His laughter never failed to make me smile. “You’re weird.”
Instead of using my water bottle that was sitting on the counter, he got out a tall glass from the cabinet, filled it with ice, and then poured the flavored water into it from the pitcher. When he placed it next to me on the table, he even put a paper towel under it to soak up the icy droplets from the outside of the glass.
“Oooh, fancy.”
“But wait, there’s more.” He opened another cabinet and pulled out a package of Oreo cookies and set a few on a plate. “Voilà. Talk about fancy.”
I took a cookie from the stack. “Mm, these are my favorite. If I’d known they were in there, I would have been eating them all week.”
Cooper slid into the booth next to me instead of sitting across from me. We’d been sitting like this more and more because it made it easier for him to see what I was doing while I edited video. His hair was still wet from the shower, and I caught a whiff of the shampoo we shared.
“I know they’re your favorite. That’s why I brought them. And that’s also why I hid them in my suitcase to save for a special occasion.”
I reached for another cookie, and our shoulders brushed together. While I was getting more comfortable with casual touches, we hadn’t done anything more than heavy kissing sessions each night before bed. I thought Cooper had probably decided I wouldn’t be any good at the sex stuff, and what else could I do but respect that? It was true, I wasn’t all that experienced with any kind of sex, much less gay sex. “What’s the special occasion?” I asked, trying to refocus on the task at hand instead of follow those Cooper thoughts into a dark place.
“We need to talk.”
Well, hell.
“Oh.”
Cooper sighed and turned to me, reaching out to clasp my forearm the way he sometimes did when we talked. I liked the touch. My body seemed to crave it.
“Something’s wrong. You’re being weird.”
I shifted uncomfortably and cleared my throat. The second Oreo didn’t taste as good as the first one. “I am weird.”
“No, you’re not. You’re unique. There’s a difference. Something’s gotten into your head, and it’s like… when the camera goes on, Nine disappears.”
I frowned at him. “I don’t disappear. I’m there every time you do a video. We’re in this together. I don’t shirk my responsibilities.”
“Whoa, calm down. That’s not what I meant. Of course you’re there physically. I’m talking about your personality. The Isaac Winshed I know—the Nine from the popular YouTube DIY channel—isn’t showing up right now. What’s going on? Are you scared?”
“What? No!”
Cooper blew out a sigh. “Calm down, manly man. That wasn’t a dig against your bad-boy image. Not… that’s not what I meant. Are you nervous? Or…”
“Yes, no. I don’t know. I just… it’s too many things to remember all the time.” I closed my laptop and pushed it away before pulling the paper towel with my drink on it a little closer. “I feel like everyone’s watching. I’m going to say something wrong or hurt someone’s feelings.”
Cooper let go of my arm and sat back in the booth, studying me for a minute. “Do you always feel this way when you take your videos? Because I gotta tell you, that doesn’t come across in your regular ones at all.”
I turned toward him and rested my back against the wall. “No, but that’s different. With those, I don’t talk as much. And I do all the editing so…”
His face lit with understanding. “Shit. So it’s the Instagram stuff. The videos we’re doing that aren’t edited before they’re posted.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way. “Yeah, maybe?”
He thought about it for a minute. “Okay, what about this? What if you focus on doing the talking only when we’re recording for the big weekly video? You can speak freely since you’ll be doing the edits, or at least you’ll have final say if I do the edits. Then, in the Insta stuff, I can take the lead. Or we can keep some of them simple by talking through ahead of time what we’re going to say. Would that help?”
I stared at him, unable to grasp how thoughtful that was. He’d confronted the issue head-on and then tried to figure out a solution. Was it because he needed me to be better in front of the camera so we could get more viewers or because he wanted me to feel more comfortable in general? Did it matter?
I fumbled across the bench and fell onto his face with my lips, kind of accidentally kissing his eye and nose before landing on his mouth. He laughed against my lips, but I didn’t stop because he also grabbed the back of my head with both hands and held on tight. God, I wanted him. I’d wanted him most of the minutes and hours of the days since the first time we’d kissed. I fell asleep with the memory of it and woke up with a throbbing dick in the bed next to his sleepy, sexy face.