Mandy laughs, but Luke’s smile falters for just a moment until the waiter arrives with his margarita. He takes a long sip and sighs. “That’s what I needed,” he hums.
We order the taco platter for the table and spend dinner catching up. Mandy teases me relentlessly because I spent weeks insisting to her that living with Luke was only temporary until I find my own place, but I can’t even remember the last time I checked apartment listings. And he hasn’t given any indication that he wants me to go, either. If anything, it’s the opposite. The way he dotes on me and takes care of everything around the house, it’s like he’s trying to make my life as easy as possible so that I’ll never want to live alone. It’s working.
“Hey, when you know, you know,” Mandy says with a shrug, shoving the last bite of her taco into her mouth.
Luke pays for dinner, ignoring my protests, and we invite Mandy back to our place to hang for a bit, but she begs off, insisting that she’s tired from a day of traveling. “Plus, it’s two hours later for me,” she reminds us. “And I’m an old lady who needs her beauty sleep.”
After we drop my sister at her hotel and I make sure she gets checked in okay, I head back to the car to find Luke nearly nodding off in the passenger seat. He blinks sleepily at me, a lazy half-grin on his gorgeous face. I love when he’s all soft and relaxed like this, and I can’t help but lean over and press my lipsgently to his. He makes a satisfied humming sound in the back of his throat and smiles against my mouth. “How did I get so lucky?” I whisper when we part.
He snorts, rolling his head back and forth across the headrest. His dark hair has flopped over to one side, and it’s a good look for him. “I’m the lucky one,” he insists.
“I think that margarita is just catching up with you,” I laugh, backing out of the hotel parking lot.
He’s quiet for so long that I think he’s fallen asleep, and I glance over to see him staring at me, his face illuminating every time we pass under a streetlamp. There’s a look in his eyes that’s almost sad. “Hey,” I say softly, reaching over to take his hand, lacing our fingers together and squeezing. “What’s going on with you tonight?”
Luke blinks hard a few times, squeezing his eyes tightly shut before turning to look back out the front window. “I just really missed you today,” he says finally, voice cracking at the end.
My heart breaks a little at that, and I squeeze his hand before lifting it to my lips to kiss his knuckles tenderly. “I’m sorry, babe,” I whisper, caressing my thumb across the back of his hand. “Was it that bad? Do you want to talk about it?”
His face remains expressionless, and maybe it’s the streetlights playing tricks on me, but I think I see tears glittering in his eyes. Every alarm bell in my mind is going off now. What the fuck happened on this collab? Did this Cooper guy hurt him? I know he’s been struggling with the idea of us working with other people again, and I admit I don’tloveit either, but it’s just work, and it’s what I came here to do. I didn’t plan to fall in love with the first guy I collabed with, so I guess maybe my priorities have shifted a bit.
When I first got to LA, all I wanted to do was work with as many boys as I could. Experience everything I felt like I’d been denied growing up in a place where there weren’t many peoplelike me. But from the moment we met, something about Luke called to me, and I think I was powerless to resist it even if I had wanted to. These past months with him have been some of the best of my life, and if he’s unhappy with our current arrangement, I’m unhappy with it. I’ll do whatever he needs, whatever is best for his career, because at the end of the day, he’s mine and I’m his, and that’s all that matters.
“Are you sure you don’t want to move out?”
The question catches me off guard. My brow furrows as I try to make sense of what he’s asking in the context of this…conversation? Can we call it a conversation if I’m the only one talking? “I mean…doyouwant me to move out?” I ask, bracing myself for the answer.
He shakes his head slowly again, and the effort makes it look like his head weighs a hundred pounds on his shoulders. “No, of course not,” he sighs.
“Then…what do you mean?” I ask helplessly. I’m glad I have the road and traffic to focus on, because it’s keeping me from assuming the worst right now. Is he having second thoughts about us?
“I just don’t want you to stay with me because you feel like you have to,” he says quietly. “I don’t want you to feel like you owe me, or something.”
“Luke, where is this all coming from?” My voice rises a little, and my pulse is pounding in my ears. I’m trying not to worry, or at least not let on that his behavior today is concerning me. “Did something happen today?”
“No,” he snaps, a bit too quickly. The single word is sharp and takes me aback. I can feel the tension in his body radiating from his palm into mine. I’m debating whether to leave him alone or to push and ask again what he means when he lets out a loud sigh, his shoulders dropping dramatically. “I think I’m just tired. It’s going to take some getting used to this newroutine. And I don’t want you to think you’re stuck living with me, or something. I know this all happened really fast and was supposed to be temporary. So if you still want to look for a place, I understand.”
I squeeze his hand in mine again and don’t release my grip this time. “Luke. Baby. I promise you, I’m happy where I am. I’m happy withyou, okay? Don’t worry about that. Please.”
He finally meets my gaze and gives me a weak smile. “Okay,” he whispers.
I’ve never been more glad to get home. Luke is silent as I park and we head inside. “You go ahead and go to bed,” I tell him, letting an eager Aggie out of her crate to jump excitedly at our feet. “You’ve had a long day. I’ll take Aggie for a walk and be in soon.”
He nods, his eyelids drooping already, and I kiss him on the forehead before following Aggie (who heard the ‘W’ word) down the stairs.
I’m on autopilot as I leash Aggie and we make our way across the street, following our usual route. She does her business at the first patch of grass we find, leaving me to focus on my thoughts as she trots along happily at my heel.
I replay the events of the day minute by minute, searching for any inkling of what could have put Luke into a spiral, and the only thing I can come up with is that it has to do with his collab with Cooper. When I agreed to opening back up, I had no idea that he was going to take it so hard. This was his idea, after all, and I thought I was being supportive of his career in agreeing. Now I’m wondering if I should have pushed back instead.
A tendril of worry slithers through my gut at the realization that I still don’t actually know Luke all that well, even after living with him for the past three months. Aside from our conversation at the drive-in, he hasn’t offered up further details of his past, and I wonder how much of his upbringing still informshis thoughts and actions. I wouldn’t exactly call Luke bright and bubbly, but he’s definitely outgoing and likeable, though introverted, so it’s never occurred to me how much pain he may still be masking. And I’m not sure what to do with that. Do I try and get him to talk to me, or would that make it worse? If I ignore it, will he work it out on his own?
Part of me wants to suggest that we nix the collabing-with-other-people idea altogether, but he seemed sure that this was the right business move, and I trust his instinct. But not at the cost of his mental health.
Luke is an adult, though,I remind myself. He’s taken care of himself for twenty years, and he certainly hasn’t needed my help. He’s allowed to have a bad day just like anyone else. And while the idea of collabing with other people isn’t upsetting to me, he can be unhappy about itandalso think it’s the best business move for us. Both things can be true. Navigating a relationship in this line of work is uncharted territory for us both, and hitting a few bumps in the road along the way is normal, right?
I need to trust him; trust that he knows what he’s doing with work, and trust that he’ll talk to me if he needs to. While our situation may be unconventional, getting to know someone in a new relationship is a tale as old as time. I’m probably just feeling like we should be further along in our communication skills than we are, because open communication was always encouraged in my family, and the same definitely was not true for him. Plus, with my living situation changing so suddenly and unexpectedly, we jumped about five paces ahead by moving in together literally days after deciding to give this relationship a shot. When I look at it from that perspective, my worry seems silly. We don’t have to have everything figured out right now.
Mandy will be here for a few days, and that should give him some time to decompress a little from his collab. We still have to plan out our own work for next month and figure out who we’reeach collabing with, so maybe by the time she leaves, he’ll have had some space to process, and he’ll talk to me about how he’s feeling.
