Illegal Contact (The Barons 1)

“Wrong.” I nipped at his thumb. “I wanna hear it. In detail. In fact, I want a sonnet.”

“Screw your sonnet. You get words.” Noah kissed my forehead with a touch far gentler than anyone had ever used on me before. “I love your mean ass.”

The part of me that still expected people to give up on me or let me down unwound from the tight knot of tension. I relaxed against the bed, grinning up at him.

“Will you stay with me?”

“Uh. About that . . .” Noah scrunched up his face. “I love you, Gav. I do. But I can’t live in this house out in the boonies. I got a job as a counselor at this place in lower Manhattan, and I’m not doing the five-hour commute thing.”

“You could use one of my cars.”

He gave me a look. “Gavin.”

“You’re so stubborn. It’s not a handout if it’s from your man.”

“Gavin . . .”

“Fine.” I rubbed the back of his neck, watching him from beneath my lashes and smiling at the way he still flushed. “How about if I move to Manhattan?”

“Don’t move because of—”

“It’s not just because of you, dumbass. I hate this house. It’s too big for one person, and living here makes me feel like an asshole.”

“That’s the only thing that makes you feel like an asshole?” he wondered.

I swatted his thigh. “For real. What if I moved back to the city?”

Noah was obviously fighting a smile. “What about Queens?” He burst out laughing in response to my flat stare. “We can talk about it, but I’m down as long as you’re sure you want to flaunt it to that extent.”

“Flaunt it? You clearly have no clue what I said in that article.” Glancing at the clock, my stomach did a flip. “Speaking of, that shit should be live.”

Noah shot up so fast his spine must have snapped. He half dove off the side of the bed to grab his phone, but I grabbed his wrist before he could tap the screen.

“Don’t.”

“Why not?” he asked. “I want to see what you said!”

“Because the response is gonna be ugly, and it doesn’t matter tonight.” I eased the phone out of his hand and tossed it onto the thick carpet. “What matters is that we’re together, and you just said you’d move in with me, which pretty much blew my mind with happiness. Can we just leave it at that for now?”

Noah glanced over at his phone.

“Please?”

He melted against me, and I immediately curled around him with our limbs locked together and my face buried in the crook of his neck. With warm air blowing on us from the vent above my bed and his fingers idly sliding through my hair, it was the most peace I’d had in weeks. I pretended there was a wall of D-men between us and that damn phone, and all the hate I knew would be flooding out of it should he open Twitter or Facebook, and let myself doze off.

Maybe the morning would be awful, but I wasn’t about to let one of the best nights of my life turn into a nightmare.

***

Noah

Dawn came with faint rays of sunlight streaming through thick clouds and more flurries. Gavin’s bedroom was practically encased in glass, so in those first sleepy moments of blinking my way awake, it felt like we were in a snow globe.

When the consistent buzzing of a phone cut through the silence, I wished it was true. Thick, impenetrable glass would have come in handy right now, because Gavin had been right. Whatever the reaction to his coming-out story had been, at least seventy-five percent would be ugly.

Beside me, Gavin was breathing deep and even. He was curled onto his side, hair messy around his face like a golden halo, and lips parted in his sleep. How someone so gruff could look so sweet and innocent was beyond me, but I took that moment to slide from his arms and grab my phone.

There were notifications several hundred deep from various forms of social media, along with texts from Jasmine and my dad, but I bypassed them to find the article. The headline was total clickbait, but it couldn’t have been more fitting.

Gavin Brawley Comes Out and Doesn’t Give a Fuck About Your Opinion on the Matter.

I sat on the floor in my underwear and didn’t bother to search for my glasses before scanning the rest of the article, which was only a few paragraphs long. Spence had detailed his evening of eating edibles with a friend in D.C. before getting a mind-blowing, but unsurprising, phone call from Gavin Brawley.

He said, “I need to make an announcement, a big one, and I only want to do the story with you. But you have to post it right away or I’ll post the shit on Instagram.” How could I say no? I also had an idea what this announcement would be, after spending a day hanging out at his Westhampton mansion. I guess you could say, after some of the things he said in our previous chat, I wasn’t too shocked when he came out as bisexual.