“No.”
Riggs was quiet for a moment, arms tightening around me.
“It’s something,” he agreed.
“Something serious?”
“I don’t know,” he said, but as the leather of my jacket groaned around my arms, those three words sounded like a lie. “Do you want it to be?”
“Do you?” I countered.
So much of what had happened between us had been for me, and I wanted to make sure that wasn’t true for all of it. I needed to know Riggs didn’t put himself last.
“I’m nervous about what that means,” he said softly. “For me.”
It wasn’t something he needed to clarify. I understood entirely what he meant. Riggs had been with his husband, then he’d been alone, and now there was me. I had no illusions about being a rebound or a replacement, but I wasn’t foolish enough to think there was never going to be any comparison there.
“I’m not in a rush.”
Riggs exhaled a long breath into my hair, then pulled me closer to the edge of the cliff. It was clearly designed to be a viewing point, with a row of railroad ties in place to stop cars from going over the edge. We sat down side by side on one, and Riggs stretched his legs out in front of us, crossing them at the ankle.
“I like what we’ve done so far,” I said.
“So do I.”
“I want to…I want to know how you see this working.”
Riggs clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and stared up at the sky like the answer would be written somewhere in the stars.
“I don’t want you to compromise,” I told him. “If I’m not what you want, then I don’t want to take up space.”
“I want you,” he said sharply, glancing at me from the corner of his eye. “Please don’t ever doubt that.”
“I haven’t yet,” I assured. “But I mean…”
I let the question die in my throat because I wasn’t even sure what I meant. There was no polite way to have the conversation that had started to bubble beneath the surface of whatever our relationship was turning out to be.
“I went to Rapture on Friday with Damon,” Riggs said. “I wasn’t sure if I should be there because that was a limit you and I hadn’t discussed yet. I should have talked to you first about it.”
“Did you…”
Riggs snorted, rolling his eyes at me. “Did I hook up with anyone? No, Smith. I didn’t.”
“I didn’t know.”
His smirk fell away and he sat up straighter, turning and taking my face into the cradle of his palms. “That was unfairly harsh. I shouldn’t have said that. Or… I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t touch anyone. I didn’t watch anyone,” he said. “I went because Damon was meeting somebody there and he didn’t want to go alone. I had a drink on the patio and caught up with some friends, and then I went home.”
“You don’t have to explain,” I said. “And even if you had done those things, it’s okay.”
Riggs arched a brow. “Really?”
“Well…” I thought about it for a second longer than I had the first time. “No.”
“Good boy.” He stroked his thumbs across my cheeks and then let his hands fall away.
