He smiled.“You’re the perfect gentleman.”
Laughing, I raised an eyebrow.“I think if we asked Chuck, he’d say that was you, not me.”
Kai gave an exaggerated grimace.“Do we have to talk about Chuck while we’re in bed?”
I looked pointedly at the empty spot alongside me.“Well, if we’re being precise, only one of us is in the bed right now.”
“True, true,” he conceded, then pushed his briefs down his legs and slipped under the covers.“Better?”
His hands eased their way over my chest, then down my stomach.Came to a halt at the waistband of my boxer-briefs.
“Tate, why do you have underwear on?”
I shrugged, or at least as best I could while lying down.“I didn’t want to seem presumptuous,” I explained.
Kai covered his eyes with his hand.“Presumptuous?You fed me your load on this exact bed this afternoon.I think we’re probably past it being ‘presumptuous’ for you to sleep naked next to me.”
I giggled.“So I didn’t need to bring my Bugs Bunny pajamas, either?”
He dug his fingers under the waistband of my boxers and tugged them down my legs.“At this point, I honestly wouldn’t put it past you to have a pair.”He waited for me to pull my knees up, so he could slip the fabric over my feet.“Ugh, there, much better.”
My underwear landed in an unceremonious heap somewhere in the corner of the room.
“You’ll have to remember those later,” I told him, “else you owe me a new pair.”
He snorted.“You can have a pair of mine.I’ll fill the front up with precum and everything.”
“Gross,” I replied, but my dick gave a little lurch at the thought of it all the same.
He eased one strong arm around my shoulders, and before I realized what was happening he was drawing me in against him.It was not an unpleasant sensation.
“So was having me along tonight as terrible as you expected it to be?”Kai asked, voice quieter.
I traced tiny circles with my fingertips on his chest.“No, not at all.And I never said it would be terrible to have you there.I was worried you’d be bored, is all.”
“So conscientious,” Kai observed.
“Positively saintly,” I replied, mock-serious.
His hand gently stroked my shoulder as we lay in silence for a while.Then, out of the blue: “Have we been dating?”
I blinked.“I mean,” I started, then paused.“Well.You told people we were.This evening, I mean.”
Another silence.“Sure, but that was for then, and this is now, just between the two of us.We never discussed it before, I know.I just don’t know how you see this, and I’m...curious.”
‘Curious’ was a loaded word.It hadn’t escaped me that Kai hadn’t said exactly how he saw us together.Yes, he’d told the people at the gala tonight one thing, but he’d also just made clear that was very much a situation-specific answer.For all I knew now, the reality in his mind was entirely different.
There was a part of me that felt like it wasn’t up to me to decide, anyway.As though, through some unwritten rule of the game we were playing, he was the hotter, younger, generally more appealing one of the two of us.That, in turn, left it down to him to decide just how serious all this was.What sort of name it was allowed to take.
I knew if I tried to explain that to him, though, Kai would just call it stupid and needlessly self-deprecating, and it wouldn’t get me any closer to an answer.That was a problem, because right now an answer was something I didn’t have.Nothing more, at least, than a gut feeling.
It was fun being with him.The sex was incredible, yes, but it was more than that.Kai could be serious when he needed to be, and playful at other times, and he could make me laugh just as enthusiastically as he could make me cum.
That was great, but it was also terrifying.I knew from cold, painful experience what it was like to give in to soft and tender feelings for someone else.To trust them, and come to rely on them in your life; then to realize that they were probably never the person your brain saw them as.And then, even though you were fully aware they weren’t perfect and that they couldn’t ever be, suddenly they were taken away from you.
A sense of loss, one that’s just as much for the fantasy that took root as the real, flesh and blood person you were with.I couldn’t argue with the fact that breaking up with my ex had been a good thing overall, but I wasn’t under any illusion that rushing back into that situation would be any more preferable.No matter how tempting it might be to trust Kai and take everything that was said and done at face value.
“This wasn’t meant to be a rocket science sort of question,” he said, interrupting my thoughts.“It didn’t need a PowerPoint.”
