“That’s too bad, but I get why the name, or whose kid you are, doesn’t matter to you.”
“Thank you.”
“And I think I know why you’re stuck there beside the washing machine.”
“Oh?”
He nodded.
“Could you tell me, then?”
He took a few steps toward me and then stopped and leaned again. “I think you like my house,” he said, his expression softening as he looked at me. He didn’t smile, but there was a warmth in his eyes and his stance was relaxed. “And I think when you came in, it hit you, like maybe you were home.”
“That’s very perceptive.”
He shrugged before he took several more steps and then stopped again, leaning once more, appearing totally at ease. “I think you’ve had a house before, like when you were younger, and now, in Chicago, you have an apartment, but a home…” he mused, “I don’t think you’ve had one of those yet.”
There was a flutter of panic in my chest, and I took a step backward.
“No,” he cautioned, moving again, getting closer but stopping, this time leaning on the right side of the hallway instead of the left. “Wait.”
I took a breath. “I’m sorry, you’re hungry. I’ll put this down and we can—”
“I don’t want you to put it down here,” he assured me, stepping into the laundry room, leaning against the small counter with the farmhouse sink. “I want you to carry it down the hall to our bedroom.”
The shudder ran through me. “To your bedroom.”
He shook his head. “No. To our bedroom. Because even though this is gonna be long distance, it’s still your bedroom too, because I’ve never had anyone else in it, I don’t plan to ever have anyone else in it, so that pretty much makes it yours as well.”
It felt different. Just being in the laundry room was comforting, but I wasn’t stupid, and I knew what it really was.
Crossing to the dryer, he leaned back against it, close enough that he could have reached out and touched me, but just stood there instead. “I fell asleep on you the first night.”
Why was I being reminded?
“And you like my house.”
I squinted at him.
“Has it occurred to you that I got as freaked out about being able to sleep as you are, right now, about liking my house?”
I met his gaze. “It isn’t the house.”
“No, I know. Just like for me, it wasn’t that I fell asleep.”
“Then what was it?” I asked the question I knew the answer to, but didn’t want to say.
He slid sideways and put his hand on the washing machine. “I fell asleep because sitting there beside you, on the couch that night, felt like coming home.”
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way; things didn’t work like this, at least not things that were built to last.
“Croy, you––”
“Dallas––”
“And just now, when you walked in the door, you had the same feeling of coming home that I had the other night.”
That made no sense.
“You’re fighting so hard.”
What was I supposed to say to him?
“This house, this place…it suddenly feels like a sanctuary, right?”
It really did.
“Do you know why?”
Of course I did.
“Croy?”
“It’s too fast,” I warned him instead of answering. “Regular people don’t do things this fast. You can’t just leap. You have to know everything is solid first.”
“Nah,” he said dismissively. “You just need a net. That’s me. I’m your net.”
I gestured at him. “You can’t even take care of yourself.”
“No?” He tipped his head, grinning at me. “Who has the house? Who’s saving for his retirement? Who’s ready to make a commitment and to fly back and forth across the United States because someone else is too scared to say fuck it, and just move in?”
“Move in?” I gasped.
He smirked at me, taking the last step into my space, hands on my hips, gentle but firm, before he kissed the side of my neck. “Yeah, Croy, I want you here. I want you with me. I wanna come home and see you on the couch, or meet you after work for dinner. I want you to be the person with your name on the deed next to mine.”
I closed my eyes, because while I’d had the same fantasies, life didn’t work this way. We needed to take things slow and be smart about everything.
“There’s nothing but a job keeping you in Chicago, and I know for certain that you can get one of those here, maybe even one doing something you’d like better. You’d make an amazing private detective, and this is Sin City, so there’d be no shortage of people needing you.”
Now he was embellishing my fantasies, fleshing them out, making insane flights of fancy seem possible.
“And maybe your boss at Torus could be convinced that you could keep working for him, just in this new capacity, and you could have a satellite office and still have his resources. You’d still be a fixer, but not one that leaves town, and one who always comes home before dark.”