He doesn’t respond for several seconds, but his dark eyes remain fixed on mine. The silence is pure torture. I need to elaborate, so I take a breath. “Do you get why I can’t go through with this now? The photo shoot was one thing, but actual sex would kill me, because there is no way it’s happening without both of you here, fully invested. It would destroy me to be with you and not be able to keep you, and if we did it, there’d be no going back. I won’t go through that again. I’ve lost enough.”
“So have we,” he says, his jaw spasming as if he’s angry. His eyes flash, and for a split second, he looks like he might rage at me. I brace myself, adrenaline sparking within and obliterating the weary sadness that my confession left behind. Leo in a rage is a thing of beauty. It would be worth seeing it once more before he walks out of my life for good.
But then his nostrils flare and he takes a deep breath. He pulls his phone from his pocket. “Celeste needs to be here. She needs to know how you feel.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Didn’t you hear a word I said?”
“I heard the ones that matter.” He puts the phone to his ear and a faint ringtone bleats out from the other end. A second later Celeste’s voice answers. He taps the screen to turn on the speaker. “Ángel, you need to come down here.”
“Already?” she asks. “That was fast. Or are you fucking with me?”
“No, Celeste. Forget about the sex crap for a minute. This is serious. The three of us need to talk. Will your father ask questions if you leave?”
“Papá’s in San Diego at an event for his shipping partner. Ben and Baz are with him getting a lesson in social etiquette, the poor boys. I’ll have Jerry drive me down.”
“Can Jerry keep a secret?” Leo asks.
“All Jerry needs to know is that I’m meeting you downtown. He won’t ask questions.”
The worried look on Leo’s face eases and he nods. “Good.”
“Wait,” I say to Leo, then to his phone before he can end the call. “The back door code is oh-three-one-five. Just come up when you get here.” I’m not sure why the hell he thinks her presence will solve anything, but I’ve never been able to resist the prospect of seeing her.
“Got it. See you in about twenty minutes.” The call ends, and I stare at Leo’s phone for a moment, wondering what the fuck is happening.
“Her birthday is your door code. Jesus, you really do love her, don’t you? Please don’t tell me she’s the only woman you’ve ever loved.”
I snort and head back to the kitchen to retrieve my beer. “Dude, don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.” I chug the bottle and toss the empty in the recycle bin, then grab another from the fridge. When I turn around, Leo is seated on a barstool, still looking at me like I’m a stranger. I step to the counter and nudge his half-finished beer toward him, then decide to put him out of his misery. “Yes, Celeste is the only woman I’ve ever loved. There have been men. Two men. One is dead. The other . . . is you.”
His expression tightens, and he escapes into his bottle.
I sigh. “You wanted honesty. So now why don’t you return the favor? What were you thinking would happen when you kissed me?”
He picks at the beer bottle label. “I wasn’t thinking. I was just too hell-bent on following through that I didn’t consider the consequences.”
“So, why’d you do it?”
“To see how it felt to kiss a guy.”
“And? How does it feel?”
I’m getting to the heart of it now, I realize, when he lifts his gaze to meet mine and his throat ripples as he swallows. “So much better than I imagined.”
I can’t help but smile. “You liked it.” I start to hum a few bars of the song that pops into my head.
“Don’t you fucking dare start singing Katy Perry, asshole. I liked kissing you, all right? Because you mean something to me.”
“I thought it was just sex,” I say in a mocking tone.
He looks chagrined and shakes his head. “I thought diminishing it would help. That keeping it casual would make it easier for you to get on board.”
“I don’t do casual. Not after the shit I’ve lived through. Putting myself out there has always been a risk since the very start, so if I’m going to do it, it had better fucking mean something.”
“Now I know that. If I’d known it was Celeste that day . . . that your history with her was more than just a kiss . . . I might’ve behaved differently.”
He seems so unfazed by things that I’m starting to get a little paranoid. What he asked is not an easy thing for a straight guy to come out and ask for. And he isn’t even pissed about Celeste—in fact, she’s on her way here now to join in this crazy conversation.
“Why the hell aren’t you pissed or jealous or something? I had my tongue in your girlfriend’s pussy and lied to you about it.”
“She wasn’t my girlfriend at the time. Shit, Maddox, you took pictures of the two of us fucking. I think we’re past being weird about sex.”
“Except when it’s between you and me.”
“Maybe we’re past being weird about that too. Listen.” He pauses and gets up from his seat, rounds the counter, and leans his hip against it, facing me. “I don’t do casual either. I wouldn’t have kissed you if you didn’t mean something to me. I drove around the block five times tonight before finding the balls to come in, and the entire time I was rationalizing what this proposition of mine would mean. ‘It’s just sex’ was just the easiest excuse, but the thing that made me finally stop was realizing that
