I grinned and rolled back to my side of the bed, grabbing my phone from the nightstand. “Let me just clear my busy schedule.”
“What, a play date with Houdini?”
“Close. We were gonna hit the gym later.”
“You mean I didn’t do a thorough enough job of wearing your ass out last night?” Solo scooted closer to me. “Guess I’ll have to bring it today.”
I chuckled and shot off a text, letting Houdini know I was out for the day. It was only after I’d sent the message that I realized how early it still was. Eh, the fucker would get it eventually.
After turning my phone off, I flipped onto my side so that Solo and I were facing each other. Last night had been so incredible, and he’d said exactly what I needed to hear, but there were still conversations that needed to be had—and with our time together at NAFTA running out, they needed to happen sooner rather than later.
Solo must’ve registered the change in my thoughts, because he sighed and reached for my hand, lacing his fingers with mine as it rested on the sheets between us. “I guess we need to address the elephant in the room, huh?”
Unable to resist, I lifted the sheet with our joined hands and took in an eyeful of his long, thick cock. “Pretty sure I already did last night. Several times.”
Solo groaned and pulled the sheet back down. “Don’t start with me or we’ll never stop, and that would be a huge fucking problem, because I know we need to have this conversation. So…let’s just get it over with already.”
Right to the point. That was my man.
“Okay.” I cleared my throat. “I guess we start with what we know.”
“Right,” Solo agreed, and then frowned. “So what do we know?”
“Well, we know we have a week until graduation.”
“Right.”
“And I’m pretty sure after last night we decided we want to try this thing out permanently.”
“Pretty sure?”
“Definitely sure.”
Solo smiled. “That’s better. What else do we know?”
“Uh… I think that about covers the known factors.”
“And the unknown would be”—he let go of my hand and began ticking the list off with his fingers—“we have no idea where we’ll be sent off to after graduation should we choose to accept our orders. We have no idea how long those missions will last or when we’ll see each other again.”
“Yeah,” I said, swallowing hard now that we were throwing our future out into the open to dissect. “So we just… I don’t know. Hope we end up within a thousand miles of each other? FaceTime on the regular? Visit during our time off?”
“I guess so.”
“I mean, what other options do we have?”
Solo looked down at our hands and stayed silent for a long time. So long that I began to wonder if there wasn’t some other elephant in the room I didn’t know about.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I said. “Just rip the Band-Aid off.”
When Solo’s eyes met mine, there was such a look of determination mixed with apprehensiveness that it made me wonder what the hell he was about to say.
“I’ve been having some thoughts,” he said slowly, as if whatever he was about to say was so foreign he had to roll them around on his tongue first. “What if…we made a different choice?”
29Solo
IF SOMEONE HAD told me that during the last week of training at the Elite I would be contemplating anything other than kicking ass, taking home the trophy, and getting my orders to fly off to God knows where for my next mission, I would’ve told them they were fucking crazy.
But as I lay there next to Panther, the only thing I could think about was how we could be together if we were a million miles apart. Sure, there was the whole long-distance thing. But the idea of not being able to see him every day, of not being able to touch him, talk to him, and share my highs and lows was like a dark cloud hovering over us—one I had a feeling I wouldn’t shake if it became permanent.
