We circled back to the massive living room, and I settled down on the sofa. “Did you ever think about getting into architecture in college?”
Tristan sat down next to me. “I thought about it a lot, actually,” he admitted.
“But?”
“Dad was grooming me to take over his empire,” he said. “And…I guess I couldn’t turn him down.”
“Is that one of the reasons why your relationship with him was a little…prickly sometimes?”
Tristan looked at me and smiled. “I wasn’t aware that you were aware of my prickly father-son relationship.”
“You forget that I spent half my life watching you,” I said. “I noticed things—the way you spoke about your father was one.”
“He had a vision for my future, and I didn’t necessarily agree with that vision at first,” Tristan said. “But once I got into his line of work, I realized that I actually enjoyed it. And, I have gotten to dabble in architecture every now and again, it’s just not what I do.”
“It was lucky that you enjoyed running the empire.”
“I think about that every day,” Tristan nodded. “If I hadn’t, I’d probably still think about my father with resentment. But as it stands, I just miss him.”
“I can imagine,” I nodded, thinking about my own parents. “I don’t know what I would do if something happened to my dad.”
“Before he got sick, Dad was like a machine,” Tristan said, with his eyes far away. “He worked twenty-four-seven. Sometimes, it felt like he never slept. I swore to myself that I would never allow myself to work like he did; but now, here I am, working like he did.”
“He was probably lonely,” I suggested.
Tristan turned to me. “What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know; I guess I just assume that people who work that much are naturally lonely. Why else would they give their lives over to work?”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “I had never considered that before,” he said softly. “And now that you mention it, he never really dated after Mom and he divorced. Maybe that was the reason he was so ambitious. Maybe it wasn’t just ambition. Maybe it was self-preservation.”
Tristan turned to me and sighed. “We only started seeing eye to eye when we knew we had run out of time,” he shared. “I never got around to asking all the questions that I was curious about.”
“Like?”
“Like… Did his career really satisfy him that much?” Tristan said. “Did ambition really fulfill his life? Was that the reason that he and Mom split up or did it come after? He got sick so fast, and afterward it was all about his illness. It didn’t feel right to bring up stuff that was ancient history.”
I leaned over and hugged Tristan. After a moment, I felt his lips on my head. I turned my face up to his, and we kissed slowly until it turned into a more passionate embrace. When we pulled apart, I could see the hot flame of desire reflected in his eyes.
“I like talking to you,” he whispered to me. “It’s easy—it feels natural. I’ve never had that before.”
“You’ve never been able to talk to any of your ex-girlfriends?”
“No, they were so…removed from my life,” Tristan admitted. “I just couldn’t open myself up to them.”
“But you can with me?”
“You’re different,” he said.
I smiled as he pulled me onto his lap, and his hands pushed up my skirt and started caressing my thighs. I could see his hard-on pressing up against the crotch of his pants, and I slipped my hands down and unzipped him. I lifted myself off his lap so that he could slip off my panties. Then we fucked on the sofa, christening Tristan’s new house.
After we were done, we embraced one another and lay on the couch, as he played with my hair. “This is nice,” he said, almost as an afterthought.
“This is all new to me,” I confessed. “I’ve never had a relationship like this one before.”
He looked at me questioningly.
“I mean, a relationship that is based on friendship and passion and love and sex. I underestimated how important sex can be in a relationship.”