Marlow was thelaston my list of people I wanted to run into at this point.
“I don’t know if you can tell but I’m kind of his favorite,” Marlow said as he shoved his sunglasses over his eyes once again and relaxed back down onto the dock.
“Is that what you think,” I challenged.
“Oh, that’s what Iknow.”
“I’m glad to see my grandson is making friends.” My granddad beamed.
That had Marlow lowering his shades once again. “Grandson? Blake, why didn’t you say we were in the presence of royalty?”
In a surprising show of resilience, he pushed up from the dock and rolled to his feet. There was a brief wince that I caught right before he smothered it in order to plaster a pleasant smile on his face, offering his hand out to my granddad to shake.
As the two men shook hands, my gaze wandered to Marlow’s body again, shamelessly taking in every little line of his muscles and the slight difference in tan shade starting right above thehem of his swim trunks. I bet if I placed my hand right over his pec, he’d be hot to the touch.
Scorching, even.
“Marlow Knight,” he said with a flourish. “Your grandson’s been keeping me company since I signed up for the wrong package. Turns out, I got in on a couple’s retreat and had no idea until I got here. Who knew!”
“The welcome packet, for one,” I said.
“Since then....” An arm was thrown around my shoulders, pulling me toward averywarm body. “Blake’s been filling in as my partner. It’s been great, other than him constantly ditching me for paperwork halfway through our adventures.”
The worst part about being so close to him was how easily it was to melt into his side. Like my legs were suddenly turned to Jello and all I wanted to do was let him hold me like this while I soaked up the heat radiating off of him from his sun exposure like a fucking lizard.
Since I was little, I always knew I was gay. Had never tried to hide it or explain it away to anyone, including my granddad, who wasn’t at all phased when he caught me making out with one of my classmates while we were at the campgrounds for a class field trip.
All he’d told me as I got older was to keep myself safe and to never give into anything that I wasn’t comfortable doing. He’d always been my rock throughout my life. My sage advisor.
Who was hopefully totally oblivious to what Marlow’s arm around me was doing to my brain by practically melting it into mush.
Fraternizing with the clientele was a big ole’ fat no-no.
Getting caught doing exactly that by my granddad?
I’d rather throw myself into the lake and try to drown before facingthatlecture.
“Blake.” The head shake was all the scolding I needed.
“I wasn’t—I’m not.” The words were hard to form. Worse with me trying to find what kind of sentence to string them into.
“It’s okay.” Marlow’s long and drawn out sigh snapped me out of my delusional thoughts. “I get it. I’m not fun enough to hang out with. The glitz and glam have all worn off. I’m simply a rusted up toy, no longer used and tossed into the bottom of the toy box.”
I nearly rolled my eyes.
I slammed my elbow right into his side, digging in hard enough to force him off of me. “Don’t you have a hangover to nurse?”
The second he let go of me, my stomach sank. What a traitorous bastard my body was being at the moment.
“That’s what I was doing before you came over here and interrupted my nap.”
My granddad was watching us with abject fascination. An amused smile playing on his lips that had an all-too-knowing uptick to it. If he was making assumptions about anything, I sure as hell hoped it was all innocent.
A simple case of me falling into an easy friendship with a bodacious man that clearly had too much fun ribbing me whenever he got the chance to.
So far, I still had plausible deniability. However, if Marlow kept this up—the teasing, the poking, the slightly bitchy attitude—we were going to becomerealfucking obvious soon enough.
I was trying not to be paranoid, however, my granddad also wasn’t a stupid man. Far from it, actually.
