“I just have lunch with Ivy tomorrow and coffee with Franklin on Sunday.” Tate handed me a cold beer and puckered his lips.

I hummed and kissed him. “You can tell him about my idea.”

“I will.” He gave me a cheesy little smile at that. “You know that made me love you even more?”

I chuckled and grabbed the tray he’d prepared with way too much Chinese food. “It’s just dinner.”

I’d suggested Franklin come over with his daughter; that was all.

“No, it’s way more than that, Lee. He may have jumped all in when it comes to kink, but he struggles to connect with people in everyday settings, and he has virtually no family.”

Hence my idea. Franklin had dived straight into the deep end of the kink pool, and it was a blessing and a curse. The former because fucking everything was sex to him; he couldn’t get enough, so it was nice that he was meeting other men now too. But it was a curse because it made it difficult to invite him over for a beer or dinner when he constantly anticipated a new scene. Tate and I wanted to be his friends. We wanted to get to know him properly. Which was hard when Franklin had us firmly placed in a sex-oriented box. So I figured, if he brought Lily along, we could keep shit G-rated and show Franklin that just because we were kinksters didn’t freaking mean we wanted to whip out the floggers and chains all the time.

“Is autism hereditary?” I asked on the way to the couch.

“Most studies suggest it is to a certain degree,” Tate replied. “Why?”

I shrugged and set the tray on the table. “It wouldn’t shock me if they discovered it runs on Franklin’s side of the family.”

Tate laughed softly. “I wouldn’t bet against it. He has the same tendency to fixate on things. And Franklin’s bond with Lily is incredible. He understands her in ways nobody else does.”

“I’m not surprised.”

I sat down with a heavy sigh of fucking finally, it’s Friday, and I took a swig of my beer while Tate filled me a plate with several dishes.

“Did you guys finish your work at that hotel?” he asked.

“No, not yet. I think we’ll wrap up by Wednesday.” So three more days of working overtime, and then a big hotel in downtown DC would have new elevators, and I could work normal hours for a while again. It’d be nice. “What about you? There’s no glitter on your face.”

He grinned and handed me my plate. “Slow day. My students had motor skill training at the pool all morning, so they were tired by the time I got them.”

That was still unbelievable to me. The school didn’t have its own pool, but they did have exclusive access to one over at GW once a week, which couldn’t be cheap. I remembered the stories Tate’s sister had shared from her childhood. Public schools just weren’t sufficiently equipped for special needs students most of the time.

“I had lunch with Tiana,” he mentioned. “She and her ex-husband have decided to try again after being divorced for two years.”

“Oh yeah?” I chewed around a mouthful of noodles and grilled pork belly. I had to eye the containers to see if there was enough for leftovers tomorrow. The pork, specifically. It reminded me of a Ryukyuan dish I’d had a lot in Okinawa.

“Yeah, but they’re fighting all the time,” he continued. “And it made me wonder why we haven’t argued since we got back together. We squabble over bullshit when we’re tired, but that’s it.”

I nodded slowly, shoveling more food into my mouth, and thought about what he’d said. I’d reflected on that too, and I believed the answer could be twofold.

“I’m gonna say this half jokingly,” I said, still chewing. “I think we’re in a honeymoon phase.”

Tate’s forehead wrinkled, and he looked torn between amusement and worry.

“No, I don’t think it’s going away.” I told him this before he could ask the question. “But I think we’re riding on a wave of relief that will eventually taper off—and it should. We’re finally back together, and we have something we didn’t before. Promise and commitment.”

His worry lines faded.

I squeezed his hand and drank from my beer.

“I told her about the commitment thing,” he said quietly. “I said the lack of commitment nearly destroyed us, and now that we have it, we can relax.”

I nodded in agreement. It’d been the culprit, along with shitty communication. But the commitment, or lack thereof, had brought us all those insecurities. Everybody needed the ground they walked on to be solid.

I smiled and wiped my thumb over a little dot of sweet-and-sour sauce on his chin. “If it makes you feel better, it still drives me nuts when I can’t grab my toothbrush in the morning without knocking over a dozen of your skincare products.”

Tags: Cara Dee The Game Erotic
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