Chapter 7
“Rhys, have you seen the jeans I wore yesterday?”
Rhys glanced up from his tablet, where he was catching up on the news, and he froze when he saw Thomas sauntering down the stairs with nothing but a towel around his hips and his wavy, damp hair twisted into a loose bun. It seemed like the towel revealed higher and higher flashes of leg with each step, and Rhys tried not to stare, but damn, he never realized Thomas had such well-muscled thighs. Or that his chest was lightly furred. The most revealing clothes he’d ever seen Thomas wear were shorts and a t-shirt, and while he knew on an intellectual level that Thomas was lean and toned and in excellent shape,knowingwas different fromseeing.
Thomas stopped on the bottom step and stood with his hip cocked, and Rhys swallowed against the sudden dryness of his mouth. He shouldn’t want to caress the firm curve of Thomas’s biceps. He shouldn’t want to stroke his fingers through the crisp, curling hair on Thomas’s chest. Hedefinitelyshouldn’t want to rip off that towel and bend Thomas over the bannister.
Belatedly, he realized Thomas had asked a question, but he couldn’t remember what it was. His brain had shut down, and all he had going on in his head was an endless loop of a porn soundtrack. “What?”
“My jeans.” Thomas rested his hands on his hips. “Did you put them in the laundry?”
“Uh.” Rhys scrambled to form words that weren’t monosyllables, but it was damned difficult when his libido, which had been mercifully dormant for years, chose that moment to spring back to life. “No, I haven’t messed with your clothes.”
“I must have overlooked them. I’ll check again.” Thomas headed back upstairs, but then he stopped and glanced over his shoulder, peeking at Rhys from beneath his lashes. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”
“It’s fine,” Rhys said gruffly, forcing himself to look down at his tablet, but the image of Thomas standing there half naked, his skin still flushed from his shower, was seared into his memory.
He tried to go back to reading the news, but his ears were acutely attuned to the sound of Thomas walking around upstairs, and his imagination decided to fill in the blanks. Thomas had discarded the towel and was now standing naked in Rhys’s guest room. Thomas was shimmying into his underwear. Rhys didn’t know what kind of underwear Thomas wore, but in his mind, Thomas was in a pair of black boxer briefs that hugged his ass and didn’t hide that Thomas was half hard. Thomas was pulling up those well-worn, faded jeans that were buttery soft and fit like a second skin. He was scratching his chest and arching his back as he stretched…
Shit! Rhys tossed his tablet onto the coffee table and surged to his feet, angry with himself for entertaining such thoughts and angry with Thomas for inspiring them. He stomped out to the covered deck in the backyard, slamming the door shut behind him. He had a decent view of the mountains from his deck, and he leaned against the white painted rail and gazed out at the distant peaks. The morning chill lingered in the air, raising goosebumps on his arms even though he was wearing a sweatshirt, but he didn’t care. He needed a respite so he could clear his head.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out there when he heard the backdoor open and footsteps on the wood deck, but he didn’t turn around.
“Everything okay?” Thomas stood next to Rhys and leaned his back against the rail, his hands tucked into his pockets.
“It’s fine,” Rhys growled, refusing to look at Thomas. “Just leave me alone.”
Thomas’s eyebrows climbed to his hairline, likely because Rhys had never spoken to him like that before. “Oh, have we had our first fight? What was it about? Did I win?”
The absurdity of Thomas’s response made Rhys realize he was being ridiculous. They were friends in a fake relationship, nothing more. Just because he had wayward thoughts about Thomas didn’t mean he had to act on them, and he was being arrogant to assume Thomas would want him to.
With a heavy sigh, he raked his fingers through his hair. “It’s been a bad morning.”
“Want to talk about it?” Thomas rested his hand lightly on Rhys’s arm, but when Rhys yanked it away, he drew back. “Okay, message received. I’ll leave you alone. But try to rein in the snarling by the time we have to go to the cookout or we’re going to have to figure out what we were fighting about and why you’re still pissed.”
Rhys couldn’t hold back a groan. The fucking cookout was going to be a mini family reunion with his aunts and uncles, which meant more pretending to be part of a happy couple so they would stop trying to fix him up with every gay man they knew. “Why the fuck did I think this was a good idea?”
“Because you couldn’t handle telling Viv that you don’t have a new boyfriend,” Thomas said, folding his arms across his chest.
For a moment, Rhys was tempted to call his mother and tell her the truth. She’d be hurt, but she would forgive him and move on, and then Thomas could go back to New Mexico or wherever he planned to spend the hiatus, and Rhys would have time to get his wayward hormones under control before they began filming the new season. He was actually reaching for his phone when he realized what the fallout would be.
Viv would go right back to emailing him links to articles about coping with grief and encouraging him to start dating again, only this time it would be worse because she’d know he was so desperate to avoid dating that he’d tried to fool her with a fake boyfriend. Her concern about his inability to move on would amplify, and there was no telling how much she’d escalate her efforts to convince him that he needed therapy to help him let go of his grief and move on. She couldn’t understand that he didn’twantto move on.
“I’ll be fine,” he said at last.
Thomas shrugged and went back into the house, and Rhys forced himself not to watch Thomas go, turning back to the mountains instead. Rather than remain cooped up in the house with Thomas, he decided to go to the gym, and he didn’t ask if Thomas wanted to go even though he knew Thomas adhered to a regular workout routine. He preferred to call his excursion “self-care” rather than “running away,” but he still felt the sting of cowardice on his soul. He was the one who’d dragged Thomas into this situation, and if he kept behaving like a raging asshole, Thomas would have every right to pack up and leave him to clean up his own mess alone.
When he returned to the house over two hours later, he felt much calmer, but he barely had enough time to shower and change before they had to leave for the cookout. It was a family event, so he decided to go casual in jeans and a sweater. Once he felt he’d fortified his armor enough to face both Thomas and an onslaught of nosy relatives, he went downstairs to find Thomas lounging on the couch with his legs stretched out and ankles crossed beneath the coffee table. He was wearing jeans and a dove gray sweater that made his eyes look even bluer, and the V-neck of the sweater gave a tantalizing peek of the clean lines of his collarbones.
Who the fuck had sexycollarbones?
“Have we made up yet?” Thomas asked, raising one eyebrow at him.
“Yeah.” Rhys smiled wryly. “Sorry about that. Like I said, it was a bad morning.”
“I’m sorry you had a tough time,” Thomas said. “But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take it out on me. If you don’t want to talk about something, that’s fine. I’m not going to push. But I’m also not going to be a convenient target.”
“Understood,” Rhys said. He’d gotten used to giving in to the gloomy and growly spells that hit him every so often after Andy died, usually by holing up by himself until they passed. But Thomas was right to call him out. “I can’t say it won’t happen again, but don’t let me get away with it.” He swallowed hard before adding huskily, “Andy didn’t put up with my shit either.”
