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Rhys’s eyelashes fluttered and he bit his lip, then smiled self-consciously.
“You’ll laugh at me.”
“I won’t if you don’t want me to,” I said.
He ran gentle fingertips over my mouth and nodded, eyes hopeful, leading me to the couch.
“I thought you were . . . special. That night. I can’t explain it, but I knew there was something about you that I needed to get to know. At the diner, I didn’t want the night to end. I wished I’d ordered double the amount of food so I could keep talking to you.”
My heart beat an unfamiliar rhythm and I swallowed hard.
“Why—”
“I told you, I don’t know!”
I elbowed him and glared. “I was gonna say, why would I laugh at that?”
“Oh, sorry. Um. People have just made it clear to me that they wanted to do the casual sex thing and weren’t interested in anything . . . relationship-y.”
“They laughed at you for liking them?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “For being . . . more traditional than is usual for the people I hang out with, I guess. Ugh, I’m saying this all wrong.”
“If you’re worried about offending me because you came from a perfect family and, like, know how to love, and I’m basically a Dickensian waif, don’t bother,” I said.
He laughed. “The idea of you as a Dickensian waif is adorable. Also strangely hot. Years ago, I was seeing this guy. We’d slept together a handful of times, hung out with mutual friends. I kind of just assumed that meant we were dating, because I was young and, um . . .”
“Very wholesome,” I offered, ducking when Rhys reached out to swat at me.
“Yeah, okay, terribly wholesome.” He rolled his eyes. “Anyway, my parents were coming to visit, so I told them they should come to the show we were playing that night. They’ve always been really supportive of my music.”
“Of course they have,” I said, very seriously, and this time Rhys just chuckled.
“So, after the show, I introduced the guy to my parents. The next day when I saw him at rehearsal, he kind of . . . he made it clear that it had just been sex between us and that I’d gotten the very wrong idea about everything if I’d thought he wanted to meet my parents.”
Rhys’s expression was studiedly neutral, but his gaze drifted away from mine to stare at the white walls of the small apartment. Everything looked fresh and clean—very different from my own grungy digs. I squinted at the album posters studding the walls, wondering if Rhys had played on any of them.
Based on his stoic expression, I got the feeling that while this guy might’ve been the first to say that to Rhys he wasn’t the last to express it.
“So you felt like the freak for having this super normal family?”
“Yeah, kind of. And I felt guilty. Sometimes I’d do or say things and people would just look at me like I was being such a dad or something. This one girl called me Normal Nyland.”
I snorted at that. Rhys groaned and fiddled with some papers on the coffee table.
“Look, I get how whiney and ridiculous it sounds to complain about people teasing me about my nice family,” he said. “It was more that . . .” He plucked at the seam of the couch cushion and didn’t quite look at me. “It kinda seemed like I’d have to choose between a music career and a partner. Every time I met a new person, heard someone was in a relationship, anything like that, I paid attention.”
“And?”
“Well, the data wasn’t promising,” he said.
We sat in silence for a minute. I had no idea what it would be like to have a partner. Mostly I picked up men in bars and screwed them without exchanging more than ten words. More often than not I never thought of them again. But Rhys . . . Rhys had already taken up residence somewhere inside me, the territory he commanded expanding with every contact. I shook my head to clear it.
“Anyway,” Rhys said. “Jesus, sorry. That wasn’t necessarily the conversation to have when you came over here so we could have sex, huh?”
He grimaced sheepishly, and he looked adorably like the grimacing emoji he’d texted me. My restless fingers fiddled with the fraying hem of my sweatshirt.
“You said the other day . . . That’s still what you want? Someone . . .”
Special. He’d said he wanted someone special, and he’d meant a partner. But hadn’t he just said that I was—
“Special,” he said, leaning close to me again and taking my hands in his. “I know this is new. I know I’m probably getting ahead of myself. But, yeah. That is what I want.”
I swallowed hard. “But, why me? I’m not . . . I’m just . . .” I shook my head.
