“Thank you. I needed to hear that. The second part, not all the shit about shoplifting or whatever. I needed… I mean, Cade, we still need to talk about what happened with Warren. About what you used to do. I think I need to… I’m not sure. I don’t know if I want to hear more about it or not. But right now? Thank you for caring enough to tell me what you’re feeling, and to not give up.”
Cade was still staring. Then he licked his lips nervously. “Your mother’s a bitch,” he said. “And there’s a lot of bugs at your cottage. I’m covered in mosquito bites.” He waited for a response, then said, “You need to figure out how to sort laundry, or at least stop putting my whites in with your darks. And if you say you’ll clean up after dinner, you need to actuallydo it, not pile the dishes in the sink and hope the cleaning fairies come overnight. There’s no housekeeper here, you know. And I don’t like fish. I don’t care how many times you get me to try it or how many different ways you cook it, I don’t fucking like it.”
Cade paused, and Aiden said, “You liked the shark that time. With the onion stuff on top?”
“Only because I couldn’t taste the shark. I’m not crazy about onions, but they’re better than fish. Which Ireally don’t like.”
Aiden could feel the tension draining out of his body. He still had no idea how he felt about any damn thing, but maybe it wasn’t completely necessary for him to know, at least not right away. “Okay. No more fish. Thank you for telling me.”
Cade’s expression was still strange. Not something Aiden had ever seen before. But at least he was talking. He said, “I saw you looking at that guy’s hands at the gym last week. When we were supposed to be playing basketball? You fucked up that rebound because you were staring at his hands.”
Aiden blinked hard. Cade had seen that? “It was, like, asecond. It caught me by surprise.”
“It caughtmeby surprise too.” But Cade’s fierceness seemed to be draining out of him as quickly as Aiden’s was. “People get distracted sometimes. Tempted, even. Maybe. But don’t fuck up the rebounds, Aiden.”
They stood there in the kitchen of their new apartment, and they stared at each other. The ground had shifted beneath them, had shaken and frightened them. But they still seemed to be together.
“Okay,” Aiden whispered. “I won’t fuck up the rebounds.”
Cade’s face almost crumbled then, but he stared at the door of the fridge until he had himself under control. Then he said, “I thought you’d be gone. For sure. I thought… you still might, though. Right? If I don’t say the right stuff about before? You still might leave. But I don’t know what the right stuffis, Aiden. I don’t know what you want me to say. I can’t go back in time and change it. And even if I could, it wasn’t like there was another choice. Not one that…. Yeah, I could have stayed and kept working at my regular job. But then I never would have saved the money to go to school. I’d still be back there, grinding away, and I’d never have come here and I wouldn’t have met you. I don’t know. It’s not what I wanted to do. But at the same time, it’s hard for me to think it was a mistake. You know?”
Aiden nodded. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I don’t know either. I mean, I don’t like it.” He thought of his mother’s words. “I don’t like what you went through, but I also don’t like that you were in a position where you felt like you had to do it.”
“Where Ifeltlike I had to do it,” Cade said carefully. “You think I was wrong? You think there was another option?”
“I don’t know. Cade, seriously, I don’t know what I think aboutmostof this. I’m still kind of figuring it all out. I mean, I know you’re a smart guy. I know you think things through and make plans. So, no. I guess there probably wasn’t another way.” He paused. Maybe he should stop there, but apparently he wasn’t going to. “Except you said, when you told me about the first time, it sounded like it wasn’t a planned thing. Right? You were pissed at your parents and upset that someone had stolen your money and you just… you just did it.” He shook his head. “That’s not the Cade I know. You’re not usually impulsive like that. I guess probably because you haven’t been really desperate since I’ve known you, so that’s a good thing! But, still. It’s not like this was a decision you made after you weighed all the pros and cons, right?”
Cade nodded slowly. Painfully. “Maybe not,” he admitted. “But I’ve thought about it since. Lots of times. I don’t think there was another way.”
“Okay.” Aiden tried to sound confident. “Good enough for me.”
“Is it?” Cade asked, and he watched Aiden closely as he waited for an answer.
“I think so. Yeah. I mean, I need to think about it. We need to talk about it. But we can do that once things have calmed down. Right now, I think we should focus on loving each other.” Aiden had no idea what it meant that he was coming back to his mother’s words again, but he was pretty damn sure he shouldn’t share the source of his wisdom with Cade. “Things are always going to be changing, right? I mean, I can’t give you a lifetime guarantee, Cade. And I know I can’t expect you to give me one. Things change, and we change with them. But the simple part of it is that I love you. I don’t know about any of the rest of it. But maybe I don’t have to know. Not all at once. Maybe for a while, I can just… love you.”
Cade didn’t answer. Not with words. But he shuffled forward, his gaze on Aiden as if waiting for the first hint of rejection, and when Aiden didn’t object, Cade leaned forward and rested his head against Aiden’s shoulder. It wasn’t a hug. Nothing as grasping or binding as that. But it was a connection, almost a submission. A sort of apology, without actually having to say what anyone had done wrong. It was a truce, hopefully the beginning of a peace.
Aiden ran his fingers gently through Cade’s hair. “We’ll figure it out, okay? I love you and I’m not going anywhere. Not unless you kick me out.”
“I can’t kick you out,” Cade said, his voice muffled by the fabric of Aiden’s shirt. “We signed a lease. I can’t afford the rent on my own.”
“And that’s the only reason?” Aiden felt weak for needing the reassurance, but it had been a rough day and he wanted to hear the words.
And Cade’s head shake was gratifying. “No. It’s not the only reason.” And then Cade’s whole body shuddered. He wrapped his arms around Aiden as if they were shipwrecked in the ocean and Cade didn’t know how to swim. Maybe he was crying, maybe he wasn’t, but his breath was ragged and his voice cracked as he said, “I love you. So much. I’m so sorry. I thought you would leave. I thought if I kept my mouth shut, it would go away.”
“We need to figure that out,” Aiden said. He rested his arms gently on Cade’s shoulders. “We need to know how much I can expect to know and how much you can expect to keep private.”
“There isn’t any more. This is it. I promise.”
Well, that was a relief. But Aiden was on a roll and didn’t want to stop quite yet. “Maybe there’ll be something else, in the future. Maybe one of us will fuck up—”
Cade stiffened. He didn’t raise his head but he pulled away far enough from Aiden’s shoulder to make his voice more clear than it had been before. “Which one? Me? No. I’m done. But you? That guy at the gym, or some asshole frat boy who likes to go to parties with you—”
“Fuck, Cade! I’m not planning to cheat on you! I’m notgoingto cheat on you. I didn’t mean that. I meant something else. I won’t stand up to my mom fast enough—” Cade’s huff of air was probably more of a grumpy snort than a laugh, but Aiden still took it as a victory. “Or I’ll do something else that hurts you. Or you’ll do something that hurts me. Not—it doesn’t have to be eight months of—whatever. I could get hurt by things that are less than that. Like, you don’t always pay a lot of attention to me when you’re busy with school. You bitch about how bad I am at house stuff, even though you know I’ve never done house stuff before and I told you I have no idea what I’m doing. You call my friends ‘asshole frat boys.’”
“Not Matt and Brent,” Cade said quietly. “I like Matt and Brent.”
“You might like some of the others if you gave them a chance.”
