“I wanted it too. So, thank you.”
Andy closed his eyes and relaxed into the pillows.
“What now?” Leonidas asked, drawing gentle circles that looped and swirled toward his second favorite part of Andy Motel.
“Breakfast?” Andy opened one eye and smirked.
“I meant long term.”
Andy opened his other eye, and he reached down, stopping Leonidas’s hand from moving.
“What do you mean long term?”
Leonidas’s heart stuttered in his chest. He worried he had somehow misjudged the situation. Long term was what he’d come for, what Andy had wanted and pushed for, wasn’t it? The idea of all of this being for nothing wounded him more than he’d anticipated, and he pulled his hand out of Andy’s grasp, cradling it in his lap.
“Is that not what you wanted?” he whispered.
Andy scrambled into a sitting position, his brows knit together and small lines forming in the corners of his mouth. Andy grabbed his face, his fingers digging a little bit too hard into Leonidas’s face and he pulled him to get his attention.
“It is,” Andy croaked. “It really is. I just don’t know what that means for us.”
“It means I am yours, and you are mine,” he explained.
“Andwhereare we?”
“Anywhere we want to be.”
Andy flopped back onto the pillows and covered his eyes with his arm, a quiet laugh bubbling out of his mouth and turning into something larger that had his throat and chest flushed red.
“You’re something else,” he managed to say through his laughter.
“How do you figure?”
“I…” Andy opened his mouth and snapped it closed.
“You what?” he pressed, his nerves still shooting off like an accidental fireworks disaster.
“I’m in love with you and I don’t even feel like I understand what you want from me or from this.”
Leonidas’s lungs filled, and he gripped Andy’s forearm, pulling it down to reveal his face. He grabbed Andy, holding him tight. “You’re what?”
Andy’s lashes fluttered and he huffed out a breath that flipped some of his hair away from his face. It settled back against his forehead, and Leonidas brushed it out of the way with cautious fingers.
“I think I’m in love with you,” Andy muttered, shaking his head. “But you’re just herenow. Everything with you feels fleeting, like I’ll wake up and you’ll be gone again like in Bordeaux.”
“You knew Bordeaux was temporary,” he reminded Andy, even as his mind recalled how warm Andy’s body had been, how soft the sheets had felt against his skin as he slipped out of bed silently to avoid being noticed.
“Paris was temporary. Bordeaux was temporary,” Andy said. “You can’t expect me to believe that Cherry Creek is permanent.”
“I think we have a different understanding of those words.”
“Help me,” Andy’s voice cracked. “Help me, then.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be happy being in one place,” he said, offering a sad smile with the words, because for the first time in his life, that did make him sad. “I like going and exploring and seeing, but I like knowing what I can come back to. But for me, home isn’t a place, it’s people. It’s a person.”
The worry lines around Andy’s mouth softened, but he didn’t say anything, so Leonidas kept talking.
“Every place I ever am is temporary. Every experience, just another moment.”
