Page 1 of The Comfort Trap

Chapter 1

The Shape of Forever

Patrick [NOW]

Mylife,ineverymeasurable way, is a fever dream I refuseto wake up from. Sunlight's blasting through the floor-to-ceiling windows of our ridiculously overpriced LA loft. I'm sprawled in my favorite chair. The air smells of coffee and the toxic smell of the vintage rug Ricardo insisted on thrifting last weekend, claiming I need to "expand my aesthetic horizons." Whatever the fuck that means.

My attention lands on the source of this domestic chaos.

Ricardo.

He's hunched over his laptop and notepad, wearing thoseadorableglasses that make him look like a hot, judgmental librarian who's about to shush me for breathing too loud. His brow's furrowed. He's got this pencil tapping against his mouth. A lock of his perfect hair has fallen into his face, and he shoves it back with this adorable little grumble. He's been staring at the same spreadsheet for twenty minutes without entering a single number.

Twenty.

Whole.

Minutes.

Earlier, I watched him spend forty-five minutes comparing two nearly identical shades of gray for the cell values of the spreadsheet title. They were both gray. Not metaphorically gray. Literally, the same gray. I don’t care what he said about the hex values. And I still don't know which one he picked.

My heart still trips over itself when I look at him. Pathetic.

Ricardo's pencil snaps loud enough to cut through the apartment. He looks up from his notebook.

"Shit. I think I broke it," he mumbles, holding up the two pathetic halves of what was once his favorite writing utensil. The sadness in his expression pulls at my heartstrings.

I slam my mug down on the coffee table, some of the brown liquid sloshing over the sides. "That was the Mona Lisa ofpencils! The Holy Grail of graphite! Do you have any idea what you've done?"

Ricardo blinks at me, his expression somewhere between confusion and concern. "Patrick, it's just a pencil. I mean, it was my favorite one, but still—"

"Just a pencil?" I'm on my feet now, pacing the length of our tiny living room like a caged tiger on meth. "Ricardo, that pencil had more personality than most people I know! It had perfect balance, the smoothest glide, and that eraser? Are you fucking kidding me?"

He fights it, I can see it in the twitch of his lips. And just like that, I'm grinning like an idiot too.

"It was a pencil," he says. "I'll be okay."

"Well, you know what? I won’t be," I declare, my voice dripping with mock tragedy. "My poor, precious Ricardo." I cross the room in three long strides, planting wet, sloppy kisses all over his face—his forehead, his cheeks, his nose—until he's laughing, pushing me away without actually shoving me off.

"Baby, quit it," he gasps, his hands coming up to my shoulders, but it's half-assed at best. I give him one more dramatic kiss right at his temple for good measure before backing off, flopping back onto the couch with a sigh that's entirely too dramatic for the situation.

The audacity of this man, I swear to God. He used to be ready torisk it all to get my number, and now he's telling me to back off when I'm trying to make him happy after committing pencil murder. He’s sitting there like it's nothing, when I know he’s upset.

I lean back into the couch, draping my arm over the backrest. I give him my best coy expression, the one that usually makes him forget his own name, but he's too busy performing CPR on murdered stationary. Something shifts in his expression as he observes what's left of the eraser end. He straightens up andgrabs the pencil sharpener from next to the laptop. I watch, utterly fascinated, as he sharpens the broken piece down to this tiny little nub.

That pencil wasn't just any pencil. It was the last one from that ridiculously expensive set I ordered from Japan for his birthday. I spent way too much on shipping, probably could have bought a small island for what I paid, but the way his face lit up when he opened that box? Fucking priceless.

His gaze finally meets mine. He crosses the room and leans down, pressing a kiss to my temple. He smells like the cologne he always uses that drives me wild. "You okay? You look a million miles away."

"I'm right here," I murmur, reaching up to run my fingers through his hair. "I’m thinking."

"About?"

I open my mouth, ready to say "nothing," to brush it off with some sarcastic remark about tax forms or the latest custom coffee order driving me up the wall. I look into his warm brown eyes, the same pair that used to watch me so nervously across a crowded coffee shop, and the words tumble out. "Do you ever miss it?"

He frowns slightly, straightening up. "Miss what?"

"Us. The beginning. When everything was... I don't know. Electric."