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“I’m about to ask for my shirt back…”

I laughed and let him work it up over my head.

He tossed it over his shoulder onto the floor and it landed on Woofarine. He backed up into the coffee table and bolted out of the room wearing it like a tiny gremlin ghost. We laughed and Chris caged me under him and put soft pecks along my cheek.

“Hey, what do you think about taking a trip?” I asked.

He raised his head to look at me. “To where?”

I sat up on my elbows and shrugged. “I don’t know. Somewhere far enough away that we can be together without worrying who will see us. Somewhere different.”

I said it casually, but the truth was, I’d been thinking about it for a while. I wanted to get him out of here.

Chris put on a good facade. He was happy to be with me, I knew that, but he was sad. I could see it.

It had been three weeks since we were official.

At first everyone kept trying to reach out to him. He kept making excuses. Then the guys texted him to see what he wanted to do for his thirtieth birthday. He told them he was busy and had plans. The subsequent silence in the chat was deafening. I half expected Mike to call him. He didn’t.

I think they could rationalize Chris’s distance in the past couple of months given what happened on Christmas, but this was a statement.

Nobody texted him again after that.

They weren’t punishing him for what he’d done, they didn’t know about it. They were just taking the hint. And even though he knew this was coming one way or another, when it actually happened, it hit him harder than I think he anticipated.

He missed Mike. He missed his friends. I tried to get him to reach out to at least Xavier, but he wouldn’t. Of everyone, Xavier tried the hardest to keep in touch with him and he already knew some of what was going on. But Chris said if Xavier asked about me, he didn’t want to lie to him, and if he told him, we couldn’t see Xavier approving. In the end, Chris couldn’t bring himself to reach out because the truth was, I didn’t think he could stand the rejection. So he just went on with his life.

That by itself was hard enough and the isolation didn’t help.

We were so set on keeping us private, we didn’t even dare to hold hands at the grocery store. I was afraid to visit him at work now on the off chance Mike or Jesse or someone else we knew came in to fill a prescription, and there was a small part of me that worried every time we cuddled on the couch or walked around in our underwear that one of the guys would come knocking or peek through the blinds. We needed to be a couple outside these four walls. Even just for a few days.

He scooted to lie next to me and propped himself on his elbow. “Going out of town sounds fun. When?”

“Let’s go for your birthday. You have PTO, right? I can take a few days off this week. I don’t have any orders until the weekend.”

“Okay,” he said. “What about Michigan?”

“I’ve never been there.”

“I used to go with my parents when I was little. We can drive,” he said. “It’s maybe ten hours?”

I smiled. “I always loved driving with you. I used to wish we could just keep going. Even before I knew why.”

He leaned down and put his forehead to mine. “I hated getting there. And then you couldn’t come home with me.”

“Now I’ll always come home with you,” I said quietly.

His face went soft.

“We can stay on Lake Michigan,” he said. “Maybe Traverse City?”

“I’ll find us someplace dog friendly,” I said. “The water will be too cold to swim in but we can get a rental with a view.”

He nodded. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

We listened to an audiobook on the way two days later. It was raining and chilly when we got there, but we didn’t care. It was somewhere we could go to a movie, slip into a café and share a booth without worrying we’d be seen. Someplace that didn’t remind him of Mike or the friends he wasn’t celebrating his birthday with.

Our rental had a small balcony with a table and chairs and a view of Lake Michigan. There was a big tub, large enough for both of us.