Page 113 of All Tied Up

This time was even worse than a week ago. Did he need a suit for driving back to the office tomorrow? Old clothes for clearing branches and mopping up leaks? Was there a chance he’d want his limited collection of boy t-shirts, and should he pack them just in case? Or perhaps something business casual for discussing a financial arrangement?

Neil didn’t know, so while his brain kept turning over the possibilities, he just threw everything in his suitcase. In the outside pocket, he carefully placed the three documents that he’d prepared.

Each of them was just a few simple pieces of paper, a bunch of little black letters on a white rectangle. But he was both terrified and thrilled by the possibility of what they could represent.

The Meadowlark Lodge wasn’t going to make it on its own. If they couldn’t take out additional loans before, they certainly wouldn’t be able to now. Neil was certain, however, that they could with his help.

If they were willing to accept it.

That was the big if. It was clear that their ex, Henri, had done a number on both of them. Maybe on purpose, maybe not, but it didn’t really matter.

Would they trust someone new to get enmeshed with their finances? Someone who they’d only known for a week? Someone who they’d hooked up with for a weekend of kinky fun with no strings attached?

The three proposals each had a lot of strings.

That’s why there were three of them. The one that Neil wanted. The one that he would be happy with. And the one that he was hoping that Sebastian would at least accept.

He was pretty sure that he was only going to show them the last two.

The first one was a lovely dream. Probably nothing he should offer this soon. Or maybe at all.

The only thing that he kept coming back to was the way that Sebastian called him his Cricket. He loved being sweet boy and baby boy more than he could say, but he also knew that those names had started slipping from Sebastian’s lips before they’d exchanged a dozen sentences. They stirred something deep inside, but maybe that was just the kink.

Being Sebastian’s Cricket was something special. That was a name just for him. Something where Sebastian had seen him at his worst and his best, both confident and completely exposed, and decided that what he was inside was a Cricket.

Sebastian had said that he was soothing like a lullaby but also passionate. That he was enchanting. And then Jamie had called him Cricket too, in his husky, sleepy voice, sounding more than pleased to wake up to the sounds of Sebastian bringing Neil to a noisy orgasm in their shared bed.

So if they thought Neil was their drab little bug who could come up with an unexpected song, well… even if he thought that was overstating anything he had to offer, maybe he could at least surprise them with something good.

Or maybe he was going too far.

Fuck, he had no idea what he was doing.

Nothing could stop him from driving out tonight, though, so long as there was some chance that they wanted something from him.

Why had they called him back tonight? Jamie had said that the bed was pretty big, but did he mean their bed? And Sebastian had growled for him to be careful driving, sounding just like a Daddy, but before that he’d sounded like he didn’t want Neil to come out at all.

Neil tried to steel himself for every possibility, especially the bad ones. That’s why he’d brought three different financial plans.

It was also why he’d pulled on the Daddy’s boy t-shirt at the last minute, and then carefully concealed it under a sweater. With the night temperature hovering around sixty, he was glad for the warmth, but even more it gave him a level of security.

He knew he was a weekend hook-up, and if that was all the two of them wanted from him he could accept it.

But oh, if there were a chance of more...

He’d never felt more alive than he had that last week. He could imagine so easily slipping into their lives. He would tell Jamie every day how beautiful he was. He would make sure that Sebastian never had to frown. And in return… He scarcely let himself imagine how they might take care of him.

Behind that hope lurked another pit of worry, tangled in his chest.

Just hearing Jamie’s voice on the phone had lifted his soul. And calling so late at night couldn’t just be for business.

But there was one stumbling block he kept tripping over. There was a possibility that they might offer him a relationship… and he would have to say no.

The past few days he’d done some reading—maybe compulsively—about poly relationships. After that long talk with Jamie about jealousy, he’d thought about it himself in endless games of “what if?” Could he handle being a “secondary” partner, forever standing on the sidelines to their “primary” relationship?

He was almost certain that he couldn’t. Maybe it was all of his monogamous programming. Maybe it had to do with his desire to be cared for, which Jamie had pointed out on the first day was 24/7. Taking things slowly was fine, but he knew he’d be jealous if the two of them had a level of intimacy and permanence he never got to share.

Just thinking about it provoked an immediate visceral reaction, the same type of pain he’d felt on Thursday morning when Sebastian pushed him away. So if that was what they wanted… he would have to say no.