The guy deserved access to his toothbrush at night, that’s all.
Sullivan circled the block once, darting out to grab the watch from behind the beige sedan’s rear tire, before parking on the other end of the street this time, four houses down from Cindy Jackman’s address, and seven houses down from where they’d parked the day before. Tobias yawned into the thermos of coffee Sullivan had poured him.
“Did she leave?” Tobias asked.
Sullivan looked down at the unbroken face of the watch. “No.”
They waited.
While Cindy went to work and then hit a local bookstore and café with friends, Sullivan and Tobias followed, talking movies for hours before shifting to books. It wasn’t long before Sullivan had contributed a dozen novels to Tobias’s new to-read list, which Sullivan scrawled on the back of an old receipt. This was the result of a conversation that included Sullivan yelling, “You’ve never seen Blade Runner? How are you a living, breathing person who exists?” and a long spiel that worked its way through the classics of both sci-fi and hard-boiled detective noir from there. Tobias promised to try Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the book Blade Runner was based on, although Sullivan suspected it was primarily to shut him up.
They left when the last light in Cindy’s house went dark, and got dinner before driving back to Sullivan’s. After they ate, Sullivan lounged on the sofa, his fly open, watching as Tobias sucked and licked and moaned around his dick, petting his soft curls. By the time Sullivan came, he was so deep in Tobias’s throat that he was practically in his chest, and he couldn’t remember an afterglow as satisfying as the one that followed, during which Tobias begged to come in a voice that was completely trashed, his words hoarse and running together into a long string of pleaseletmepleasepleaseletme.
Sullivan jerked Tobias off hard and fast so that he came in hot, damp pulses in his hand.
“Good boy,” Sullivan whispered, and Tobias shivered. He didn’t look as exhausted that night as he had the night before, but Sullivan still didn’t mention the motel. He simply guided Tobias upstairs and into the shower.
“Something’s going to happen sooner or later, right?” Tobias asked later, brushing his teeth and bemoaning the ineffectual nature of stakeouts at the same time. “I mean, we’ve been following her around for ages.”
“Two days isn’t ages.” Sullivan stretched out on the mattress, tired and curiously content despite finding several smug texts from Caty about her certainty that Sullivan had already caved to the lures of the college boy. He put his phone aside without replying; he sure as hell wasn’t going to confirm it for her.
On Wednesday, they followed Cindy to work, the gym, and then out to a movie and dinner with a handful of her friends. For most of that time, Tobias read aloud, pausing only to drink from the bottles of water Sullivan kept pushing on him. At Sullivan’s behest, they wandered through five different books, starting and ending at seemingly arbitrary points in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the Bhagavad Gita, The Gospel According to Judy Blume, Slaughterhouse Five, and The Portable Dorothy Parker. Tobias was a good out-loud reader—careful, not too slow. When they got bored with that, Sullivan went on a long, enjoyable spiel—monologuing, Caty would say, but she wasn’t here, so whatever—about the strengths and drawbacks of the wah-wah pedal.
“Do you even play guitar?” Tobias asked him during a lull.
“No. Why?”
“No reason.” Tobias smiled and Sullivan shook his head. Tobias asked the weirdest questions sometimes. But he also gestured for Sullivan to tell him more, so Sullivan figured he could put up with it.
Later, while Cindy and her friends dined on the restaurant patio, they somehow got onto the subject of guilty pleasure tasks.
“You stress bake,” Sullivan repeated. “For fun, you stress bake.”
“Yes.”
“What does stress baking mean?”
Tobias pulled out another bottle of water and shoved it at Sullivan. “It means I bake when I’m stressed, what do you think it means?”
“I don’t know.” Sullivan wasn’t thirsty, but he felt somehow unhappy at the idea of rejecting the offering. He decided not to think about why that could be and immediately began pulling the label off with his thumbnail. “I thought maybe it was like you have to produce a certain number of cupcakes in an hour or they blow up your pans or something.”
Tobias laughed. “No. It takes a lot of concentration, so I can’t worry about other things, but it’s not high pressure in and of itself. It says a lot about you that you thought there might be something dangerous in it, you know.”
“Hey, cherry pie done right is very dangerous.”
“For the waistline, maybe.”
“In every way. Come on, that’s a sexy pie. If apple pie’s the good girl, cherry pie’s the filthy minx.”
Tobias laughed again, and when they left Cindy tucked in for the night, they ended up at a twenty-four-hour grocery store shopping for baking ingredients.
Which was how they ended up covered in flour at three in the morning, eating steaming cherry pie out of the tin. Sullivan had enjoyed helping—if you could call snitching cherries and flicking sugar at Tobias’s face helping—almost as much as he enjoyed the pie itself. The pastry was golden and flaky and buttery, the filling the perfect mixture of sweet and tart. Sullivan ate three pieces before he collapsed onto the counter, too full to move.
Tobias smirked, drawing a film of plastic wrap over the pie to keep it fresh. “You could’ve stopped at one piece.”
“She seduced me,” Sullivan moaned. God, he was going to explode, and he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be worth it.
“Come on, get up.” Tobias tugged on his arm. “Let’s clean up. I’m so tired.”
“You made a mess of my kitchen.” Sullivan turned his wrist over so he could trail a thumb over a smear of flour on Tobias’s
