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“Linden doesn’t have a single restaurant with tablecloths.” He tilted his head back so he could look up at me defiantly. “There’s one stoplight. One bar. One tiny grocery store. Closest decent hairstylist is thirty minutes away.” He lifted a hand to brush a strand of hair off my forehead before snatching his hand away like he’d touched a flame. “There are no endowments or galas. No polo fields. Folks who are well-off there only have to work one job, but lots work two. My parents need my help so they can pay off their house and retire someday.” He shrugged. “Not your kind of place, that’s all I’m saying.”
I wanted to argue with this. To tell him that I’d been to lots of different places, and not just on exotic vacations—Landry had grown up with less than nothing; Silas, Zane, and Dev with only slightly more—but being familiar with it didn’t mean I’d experienced it. Didn’t mean that I knew at all what it had been like for him to grow up in a town like that.
“Isn’t Purdue University nearby?”
Rowe took a sip of his beer and nodded. “Sure. I’ve gone there a couple of times to, uh… you know, try to hook up or whatever.” His cheeks turned a delicious shade of pink.
“Try? Why didn’t you succeed? I would think a college town would be a fairly good place for hookups,” I said carefully, trying to ignore the feral banshee inside of me who suddenly wanted to kill every Boilermaker on the planet.
“Maybe it would have, but I kept chickening out,” he said softly. “The only thing I knew about those guys was what their abs looked like in a Grindr picture, and all I could picture was my broken body thrown into an empty oil barrel and tossed into the Wabash River.”
“Wow.” I bit my lip. “Does that… happen a lot in Indiana?”
His eyes lit with amusement. “Well, no. But only because people like me remain ever vigilant and don’t allow ourselves to get distracted by lusty hookups, you see?”
“I do see.” I nodded slowly. “You’re right. I wouldn’t last a single day.” I gave in to the temptation and raised my free hand to bracket one of Rowe’s lean hips, then lowered my head to nibble at his lower lip. “If you were anywhere nearby, I’d be far,fartoo distracted.”
Rowe’s breath caught. I set our beer bottles on a side table, then did what I’d been longing to do since the moment he stepped into the room—I grasped the back of his damp curls and pulled him in for a hard kiss. “You’re fucking irresistible,” I murmured against his mouth, the words coming out like an accusation.
When I pulled back, Rowe’s eyes were a little glassy, the same way they’d been earlier during sex. The front of his joggers tented out, and his neck was mottled again.
I was in trouble with this guy. I wanted him again, and it had only been fifteen minutes since I’d had him the first time. Men didnottie me into knots like this. Not ever. I’d always been way more interested in what I could do with my life thanwhoI could do. But with Rowe… it was like my brain was covered by a thousand stickers of him and then covered with a permanent top coat that would make removal completely impossible.
“More,” Rowe begged, grabbing the front of my T-shirt. “Please.” But before I could agree and rush him back to the bedroom, there was a knock at the door.
“Hold that thought.” I opened the door so the staff could deliver our snacks and perform their turndown service. It felt like they were all moving with exaggerated underwater slowness, but I told myself that was a good thing.
Arm’s length, Sebastian. Light and easy.
But when the last of the room attendants left a few minutes later, my arousal hadn’t let up in the slightest.
“Come eat,” I suggested, gesturing toward the array of desserts, wines, and snacks that had been laid out for us. “I can’t have you fainting on me.”
“Fainting,” he scoffed. He puffed his chest out. “I’ll have you know I reached level six on Gym Joe’s YouTube Bulk-Up challenge.”
“I… don’t know what that means,” I said, but when he passed in front of me to get to the table, I couldn’t help reaching my hands under his shirt to feel the muscles of his abs and chest… and if my thumbs happened to brush across his nipples, then so be it.
“It’s… uh…” His breathing increased as his nipples hardened. “It’s…”
I leaned in to kiss his ear before stepping away. “Eat,” I repeated. “Then you can tell me more about it.”
After I pulled back, he wobbled for a moment before seeming to snap out of it and reaching for the snacks. I poured myself a glass of wine, handed him his beer, and led him to the sofa, where we resumed our seats from earlier.
Between bites of a fruit tart, Rowe told me more about how he motivated himself through his workout videos, and I found myself promising I’d try one. And he told me about his adventures as the Burrito Bandito… which made me laugh so hard I snorted wine through my nose for the first time in my life.
“It’s actually really fun,” he admitted, crunching a handful of rosemary sea salt mixed nuts. “The tips aren’t great, but it’s nice to know you’ve brightened someone’s lunch break with a little song and dance. I might even miss it a little when I’m back in Linden in a couple months.”
“So why go back?” I asked lightly. “I mean, couldn’t you stay—?”
“No way. I’m barely making ends meet here, even sleeping on Joey’s futon. I couldn’t afford to rent a tux last night, which was why I was wearing Joey’s.”
“The bunny tux was your cousin’s?”
“Better than his stripper tux, or so I’m told.” Rowe grinned. “Anyway, I told you, I have to go back to Linden so I can help my folks. They don’t have much money, and my job at Bobby’s Tech Barn pays pretty well. And it’s fun, too, in a way.”
“So you’re interested in technology, then?” I asked, unable to stop myself from edging closer to the topics I’d promised to avoid.
Rowe snorted. “Nah. I’m the opposite of a tech geek. But I don’t need to be. Most of our customers are sweet grandmas who don’t remember how to get into their email and clueless middle-aged guys whothoughtthey knew what they were doing but ended up downloading a bunch of viruses while trying to stream movies. Bobby and some of the other techs get impatient with them, but I know what it’s like to be technologically challenged and learn things as you go.”
