He pressed his hands to his face, groaning. “You’re going to fucking make me cry, Luke, and you know I’m not ready to do that in front of you.”
“Fuck it. Cry in front of me. Do whatever you need to.”
Miraculously, he was smiling when he took his hands away from his face. “You wouldn’t be totally freaked out if I cried?”
“Why the hell would I be?”
“I feel like a lot of guys, or a lot of people, just don’t want to be around that kind of emotion,” he said. “Especially a guy like you.”
“Again with this guy like you bullshit,” I said.
“You’re kind of a tough guy!” he protested, shrugging his shoulders on my lap.
“That is the craziest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“What? You are,” he said. “You’re tatted up. You’re a veteran. You don’t talk much. You’ve got that deep voice. You make everything yourself. You work outdoors. You wear flannel.”
“Christ,” I said. “Do people really see me as tough?”
He nodded. “Yeah, most likely.”
“I’m just a weirdo who’s afraid of the indoors and obsessed with plants.”
He let out a peal of laughter. “You aren’t afraid of anything at all,” he said.
I thought of all the nights I’d woken up in cold sweats, terrified of the dreams I’d had, terrified of the day ahead, terrified of my life. There were entire months when I got back where I couldn’t hear the sound of a popping car engine without shutting down. And I sure as hell was terrified of love.
But Cam saw me differently. He liked what he saw. And it brought out a feeling I hadn’t let myself feel in a long time.
“You make me like myself better,” I said quietly. “You know that?”
“Do I?” he asked, meeting my eyes.
“Very much.”
“You make me feel better, too,” he said, reaching for my hand and squeezing it. “Like I have a future, or something. Like I’m not just going to be Cameron Lyons-Erickson, the Divorced Dad for the rest of my life. You remind me that I can still meet new people. Make new friends.”
I nodded, swallowing as I looked down at him. My heart twisted as he said the word friends. I couldn’t tell whether I’d won the lottery or just been let down.
I wanted to be Cam’s friend. I really did. The more I got to know him, the more I would have been happy to be in his life in any sort of capacity.
But something inside me still wished for more.
I didn’t even know what kind of more. I’d certainly never wanted much more with anybody else, other than a short-term partner I’d been with during a war. I was in uncharted territory, all with a man who’d made it perfectly clear that I was not going to be a permanent fixture in his personal life.
“I’m glad I give you some kind of hope,” I finally said. I cleared my throat. “But I still think I’m just a plant-obsessed weirdo.”
“Well,” he said, “if you think of yourself as a weirdo, all you have to do is remember what I was doing when you first met me. You’ll remember I’m a lot weirder.”
“Doing a crossword in a bar isn’t that strange,” I said. “I just wanted a reason to tease you.”
“And I loved it when you teased me.”
He was running his fingertips across the inside of my palm, like a light massage. My chest felt heavy—but a good kind of heavy, like my heart couldn’t quite handle how much I was enjoying this moment with him.
I would have been happy for the moment to last forever, no matter how bittersweet it was. I was plagued with guilt, a grey cloud hanging over me at every moment.
I had to tell him that I was Phlox. It was just a simple, little internet exchange, anyway. Why the fuck was I so scared?
Suddenly the pressure gauge was going up inside me, but for once, it wasn’t because of a bad dream or because I was inside or because I was lost in memory.
I just wanted the best for Cam.
“Maybe we…” I trailed off.
“What’s that?” he asked.
I cleared my throat. “Maybe we shouldn’t have sex.”
I could see the disappointment in his eyes.
“Trust me, I hate myself for saying it as much as you probably hate hearing it,” I told him.
“Sounds like a terrible fucking idea to me,” he said, pouting in my lap.
“But I really want to be your friend, Cam. I think we both need that more than we could ever admit.”
“I definitely do need a friend,” he said. “And I feel more comfortable with you than I have with anybody in a long, long time.”
“I do, too,” I said. “And God knows I want to…”
“Fuck me?”
I swallowed hard. “Yes. That.”
“I really want you to fuck me,” he said wistfully.
“God, you are not making this easy,” I said.