Since I’d gotten those nice notebooks from the guys, I started to keep a journal. I figured that at least I could scribble down anything that popped into my head just to get it out of there.
By the time it was late July, I had several pages of random snippets of thoughts such asIt’s not fair for someone to be that good lookingabout Seb, andI kinda want to name themabout the kittens.
I’d also made notes about foods I wanted to cook and ones I had already, and about how accomplished I’d felt when I got praise for the stuff I’d made.
I’d also written about how much our cleaning lady, Karla, made me feel conflicted. She was the kind of middle-aged woman who came across incredibly motherly, and I didn’t know how to deal with that. She was nice, complimented me on how I kept the place clean and all, but still. I’d had a mother and I couldn’t deal with, well, mothers, anymore.
Then there was one spread of the notebook where I’d pressed it open. It was filled with notes of potential snack foods and some stains from me putting together said snacks. One corner stated that they were for Theo and Seb’s rescue mission to some horrible horse auction.
Maybe writing things down was sort of therapeutic for me, too. I’d written about all the times I managed to get out of the house. There weren’t many of those instances, and I never went more than few steps from the closest door, but they were still happening.
The kittens’ growth chart was marked with times when I took them outside for the first time and where the playpen had been and so on. At first I’d managed to fit it on a corner of the front porch, but lately I’d taken it out into the front yard under the tall trees.
It was as if my soul was unclenching a little, and I’d started to feel a bit more safe. Not enough to go walk into the middle of the yard, but I felt safe enough to go onto the concrete slab in the back for more horse lessons with Theo and under the trees with the kittens.
All in all, things were good. Stable.
And then Cook came home.
* * * *
I sat next to the kitten corner of my room and listened to the night sounds from the barely cracked open window.
I couldn’t sleep, not with the day I’d had.
When I’d first seen the dogs perk up, I’d felt scared. They were all on high alert, but then, before I had time to freak out, they completely changed and turned into enthusiastic puppies.
Cook was…a lot. In many ways. He was tall in a way that intimidated me, because it reminded me of some of the guys who worked for my dad. Except, while the same dangerous aura was there, the one that told me he’d be comfortable with a gun in his hands, he was completely different from them.
The quiet solid calm that rolled out from him whenever I got close enough already felt addictive as fuck.
He looked like a biker, but when he tied a bandanna around his head to keep his hair back and grabbed some sort of a fancy kitchen knife out of his personal set, he became something different. Zen. As if nothing could shake him at all.
We’d made dinner together, and I could already see wanting to do more of that.
The best bit was that Cook never appeared as if he was humoring a kid, either. He asked me about what I liked about cooking and what I’d made and what I enjoyed the most about it, I felt like I was being treated as an adult.
Not that the guys ever treated me as a kid, but still. To them I was a kid brother, and that showed in everything, although mostly in positive ways. Theo treated me sort of similarly, but more as an equal.
Seb had been super into telling me everything about horses and other animals, and he’d even loaned me some of his actual veterinary textbooks which I enjoyed a lot. But underneath, he also saw me as a kid or maybe a young adult, who knows. He just didn’t see me as anactualadult yet.
Not that I was bothered. Like I’d thought when I’d first met him, I didn’t need a crush on an adult man. Except, the thing I had felt instantly around Cook was different. It was scary as fuck in a way I hadn’t experienced before. Cook, for some fucking reason, felt like home and everything good, and while Ididneed that in my life, it couldn’t come from this particular source.
I think Cook was around Theo’s age, so in his mid to late thirties. He could literally be twenty years older than me, and while the whole age gap thing could be hot, it could also be incredibly sketchy and wrong.
Anyway, there I was, sitting with the kittens because my brain was readjusting itself for this new person I’d just met. So, thanks a lot for that, universe.
The kittens wouldn’t stay in the pen while indoors, so I’d stopped trying and kept it open overnight. I’d wised up after too many times of waking up to meowing when one of them couldn’t get back into the pen for whatever reason. I normally woke up with at least one of them curled up next to me every morning.
I heard Cook use the bathroom. Now that he wasn’t an abstract anymore, it felt a whole lot different to know we both showered there.
I tried to not think about that because holy fuck did I not need much to get hard—forgive me for being seventeen—and realizing that he might be naked just behind the flimsy door one day while I was here—”Ouch!”
The calico decided she’d had enough of me being so maudlin, and she decided to bite my thigh just because she could.
“Okay, okay.” Sighing, I got to my feet to go to bed. That was what she wanted anyway.
I kept tossing and turning in the careful way you do when you have pets in your bed. I’d discovered that with the kittens. Somehow my mind and body realized there were tiny squishable things sleeping with me now, and suddenly I never woke up with my sheets tangled up around me like so often before.
