“I think I can do that.”
“I’m just going to put the bread in the oven to toast a little.”
Adam stirred the pasta painfully slowly, like he was coating each individual piece of penne with the pesto. Jared didn’t push or tell him to hurry up. This was Adam’s thing—his learning experience.
“Add some pepper to it as well.”
“Like….”
Jared handed him the pepper mill. “You know how to use this?”
“Fuck off,” Adam grumbled.
When it was all done, Jared split the food into two bowls while Adam found forks, then led him through to a dining room.
“I think I should eat the first meal I made myself in here,” he said, gesturing to the positively cavernous dining room. It was warm and light, a long, narrow room with a dark wood table and elegant chairs, space to seat eighteen.
“I totally agree.”
Adam was about to set his bowl down in the head-of-the-table spot when Jared shot out his arm and stopped him.
“You’ll leave marks on the table if you don’t put a placemat down.”
“Oh. I don’t know where we keep those.”
Jared rolled his eyes. “Hold this,” he said, handing Adam his bowl. He jogged back to the kitchen and grabbed two dishtowels, folding them to protect the polished dark wood from the bowls.
“How do you know shit like this?” Adam said once they were finally seated, digging into the food.
“How to cook?”
“Yeah. And the stuff about the placemats.”
“Because my mom was super into keeping us grounded when we were kids,” Jared said easily. “She never had a paid job, so she spends a lot of time volunteering with the victims of domestic violence.”
“This is really good, by the way,” Adam interrupted. “I’m very impressed with myself.”
Jared grinned. “I completely agree.”
“So your mom made you cook and clean and stuff?”
“Yeah. My dad is kind of conservative. He was brought up in a very strict religious family. My mom is a bit more laid back, but she never stands up to him. I know she didn’t want me to go to the MPS but my dad insisted.”
“MPS?”
“Marine Preparatory School.”
“Ah. Where you were last year.”
“Yeah.”
Adam speared another piece of penne, considered it, then ate it. “I’ve never met an army brat before.”
“I’m not,” Jared said, laughing. “My dad works in a bank. He couldn’t get into the army because he had bronchitis as a kid, which means he’s got breathing problems. They wouldn’t take him. It’s his biggest regret in life.”
“How sad.”
“Yeah. The school was… I mean, I spent enough time in a fairly liberal school before I turned seventeen, so I knew a lot more about life than the other kids at MPS. They were so fucking sheltered. Their parents wanted to keep everything from them. But they could quote scripture at you like it was written on the back of their eyelids.”
“The perfect place for a flaming homo like yourself, then.”
“Excuse you. I do not flame.”
Adam grinned. “I know. It’s a big jump, you know, conservative Christian Texas to ultra-liberal Washington.”
“Yeah, well, I know what I prefer.” Jared leaned back in his chair and let his fork clatter into the empty bowl. “Thanks for dinner.”
“You’re welcome. If you want to come over and cook for me again you can, anytime.”
Jared checked his watch, surprised at the time. Between studying, making out, and teaching Adam how to cook, the time had flown past.
“Shit. I should head back soon.”
“What’s time is it?”
Adam never wore a watch. It was something Jared had noticed right from the start. Adam relied on other people to tell him where to be and when.
“Almost nine forty.”
“Oh.”
“Hadley has her friends staying, and they’re….”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Just drunk people in their early thirties who don’t seem to give a fuck that I need to get up at six in the morning to be ready for school. They party until four some nights.”
Adam winced. “That’s rough. You know… you’re welcome to stay here.” His wince softened, stretched, widened into the half-sexy, sloppy grin Jared now recognized turned his stomach over with more than simple lust.
“If I stay here, you’re going to spend all night feeling me up.”
“Sure am. That’s the payoff. You get my bed, I get you.”
Jared straightened his spine. “I’m not messing, Adam. You’re not fucking me.”
“Jeez. Okay. I still get at least second base privileges then. It’s my fucking bed.”
“Second base?” Jared echoed, amused.
“Yeah.”
“Come on, you spoiled child,” Jared said, pushing away from the table and grabbing his bowl. “I’ll show you how to wash dishes.”
Washing up—by hand, at Jared’s insistence—took longer than it should have, mostly because Adam kept flicking soapsuds and laughing at Jared’s “serious teacher” voice. That, and they stopped to make out every few minutes, so by the time they were done the water was going cold and the dishes on the rack were almost dry.
“Come on,” Adam said, slipping his hand into Jared’s. “I just need to lock up.”
“I dread to think how long that takes in this place,” Jared said, teasing, following Adam out of the kitchen.
“Uh, about two minutes.”
In a small room off the side of the grand entrance hall, there was a computer with several monitors and a panel that must control security for the whole house.
“It’s easy, really,” Adam said. “You just press this here, and it tells you where any windows are open or unlocked. Same for the doors. Then if anything beeps—like, there.” He pointed to an output on one of the monitors. “That’s the door from the kitchen to the back balcony. But we can lock it from here.”
He clicked a few buttons, and the red light turned green.
“The others are all in my room,” Adam said, referring to the suite he kept on the far side of the building. “I don’t mind leaving that unlocked from here. I can always do it myself when I get upstairs if I want to.”
“That’s a pretty cool system,” Jared said.
“Yeah. My mom helped design it. That’s part of what she’s into—not just
