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“I don’t understand the difference,” I admitted, hoping he couldn’t feel my muscles tightening. It wasn’t like either of us had been a virgin when we’d met. I had no reason to be upset. But I was. “Spending time with someone, being friends with them, and having sex with them. That sounds like dating to me.”
He looked up at me, chewed on his lower lip, and furrowed his brow in concentration.
“Yeah, that’s true. I guess what I mean is that we weren’t in a relationship, you know? It wasn’t like how things are between us.” He rested his cheek against my chest again and sighed contentedly when I hugged him to me. “I didn’t love him.”
It was the perfect thing to say to stem my rapidly rising jealousy. And also the thing sure to open the floodgates on a whole other kind of panic.
Chapter 13
INTRODUCTION
Charlie (“Chase”) Rhodes
HAVE you ever known someone who looks at life through a completely different lens? Like, for example, you could be at dinner with ten people and someone can say something. Then later, if you ask all ten people what happened, nine will tell you one story and the tenth will say something totally different, something tainted by that person’s faulty life-view lens. If you know a person like this, then you’ve probably figured out that they don’t realize they have a faulty lens. They honestly believe that what they think happened is what actually happened.
Well, at age twenty-six, I was forced to admit that maybe I had been looking at life through a faulty lens. Going on eight months into what I’d thought was a great relationship with a lonely guy who cared about me as much as I cared about him, I was slapped in the face with an alternative reality: the reason I hadn’t met any of Adan’s friends or coworkers or classmates or family members wasn’t because he wasn’t close to anybody except me, it was because he was ashamed to introduce me to the people who mattered in his life.
If you’ve ever had your world tilt on its axis that way, you know that the pain of your discovery is equal to the insecurity you carry into every other interaction in your life. After you realize you missed all the signs of something you should have seen all along, you can never trust yourself to see even the most obvious things clearly.
The next picture in the album isn’t a happy one, even if it looked that way through the camera lens. Because that picture was taken on the day that my entire world stopped and reshaped itself, the day I stopped trusting Adan Navarro, and, what’s worse, the day I stopped trusting myself.
We’re sitting side by side on a bench inside a temporary restaurant. He’s holding a drink in one hand and a piece of bread in the other. I have one hand on his knee and my arm stretched in front of us, holding the camera and snapping the self-portrait. We’re both smiling in the picture. But my smile, at least, didn’t last for long.
Adan Navarro
FINALS sucked, and not just because they were hard and I had to study every single second I wasn’t sleeping, but also because all that studying and focus meant I couldn’t see Chase. It was the longest dry spell I’d had since we’d met, and I hated it.
I didn’t bother going back to my apartment after my last final; I went straight to Chase’s place. I’d barely gotten my key in the lock when I heard him racing toward the door and the locks being flipped from the inside.
“Adan!” he said as he yanked the door open. He dragged his gaze from my face down my body and then back up again. “Adan,” he rasped, the need in his voice clear.
“Did you miss me?” I pulled my key out, tossed it onto his counter, and pressed my chest to his, moving him into the apartment as I kicked the door closed. He trembled and whimpered. Seeing the way I affected him, how much he wanted me, made me feel like the most powerful man around.
“God, yeah,” he said. He shoved my coat off, threw his arms around my neck, and tried to climb up my body.
I loved his eagerness, loved how open he was with his emotions. I chuckled, grabbed his butt, and yanked him up so he could wrap his legs around my waist.
“Better?” I asked when he sighed happily and started sucking on my neck.
“Yeah.” He nibbled on my earlobe. “It’d be even better if we were in bed.”
I walked us over to his bed, squeezing his ass along the way.
“’S so hot how strong you are,” he mumbled as he kissed his way up my chin.
We reached the bed and he slowly slid down my body, rubbing against my dick and making me groan. Foreplay was nice but I was so damn hard I ached.
