He shoves his fingers into his hair and shakes his head. “I should just take the train home.”
“Get in the car, Chase.”
“Fuck,” he whispers as he grips the door handle, yanking the door wide and stepping in.
I grab his suitcase and right as I’m opening the back trunk, two other cars pull in behind us and paparazzi jump out.
I turn into the flashes, giving the cameras a smile and a wave.
“Did you enjoy the art show, Logan?” one guy yells over.
“Were you meeting a woman? Was this a date?”
“Have a good evening, gentlemen,” I tell them as I shut the trunk and walk over to the door to get in, shutting out the noise of the world.
I saw the angle they had. They didn’t know anyone else was in the SUV, and they only saw my face in the pictures. My driver takes off down the alleyway, and we lose the paparazzi in traffic on 2nd Ave.
My driver has music playing in the car, and it fills the space as neither of us talk.
My hand finds its way to Chase’s before we’ve even been driving for a minute.
He holds my hand loosely at first, and when I grip him harder, he relaxes a little, letting his thumb roam in circles over the edge of my hand.
Every word I blurted out to him before he got into the car echoes in my mind. I said so much, but I also didn’t saynearly enough. My words were left hanging in the air, and now I’m unwilling to continue the conversation in a car with no partition.
But I keep touching him.
Every brush of his skin on mine is like a question I wish he would answer. Like we’ve swapped entirely, and now I’m the one wishing he’d open.
I keep glancing over at him, trying to get a read on him as he looks out through the front windshield, his eyes only sometimes visible past the lock of dark hair falling in front of his forehead.
His shirt has come open a little further at the collar and I can’t stop staring at the tattoo that loops out to his collarbone, where I now know he loves to be kissed.
I keep inching my body closer to his, bit by bit, until the edge of my leg is pressed up against his.
You hold all of the power.
Please, give me something.
Give me anything you offered so freely until now.
“This is it,” Chase says as we pull up to a spot on the street that doesn’t possibly look like it could contain someone’s home.
It’s the corner of a street that has a little bodega selling fresh fruits and beverages and an old watch repair shop. The rest of the street is lined with restaurants and bakeries that are long since closed at this time of the evening.
Chase releases my hand and it feels like I’m losing a part of myself.
“I’ll walk him to the door,” I tell my driver as Chase already steps out onto the sidewalk.
I follow him to the door and he turns around, nodding at me. “Thank you. Oh, hold on, I didn’t grab my suitcase.”
“Leave it in the trunk,” I say, waving him off. “We can get it later. Is this really where you live, Chase?”
He gestures at a narrow door. “That leads up to the third-floor of the building. It used to be a garment manufacturer up there, but they turned it into a few apartments in the early 2000s.”
Something stretches out from inside my chest, like I’m trying to hold onto this moment before he disappears.
“And you live with your brother?”
