“I love you,” I said back to him.
“Let’s start packing. I’m excited to get you home.”
I hummed my agreement and took a step back. The plug shifted inside of me, heavy and warm against my prostate, and I had to brace my arm against the wall to stop from falling over.
“Don’t you dare come in your pants, Reese.”
“You know I can’t control that kind of thing.” I glanced up at him, sucking in a breath to steady myself.
“Figure it out.”
He grabbed my earlier discarded pajama pants and tossed them to me across the small space. I struggled into them with an embarrassing number of pauses and whimpers. The whole thing took me so long I missed out on the sight of Cory getting dressed.
“Where do you want to start?” he asked, hands on his waist.
The two of us looked around my studio apartment, the place I’d called home for God knew how many years. The four walls were filled with memories, some good and some bad, but the weight of them didn’t even come close to outweighing the future I was ready to build with the man standing five feet away from me. At some point, he’d turned his back to me so he could rifle through the sex toy bag he’d pulled out from under my bed, and I knew that while I was eager to make his space ours, I would miss the sight of him in mine.
“Where are you thinking?” I asked instead.
He zipped up the bag and tossed it toward the door. “That’s all I need.”
I chuckled, rolling my eyes at him. “There’s a closet full of hoodies you’re missing out on.”
Cory made his eyes go dramatically wide, then he headed for my closet. “We can’t have that.”
I sat down on the edge of my bed, grunting from the internal pressure, then opened my nightstand drawer. There were two half-used bottles of lube inside, a strip of condoms that I’d never need again, a stack of polaroids of me and Morgan over the years. I thumbed through them, not willing to part with them but also unsure of where they’d go.
“What’s wrong?” Cory asked, and I angled my body toward him, stifling a laugh when I caught him with his arms overflowing with my hoodies. “You look…unhappy.”
“I look like I need to come,” I said, holding up the pictures with a sigh. “I want to move in with you; I’m just trying to figure out how it’s all going to piece together.”
Cory made a worried sound and sat beside me on the bed, dumping the clothes he was trying to steal onto the pillows. He stretched an arm around my shoulders, and I rested my head against his. Closing my eyes, I breathed in deep, smiling at the way Cory matched his breathing to mine.
There’d been days and nights when we lazed together in bed, but our time had always been on a clock. We’d never had a chance—or the inclination—to simply just exist in the same moment together.
The same space.
He held out his free hand, and I dropped the stack of photos into his waiting palm. The first one was a picture of me and Morgan from Halloween last year. I always worked Halloween, and she always dressed up and came to spend the night with me at the bar. I wondered if she still would if Cory would be there too. If he even wanted to be there.
“It will piece together however we want. Just like everything else.”
I inhaled and nodded, and Cory used his thumb to slide the top picture out of his hand and into my lap. The next one in the stack was from Morgan’s birthday, and she wore a sequin cowboy hat and matching sunglasses. I was holding her in my arms, and she had one leg bent at the knee, the other kicked straight out. We were both laughing. I remembered it like it was yesterday.
“When was this?” Cory asked.
“Her last birthday.”
He slid the picture away to reveal one of us from my birthday, and another, and another, and another.
“Do you want to call Morgan and have her come help instead of me?” he asked.
I scoffed, taking the pictures from my lap and his hands and reassembling them into a neat pile. “This plug is too big for me to do anything with her that won’t ruin our friendship.”
“What then, Reese?”
“I want this with you.” I dropped the photos onto the bed and took his face into my hands, forcing him to look at me and see the truth. “I want this more than I’ve ever wanted anything.”
Cory curled his fingers around my wrists and held my hands in place, then he nodded his agreement.
