Page 70 of These Secret Years

Sullivan closes his eyes for a moment like I’m annoying the shit out of him. “That’s her business.”

“But it involves fucking other people?”

“I’ve said too much. I don’t want you to treat her like there’s something wrong with her if you ever meet her. It’s not like that.”

“I never said… Look, I’m just asking questions.” Because fuck, I have so many.

“I trust her,” he says.

“She trusts you, too, I guess.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I mean…good for you?”

“It just means if you want to hook up, we can.”

Some of these tangents he takes me on—not always a good time. “I’m not sure that’s the best idea.” That pit in my stomach is crawling up my esophagus, and I might be sick. It’s pure jealousy. I recognize that at least. It’s the one feeling I’m intimately familiar with and have no problem naming.

“I trust you, too, if that helps,” he says.

I feel him looking at me, but I’m not sure I can return the favor. He’s gonna look gorgeous in this light. He always does. It’s gonna make me want to kiss him. Decode him. Try to make him make sense. It turns out sex and intimacy aren’t even in the same ballpark. It was naive of me to ever equate the two. I mean, I’m not stupid. I get that a one night stand is different than having a boyfriend, but I never pictured myself in the gray area I’ve wound up in with Sullivan. Where we fuck regularly but don’t have a relationship outside of that.

Unless this counts. “Don’t worry about me,” I say. “Trust whoever you want. Or don’t. I’m good.”

“You’re not really planning to be celibate when you go back to school, are you?”

“I need to focus. Football is my priority. It’s my first year starting, and I can’t fuck up. Sneaking around trying to find someone discreet is basically the opposite of focusing.”

“Hence—you have my number.”

“You seem like you’ve got plenty going on.”

In my periphery I notice the drop of defeat in his shoulders. “Knight...come on.”

I shake off his words. This conversation. “I brought tequila. Let’s drink and see what all that air mattress can take. If this is it, let’s make it good.”

“Yeah,” Sullivan says after a minute. “Okay.”

I fucking love tequila. Everything feels good, and anything is possible.

Even crazy shit like Sullivan asking me to fuck him.

“You realize I’d have to touch you to do that.”

“Bring it, QB. Anything else you want to do to me while you have an all access pass?” He’s clearly feeling the tequila, too.

We’re in the upstairs media room where there’s carpet and blackout shades. It’s where we decided to blow up the air mattress after checking out the rest of the house. It’s got these cool foot lights along the baseboards and a wet bar where we put all our food and drinks. Sullivan’s instruments remain downstairs. We never got around to checking out the acoustics. He started undoing my drawstring pants the second the mattress was inflated, and I had to shove him off to pour us both some shots.

We’re on shot number three when he brings all this up. I’m looking him up and down because there are about a million things I want to do with him, but probably more than anything—“I want to suck your dick.”

He grimaces. “I knew you were gonna say that.”

“That’s a no?”

“No, I want you to.”

My eyebrows must jump to my hairline. “Since when?”