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“Did he force you?”
I frowned. “No.”
“Did he hurt you?”
I supposed that was relative, except… “No, he didn’t hurt me. At least not deliberately. He—wanted me to go back to the island with him. To leave all of this—to leave you, the city, my family… and he wanted me to go and I told him no.”
“And he did what?”
“He finished,” was all I said since I wasn’t going into details. “But then he stormed out because he said it had been a mistake.”
Milo’s lips compressed. “That didn’t hurt you?”
“I can live with having my feelings hurt.” I wasn’t a child. “I just—I should have told you before. I know we didn’t make any commitments. We haven’t made any commitments. Certainly the first time, I wasn’t sure I would get to see you again even if I wanted to—”
I hesitated.
“That might have been my first lie. Sorry,” I admitted. “I would have seen you again. Considering I wanted to see you again, Pretty Boy. I like having you here. I liked that you stayed.”
“But we still haven’t made any commitments,” Milo said slowly.
“It’s not that, I promise. I—Ezra can be sweet and warm and funny. I let him...I got carried away with him.”
“Because you care about him.”
“Sometimes,” I said softly. “I wish I didn’t. It might make so much of this easier. Nevertheless, Ezra and Adam have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I used to imagine it sometimes when I was younger—before I realized they were beating up any possible boyfriends or frightening them away.”
I made a face.
“Now…now I wonder if that was just another way to control me, and that’s what the sex is, or if it’s something else.”
“You want it to be something else.” It wasn’t a question, and Milo let out a long sigh. “Mayhem—it’s okay to admit you want someone to care.”
“I don’t know. It sounds kind of pathetic to me. Like…I can’t handle it.”
“You can handle anything.”
“I just—I don’t like feeling like I was lying to you.”
“Well, I don’t like the idea of you lying to me or me lying to you,” he said with a faint smile that never reached his eyes. “Not real sure I like the idea of you having sex with that handsy entitled asshole either.”
“I want to say I’m sorry…and I am sorry because the last thing I want to do is hurt you.”
He nodded once, but he didn’t say anything. His guarded expression was almost impossible to read.
“I’m—going to ask you for some time to sit with this.” Each word was carefully enunciated and controlled. “But answer this for me… do you want more with him?”
“I don’t even know if that’s possible with Ezra,” I admitted. “I used to think I understood him. More and more he seems like a stranger.”
“But do youwantmore with him?”
Did I?
There was an easy answer and a complicated answer.
“I don’t know,” was the easy answer, but I didn’t leave it there. “Sometimes, when he kisses me, he makes me want all the possibilities.” That was the complicated answer, but I took it a step further and met the difficult one head-on. “Like you do. I never imagined you, Pretty Boy. I don’t know that I could have, and now—I can’t imagine it without you.”
“Or him.”
