he was so afraid of was just what he needed. He could make certain everything with Matthew was well and truly in the past, and he could navigate the difficulties of everything unsavory he’d done in the recent past without having to bother Javier with it.
Javier would never have to know how big of a disaster he really was.
“So we’d be weekend boyfriends,” he said, smiling at the idea.
“Weekend boyfriends, for now, who need each other and this safe space to make it through the rest of the week,” Javier said with a nod.
“And during the week, we go about our own business?” Desmond asked. “Without contacting each other?”
“It could be fun.” Javier grinned, shrugging. “Almost like a sinful secret, just between the two of us, but not quite.”
“Not quite,” Desmond agreed, enjoying the fluttery feeling of doing something no one else in his life knew about on the side.
“And neither of us will drag the other down with our problems,” Javier added. “We will trust that we’re two grown adults who know how to handle their shit.”
Desmond could keep reality at bay, untangle the messes he’d made that Matthew was still holding over his head, and build some type of relationship with Javier as he did it.
“I think that sounds like a perfectly lovely idea,” he said, holding Javier’s hand again and gazing into his eyes like the lovesick fool he was.
“Perfect,” Javier said, leaning forward so he could raise Desmond’s hand to his lips over their supper. “Now let’s finish this amazing meal and figure out a way to enjoy dessert, even though you served asparagus.”
Desmond laughed, feeling genuinely joyful, despite the oddities of the agreement they’d just made. If anyone could make the unique arrangement work, it was the two of them. And given time, once all the other disasters in his life were taken care of, maybe they could move into being full-time boyfriends. It was definitely something to work toward.
nine
. . .
Once, when Javier had been in secondary school, studying Greek and Roman mythology, he’d done an entire project on the god Janus. And even though Danny Singer had used the opportunity to call him two-faced, which had led to a confrontation in the alley behind the school during which Javier had proved that pretty boys who wore eyeliner and lip gloss could punch snotty little arseholes in the nose just as effectively as anyone on the rugby team, Javier had been really into it.
As the weekends in February and March came and went, Javier felt more like Janus than he would have guessed it was possible for a mere mortal to feel. He swore he was looking into the past and the future as he stood on the threshold between two realities.
On the one hand, his weekends were absolute bliss. He and Desmond truly had hit the ground running. Not once in almost two months had either of them questioned their premise—that they’d been dating for ages instead of just a handful of weekends. They both committed to the fantasy, which meant they simply ignored the whole getting to know you phase of a relationship and went straight for the mind-blowing sex.
And also the quiet, domestic moments when they let their guard down, sat snuggled on the love seat in the sunroom reading together, cooked meals together, talked and debated about things in a way too many people had assumed an airhead model wasn’t capable of grasping, and occasionally went out to a restaurant or museum in London together.
