Say You'll Be Nine

The dust in my truck was everywhere. I tried rubbing it off the little decorative bands around the radio and the top of the gear shift. Cooper finally grabbed my hand to stop me.

“Look at me.”

I looked up at him. He was so beautiful even when he had those little cracks of worry between his eyebrows.

“Isaac, do you want to keep our relationship a secret? I mean… obviously there’s the fake one for show. That one we can’t keep a secret, plus it’s too late. But I mean this, us. Whatever this is between us. Do you want to keep that a secret?”

I knew better than to answer his question without thinking it through. After a minute of making sure I knew how I felt, I reached over and opened the truck door to get out.

14

Cooper

Well, that answered that. If he was so annoyed he was getting out of the damned truck, it couldn’t mean good things for me. I’d finally pushed Nine past his limit.

Except then he walked around the front of the truck and to my door, opening it and pulling me out until I was standing in front of him on the sidewalk in front of Tim’s store.

“No secret” was all he said before gripping the back of my head and hauling me in for an epic kiss right there on the main drag of Shale Falls.

It wasn’t a busy town, but there were definitely people out and about, including customers coming in and out of the store right in front of us. When Nine finally let me suck in some oxygen, I wondered if there were any cops around prepared to write my dick a ticket for public indecency.

“Understand?” Isaac grunted at me.

“Mm-hm,” I said with a brainless nod.

“Good. Get in the truck. I’m hungry.”

“Mm-hm,” I said again. And damned if I wasn’t hungry too, even though it wasn’t for steak.

The Tin Cup turned out to be an old clapboard house set right on the river that ran through town. I could see from the side it had a wide-planked back deck hanging partway over the river with wooden picnic tables covered in white butcher paper and votive candles in fat glass jars. Twinkle lights illuminated the wooden ceiling over the old porch, giving it a sort of shabby-chic look. I loved it on sight.

“You the ones in the truck with that golden retriever?” the hostess asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Nine said. “That’s Nacho, but he won’t bother anyone, and we left the windows open for him.”

The young woman smiled at him with the full dimple treatment. “No, I was going to say, you can bring him in if you’re okay sitting outside on the deck.”

Nine’s face lit up as he turned to me. “That okay with you?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “I can’t believe you even asked me that.”

He raced out to get the dog while the lady led me out to a table in the corner. It was a beautiful evening, and since it was early in the summer, the water was still moving pretty fast, kicking up some froth around clumps of giant rocks and cooling the air down around us. I was thankful I’d brought a long-sleeved pullover just in case.

When Nine returned to the table with Nacho, they both settled in. Nine took the seat next to me, and Nacho plunked right down on top of my canvas sneakers and let out a deep, contented sigh.

I was pretty much in heaven. These kind of nights were what I loved most about growing up in the Rocky Mountains. Being able to sit outside with someone I cared about as the sun slid down between the evergreens on the other side of the river was like something out of a Hallmark movie. It wasn’t something that happened to someone like me.

An outdoorsy-looking dude stepped up to take our order and gave Nine a serious up-down perusal that was impossible to misinterpret. He had brown hair pulled back in a messy bun, and I could see tan marks from sunglasses on the side of his face. He was dressed in what appeared to be the server uniform of the restaurant, blue jeans and a gold-and-white checked button-down shirt with a kind of leather half-apron tied around his waist. He was sexy as fuck, and suddenly I felt a growl of possession rumble in my chest. I bit it down and watched Nine out of the corner of my eye.

He was blushing. Fuck.

“Welcome to Tin Cup. My name is Todd, and I’ll be your server tonight. Would you like to hear about our specials?”

Nine stared down at his menu without responding.

“Sure,” I said.

He rattled off something about a river trout and dressed field greens, but I wasn’t listening closely. I was watching my boyfriend get more fidgety and weird around the hot server.