“You think?” I said, pointing to the spot and the smaller droplets on the red bedding. “All of my cum went in you.”
“In the condom,” he said.
“Daddy’s got to use to protection, always.” I winked at him. “Unless you wanna come get a clean bill of health with me at the local clinic. Then I’ll more than happily go from making you my little toaster strudel to Boston cream pie—but like the donut version they sell at Dunkin’.”
“No more food talk,” he said, holding his stomach. “I could burst.”
“Aw, well, that won’t stop you from helping me.”
It was natural yet strange to have this playful dynamic. I was used to ordering people around, and I was more than used to doing it with a stern face and the looming idea of a threat if they saidnoor let me down. I didn’t know if Kalen had ever been scared of me. He didn’t leave at any point when I called him a Fed, or at any point when I told him to leave—and maybe if I hadn’t found him slightly attractive, I wouldn’t even have told him, I’d just have had a man deal with him. Or was I becoming softer?
As we made the bed together, I continued to go over how I’d changed since my father’s death. The idea of having to be the tough son, the rough son, the one who cast the largest shadow of a threat. There was also Tomaso, but he was the sneaky threat, the one you didn’t see coming, so people never saw him as a threat. It probably didn’t help that I had more muscle on me,and I’d KO’d several opponents in some amateur league boxing rings.
Kalen noticed I wasn’t actively in the room with him. “I think that’s what I look like when I’m in little space,” he said, grabbing and fluffing the duvet.
“Sorry, I’m just—” God. I never said sorry, and here I was, saying it to someone I’d had shackled to a bedroom wall earlier. “People don’t usually sleep over. They kinda bore me with their conversations, mostly because they don’t say anything worthwhile.”
He smirked. “And me?”
“Well, you’re a fucking Fed.” I cocked my head and grabbed a pillow. “You’re interesting, and I think when you crack, you’re going to contain the juiciest little nuggets of information.”
Giggling, he snorted, and his eyes watered—with happy tears, it looked like. “You mean when I nut, right?”
I threw the pillow at him, engaging in a pillow fight.
Kalen jumped on the bed with his knees, the duvet still around him, and now armed with a pillow. It was like armor and a weapon, but it weighed him down. I grabbed the second plumped-up pillow from my bed and as I went to swipe him with it, he ducked into the duvet mound, still giggling.
It was over once I got on the bed and wrestled him out of the duvet.
It didn’t last long for him to tap out and give in. I sat across him with just his cute little face appearing through a hole in the duvet.
“You’re all mine,” I said, kissing him.
“I already tapped out,” he said.
“That doesn’t change anything,” I said. “I might just lie on you like this.” I wiggled myself, coaxing some more laughter out of him. “Or maybe I’ll pick you up like a baby in the duvet andhold you tight.” Sweeping my arms down under him, I managed to pull him into my arms and hold him there. “Like this.”
He lifted his head and kissed me. “Do you think I’d get arrested if I quit my job to date you?”
“I thought that stopped being in the table?”
“It is,” he said. “I just keep thinking about it.”
I tried my best to keep those thoughts at bay for him. We had people who helped, people whose job it was to keep us out of trouble, and people who put a stop to any investigation that got started. Having Kalen in my apartment and my life was dangerous, but maybe not quite in the way he thought. It was dangerous because there was unrest after my father’s death, and he could find himself in the crosshairs of it.
“So, I’ll keep my job,” he said, still in the cocoon of the duvet. “And then I can decide what we do after my mom’s been to her appointment.”
It sounded good, but to know it all rested on this left me a little shaky. Knowing he could vanish for months, back into his work, knowing there was probably going to be a Kalen-shaped hole in my life, right after he’d made it himself, cuddled up within it—that he was figuring out whether he wanted to stay in the hole.
We got to sleep in the bed at around three in the morning. I needed the sleep for the poker game tonight. And I wanted Kalen as far from it as possible, even if Santo wanted his set of eyes. I agreed that he was good at analyzing, and if we were a legit casino there would’ve been cameras, and he could watch, but this wasn’t a legit casino.
I woke before Kalen, early enough to clean the apartment and look at all the food we’d managed to stuff our faces with—there was very little left behind. It was nice to see him still sleeping when I got back to the bedroom. I hadn’t thought this was how everything would go after yesterday. He’d been cuffedto a wall, trying his best to seduce me, and then when we actually did have sex, I’d felt something deeper—not just inside his ass, but inside him as a person. And I think part of him combating me meant I liked him more, even if he had been throwing himself at me—back when he was trying his best to build a case against me.
“What are you doing?” he asked, turning over in bed. I’d been standing, staring at him, my eyes glaring, lost in thought, and I’d barely registered the fact that he’d actually woken up.
“You want something to eat?” I grumbled.
“Come cuddle,” he said, all soft with a pout.
