Page 32 of Holden
“Does it matter?”
Bryce shrugged. It shouldn’t matter, but it kind of did. He also didn’t want to admit that out loud and he sort of wished he’d never asked the question.
“I don’t care where you work,” Holden finally said. “I don’t mean like I don’tcare. I just…don’t care.”
Bryce let out a quick laugh and knocked their shoulders together. “So you don’t care.”
Holden glared at him, then turned his attention back to the dance floor.
“Did you even know this place was here?” Bryce asked.
“No.”
“Did you think it was a church?”
“I don’t come to Pasadena often,” Holden explained. “It’s a bit of a drive.”
“Oh. Right.” Bryce took another swallow of his drink and groaned. “Well, thank you for coming. For me, I mean. To have a drink.”
“Normally I have to gag you to get you to stop talking,” Holden said quietly, barely loud enough to hear over the music. “Why are you all tangled up in yourself now?”
Bryce didn’t have an answer that was a good one. Well, he had the truth, but the truth was embarrassing. He was having a hard time talking to Holden because Holden had worked the whole day, then driven up to Pasadena to have a drink with him, and he didn’t complain about the traffic or anything. And the two of them were standing in the middle of a kink club having a drink together and that felt a lot like a date, which was nothing they’d done before. Nothing they’d even discussed. But he couldn’t say all of that to Holden without sounding like a crazy person, so instead he asked the second-best thing.
“Is this a date?”
Holden’s jaw went slack, and Bryce wanted to bury himself in a hole. Bryce tried to not look as mortified as he felt while Holden finished his drink, set the empty bottle down on the bar, and faced Bryce head on.
“Do you want it to be?” he asked.
“God. That’s not what you signed up for, is it? You took me for a sandwich, and it really just escalated from there, didn’t it? It wasn’t supposed to be anything serious, and now here I am?—”
“You got tested so I could fuck you raw.” Holden grabbed his face, fingers pressed into one side and thumb into the other, puckering Bryce’s mouth like a fish. “That feels serious.”
Bryce was glad he couldn’t speak. That again, Holden had made it impossible.
“Do you want it to be?” Holden asked again.
Bryce nodded.
“Is there some place we can go sit down?”
Holden released his mouth, and Bryce hated it. He worked his jaw to loosen it, then motioned toward a wrought iron staircase against the back wall. “There’s a loft. It’s a little quieter, but a lot raunchier.”
Holden’s stare flickered toward the loft and he gestured dismissively. “Lead the way.”
Bryce’s heart was in his throat, but he led Holden to the back of the club and up the stairs. There was a leather couch against one wall, a small bar, and a St. Andrew’s cross in the corner. There were private rooms in the hall; Landon had told him as much during the interview, but all those doors were closed. Bryce didn’t know if they were occupied or not, but before he could look, Holden sat down on the couch and patted the empty cushion to his right. Bryce sat beside him, fingers nervously picking at the label of his beer.
“I don’t want you to talk unless you’re talking about yourself,” Holden said. “In a meaningful way. I don’t want you to fill the silence.”
Bryce hated that, but he liked Holden more.
He took a drink of his beer and settled into the couch, tucked halfway against Holden’s side. The other man made himself comfortable, and Bryce was jealous of the way silence came so easy for Holden. Bryce had never imagined a life like that, one where he could just exist without needing to fight for it. But hecouldimagine it, if he was being honest with himself. He’d already had a taste of it, a sweet gift from a man who didn’t really know him from his brother but also didn’t care.
“I’ve felt more myself since I got to LA than I have in the past three years,” he said.
Holden raised a brow. “Why?”
“It feels like a fresh start a little.”
