Tam shakes his head. “Fuck, no. Even at his worst, he’d never have done that. It’s just—fuck. How much was it?”
I name the figure.
Tam’s eyes widen. “Shit.”
“What?”
“I don’t have that much to pay you back.”
“You don’t need to pay me back. I loaned it to him, not you.”
“You loaned it to himforme. Because I wasn’t there when I should’ve been.”
“You were asleep,” I counter. “Because you’d been up for days looking for me, then fucking my brains out. And honestly, I don’t care if I never see that money again. What he needed it for is more important than just about anything.”
Tam surges upright without warning.
I find myself on my back, his weight pinning me down in an almostperfect reenactment of how he fucked me last night—yesterday, whenever it was.
He grips my throat and kisses me. “I fucking love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Yeah?”
I flex my hips, on instinct more than anything else, and I’ve learned the hard way that how I feel about someone has nothing to do with how horny they make me. But with Tam, everything’s different—I’mdifferent, and my physical reaction to him means as much as anything I could say.
He feels it too, and it’s a while before we come up for air.
I’m naked and sweaty again by the time I remember the work message on my phone.
I read it while Tam lets Rudy out, my mind still half on how well Tam fucks me, and how lucky I am that I got to find my unicorn lover. It takes a second to compute the words on the screen. Then I’m distracted by Tam coming back and my brain reroutes to fucking. Because he’s still naked, and so am I. “You know, for someone who doesn’t top, you’re amazingly good at it.”
Tam grins and sinks onto the couch beside me. “I said I bottomed most often, not that I never topped. And you kinda sprang your mad skills on me too. I had a lot to live up to.”
I start to scoff, but Tam slaps a hand over my mouth, and he keeps it there until whatever the devil on my shoulder was about to say is gone.
While he’s at it, he peers at my phone screen, reading the email from the nurse manager at the hospital. “Does that mean what I think it means?”
“Yup. No work until January.”
He nods, frowning like he does sometimes just because hisface falls that way, but I’m still extra enough to read too much into it.
“What? What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking…” Tam tugs me into his lap, already half hard again. “…that I couldn’t love you more, but I’m going to try,andthat I can’t fucking wait to spend Christmas with you.”
Epilogue
TAM
One year later…
Turns out Icanlove Bhodi more. I felt it every moment we spent together that Christmas, and every day after.
Could love my brother less, though, now he’s living in my fucking annex and giving me shit every spare moment he gets. Thank the Lord life as a single dad doesn’t give him much free time, especially since he volunteered to fix the roof of my house in the rain.
Not that being a drowned rat stops Sab getting in my face every two seconds when I have shit to do.Importantshit—that he knows all about and still won’t shut the fuck up.
