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“Oh, yes. Definitely. I… yes.” He gave me a small smile. “Sorry, I didn’t know.”
I let go of him and nudged him over so I could slide into the crisp sheets next to him. “There’s nothing wrong with not knowing the protocol.”
His face relaxed into an eye roll at my use of the word. “Ha ha. You’re hilarious.”
“You want to know a secret?” I trailed one finger lazily over his sternum and loved the way he shivered closer. “I really fucking love that I’m the one who gets to teach you these things. It’s… special.” There were other words I could have used. An honor. The greatest gift I’d ever received. Headier than any achievement I’ve ever earned. All of those would have been true. But I didn’t want to scare him off, not when he was so new to this.
Instead, I leaned over and kissed him, enjoying the fresh toothpaste taste of his warm mouth.
We kissed lazily for a little while until I laid my head on his chest—like the romance novel heroine Kev had mentioned the other day—and wrapped an arm around his middle. Kev’s fingers sifted gently through my hair, and the affectionate movement lulled me halfway to sleep.
“Thank you,” I said after a few moments of comfortable silence.
He huffed out a laugh. “Pretty sure that should be the other way around.”
“Thank you for trusting me,” I continued. “Whether it was a big deal for you or not, your trust in me was a big deal to me.”
Kev’s hand came down to brush across my cheek. “You’re welcome. But I wouldn’t have trusted you if you weren’t trustworthy.”
His words should have made me feel good and powerful, and in a way, they did. I’d worked hard in the Marines to become someone my friends and teammates could depend on while still being easygoing and accepting. The kind of person that young Jasper Huxley growing up in small-town Pennsylvania with stern, sometimes absent parents had needed in his life. Hearing those words from Kev’s lips was a benediction I hadn’t expected, making me feel truly seen and understood, and it went straight to my heart like an arrow tipped with a healing salve, making me care about him all the more…
Until I remembered all the ways I hadn’t done right by Kev in the past. All the things I still hadn’t quite come clean about.
“I don’t know how you can trust me when I’ve been such a jerk to you,” I admitted. I worried about bringing it up, but the words had shoved themselves forcefully off my tongue, as if we wouldn’t be able to move on unless I cleared the air about this.
“You explained everything to me earlier.” His face was open and trusting, his words relaxed and sleepy.
I nodded, enjoying the light scratch of his chest hair against the side of my face. “I know. But the same way you keep thinking I’m going to blink and suddenly realize that I’m not in bed with one of the Hemsworth brothers, I’m scared you’ll realize what a selfish ass I am and how much better you could do with someone else.”
“No way. I mean, no one else gives me a run for my money in Horn of Glory like you do,” Kev teased. Then his smile faded, and the light in his eyes dimmed. “I would have said my friend Smitty was pretty good too, but he’s ghosting me now, so… I’m not sure if we’re really friends anymore.”
My stomach dropped. Here it was—the moment when I really had to out myself as SmittyKitty, the moment when a simple omission became an outright lie that would come back and bite me, the moment when I could be the trustworthy person he thought I was and put him before the op.
“Kev…” I began.
“No, it’s fine.” He lifted a hand from my head to wave it dismissively. “Really. It’s just… this is why it’s hard for me to believe you when you say you like me, you know? I thought Smitty and I were becoming friends. We’ve chatted a lot about the game, and I told him some stuff about me growing up, and we had a whole conversation about rabbits, I guess ’cause he works at a pet supply store, plus a bunch of other conversations too, and I thought… Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I guess he changed his mind about me.”
I held him tighter and swallowed down the confession that had been on my lips. Kev was hurting—again—and that was my fault—again. Telling him the truth might relieve me of the weight of the secret I was carrying, but would it make him feel better? Or like he’d lost yet another person who claimed to really care about him?
The idea of right and wrong didn’t seem so simple anymore.
