Like home.
Like my other half.
Like heownedme and I reallywashis… but also like he was mine.
I may have been the one who’d worn the collar for a while, but Gage had said it himself: I’d claimed him, too, and even without that collar on now, even if he never wanted to be called my “boyfriend,” the taste of him reassured me like nothing else could have.
He suddenly grinned, the feel of his lips curving up under mine making me giggle.
“Hey there, dimples,” he whispered when I pulled back just enough to smile back at him.
“Hey, G.”
“So we’re doingthisnow, huh?” he asked, tracing my lips with a finger. “Kissing? That okay with you, baby?”
Okay?
Okay?
It was everything.
Besides, he’d fed me his cock. Had his fingers in my butt. Covered me in his cum and then licked it off my tongue. He was mymaster. He didn’t need to ask.
He didn’t need to, but he had, so—
“Yes, please,” I answered, breathless and happy and loving… this.
All of this.
Him.
Oh. I loved him. I lovedGage… because of course I did. Hadn’t I always?
But maybe I loved him just a little bit more when he pulled me back down and kissed me again. Kissed me like he meant it. Kissed me like all my jittery anxiety about what we were or weren’t or where it might be going or what it all meant was meaningless.
Unimportant.
Unnecessary.
All my doubts had come from my own impossible-to-settle-down head and my chronic case of always panicking about things, not from him. He’d been giving me the answers I needed this whole time, not by what he had or hadn’t called me, but by the way he treated me. How he’dalwaystreated me. So it was officially official: I was going to stop worrying once and for all about whether being gay bothered him or not, or if I was too needy, or whether or not anyone else knew he was my boyfriend, or if codependency was a bad thing.
Gage was right. That last one didn’t even matter. Codependency wasourthing, and it worked for us, so what anyone else thought about it didn’t even matter. And finally getting to kiss Gage?
That brought whatdidmatter into focus.
Why had I ever worried about whether or not I was his boyfriend, when the only one of those two words that was important was “his”? And since that ownership went both ways—I’d claimed him, too, as he’d pointed out… and I’d claimed himfirst, if you wanted to get technical about it—my momentary anxiety about the B-word just seemed silly now.
Even without the collar that I still missed wearing, me being his always was, always had been, and always would be true. It had been that way since the very first day of first grade, and it was more permanent than gravity or the Kardashians or my ADHD. It wasforever… and not just because I loved him, but because wewerecodependent. Because I needed him.
And I finally understood that Gage had always needed me, too.
13
Gage
The best thingabout having parents who gave zero fucks was that they never checked the credit card statement they paid off for me every month. At least, I assumed they didn’t, since they never asked me about a single damn thing I put on there… even when I’d added that gay porn subscription last month to try and get a baseline of reference material for figuring out shit that Noah might be into and the mechanics of how to go about fucking him.
This one though—dropping a few hundred dollars at a place called The Church of Kink—might have raised their eyebrows.
