Page 9 of Toren

Not a date.

Definitely not a date.

“Six works.”

“I’ll send you my address when I get home and see you at six, then.” Andrew leaned down and pressed his finger against the underside of Toren’s chin, tilting his face up until they were at the right angle for a kiss. It was a soft and chaste thing, but their tongues still touched and if Andrew found the taste of sleep and cum and cigarettes repulsive, he sure hid it well.

“See you soon,” Andrew murmured against his mouth, breaking away and leaving before either of them could touch again or say another word.

Toren let out a long and shuddering breath, falling backward onto the mattress and covering his eyes with both hands. God, what had he done? What sort of mess had he gotten himself into? It had been so many years since he’d been with anyone, and the first person he decided to break that streak with was Andrew Calavert? He was grateful he didn’t live in LA, because if Smith found out, Toren would never hear the end of it.

It’s not horrible, a familiar, if not quiet voice in the back of his head told him. His subconscious often sounded like his brother, which made it much harder to ignore.

“It’s a bad idea,” he said out loud.

Says who?

“Says me.”

Why?

Toren swore because he didn’t have a good answer. He forced himself off the bed and into the shower where he made sure to clean himself extra well in an attempt to wash the evidence of the night before—and the morning—off of him. It was absurd to worry, not like Smith and Riggs would somehow know Toren had hooked up with anyone, let alone hooked up with Andrew. He was being paranoid, and he hated it.

Out of the shower, Toren got dressed and packed his suitcase. He hadn’t brought much on account of only being in town for two days, so there was plenty of room in his bag to fit in the bottle of vodka Andrew had picked up for them the night before. From a hotel bar, it was probably really expensive and Toren didn’t want it to go to waste. Would it be weird to take it over to Andrew’s that night?

Maybe.

Not that it would be weird to return something Andrew had paid for, but weird that two sexual encounters in a row between them would be fueled by vodka and bad decision-making skills. Toren didn’t know what the right thing to do was, but he had plenty of time to think about it. Worrying about sending Andrew the wrong signal could wait.

Checkout at the hotel was eleven, and Toren waited until 10:59 to leave his room. He dropped the keys in the box in the lobby, got his car from the valet, and headed to lunch…already counting down the minutes until six, knowing he was already in too deep and far too gone for anything good to come of whatever mess the two of them were about to make.

CHAPTER 4

Andrew

From the hotel, Andrew drove straight to Dave’s house. His boyfriend opened the door with a wide smile and a rough kiss, which Andrew returned. When Dave broke away, he smacked his lips together like he was chasing a taste.

“Did you smoke?”

Andrew traced his tongue across the front of his teeth.

“No,” he said. “I met someone.”

“And you come over tasting like him?” Dave leaned in and sniffed him. “Smelling like him.”

Andrew plucked his shirt away from his chest and smelled the material, knowing it didn’t have any hint of Toren on it because he’d tucked last night’s clothes safely in his suitcase. “I didn’t know our situation required me to scrub every trace of another partner away before coming over. You certainly don’t.”

Andrew’s relationship with Dave was a complicated one on a good day, a horrible one on most of the others. College sweethearts, their relationship had ended their senior year very unceremoniously after a failed test run of polyamory where Dave had proven he couldn’t be trusted to be honest with Andrew about his comings and goings. The deceit ended with both of them on a fourteen-day course of antibiotics and—after hours of fighting—broken up.

They’d reconnected recently by accident, running into each other at a farmer’s market. Dave had greeted him with an apology and the same wry smile Andrew had fallen for in the first place. College—to both of them—felt like a lifetime ago, and when Dave asked him for a second chance, the answer had been an easy yes.

Falling into polyamory again was a harder sell for Andrew, still weary from the mistakes of their youth. But Dave had been patient, he’d shown Andrew all the ways he’d changed, and so his tentative no had turned into a hesitant yes. The problem between them was Andrew wasn’t actively seeking out new partners, and Dave very much was.

And that was fine.

Andrew knew what he’d signed up for by walking into another open relationship, and true to his word, Dave was honest with him in all the ways Andrew had wanted before. He had started to wonder, though, if he saw a future with Dave. There were people who did open relationships, and did them well, but Andrew wasn’t sure he was one of those people. At the heart of it, he wasn’t invested enough in Dave to care one way or another.

A problem in and of itself.