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“This is a thing…”
“Are you going to just repeat everything I say?”
“Quite possibly. I think I’m too drunk for coherent thought,” Jamie replied.
“On the contrary, I think you’re possibly at your most eloquent when you’re drunk.”
“Is that so?”
“It is.” Chris grinned, leaning down the extra couple of inches to kiss him. Not for the first time Chris realized how much he loved the way that Jamie kissed.
“Let’s go to bed,” Jamie murmured, leading Chris up the stairs by the hand. Boomer followed them uncertainly.
They didn’t undress each other this time. Instead, they moved to their respective sides and stripped rather clinically before sliding beneath the covers, Jamie fluffing the pillow with a closed fist. As Chris shuffled in, he spotted the Labrador still in the doorway, hunkered down as if waiting for permission. Chris suddenly felt horribly guilty for coming so suddenly between the dog and his human. He patted the space between Jamie and himself.
“Come on, Boomer.”
The dog was up immediately, tail wagging happily as he bounded onto the bed and tread a circle between them before lying down and burying his wet nose into the crook of Chris’s neck.
“Poor Boomer,” Jamie murmured, digging his fingers into the short, coarse hair on the Labrador’s neck. Chris rolled onto his side and placed his arm over the dog, smiling at Jamie across the pillow.
“At least he doesn’t hate me for taking you away from him.”
“Of course not. Boomer is a total sweetheart.”
“He’d do anything for you,” Chris said.
“So would you,” replied Jamie sleepily, his eyelids already starting to close now that he was lying down, his fingers ceasing their light scratch on Boomer’s neck.
“Yeah, I think I probably would.”
But Jamie was already asleep, his mouth slightly open, breathing steadily. Chris smiled, tenderly brushing back a lock of dark hair from Jamie’s forehead. Boomer looked at him with large brown eyes, his tail swish-swishing on top of the covers. Chris gave his silky ears a rub.
“I guess we both love him, huh?”
Boomer whined quietly and nudged Chris’s cheek with his black nose before settling his head on his paws, comfortable between them both. Chris fell asleep to the sound of Jamie’s breathing. Somehow, he felt like this was where he was supposed to have been all his life.
Chapter 12
“Aunt Helen, I am not coming to the ballet with you tonight,” Jamie said into the phone that was jammed between his ear and shoulder as he mixed cream and sugar into the cup of coffee that Chris had made for him.
He loved the way that they had fallen into relative domesticity when it was just the two of them. He loved the way that he and Chris moved around each other, how Chris squeezed his shoulders and pressed a kiss into his hair as he walked past on his way to the fridge, how Chris’s fingers brushed up against the inside of his wrists as they sat at the kitchen counter in the morning and decided what to do with their day.
“Yes, you damn well are, young man,” Aunt Helen replied sternly. “You’ve been out of hospital for almost a month and hardly a soul has seen you out and about.”
“I thought that was the whole point,” Jamie grumbled, remembering the conversation with his mother over why he was in the Hamptons in the first place—so he wouldn’t slide right back into bad habits.
“No, it was not the whole point! The point was that you would ease yourself back into society instead of jumping in headfirst, but so far, you’ve been to the VA thing, you’ve been to lunch with me, and then some paparazzo caught your Winter Picnic on camera, and those are the only public outings you’ve had in four weeks. People are talking.”
“What kind of people?”
“People like Geoffrey Pierce.”
Jamie stiffened at the mention of the name, and across the table, Chris glanced up from his coffee, frowning of concern.
“Fuck Pierce,” he replied harshly, his fingernails digging into the palm of his hand.
“He’s the mayor of the city, James,” Aunt Helen replied coldly, “and he’s publically calling you out. He’s saying that you can’t hack it anymore after Afghanistan and that it’s time for America to stop indulging your fuck-ups…”
