Page 56 of Yard Sale

He pushed up on his arm and stared down at me. From where he was, I could see one eye, one side of his nose, and his pronounced cupid’s bow.

I reached up and traced my fingers over his lips.

“Let me take care of you,” he said.

I…well. That was new. And different. I swallowed thickly, then nodded. “Okay.”

He smiled and rolled away, and I closed my eyes, listening to him slip into the bathroom and start water running. I lost track of the minutes he was gone, and I was just starting to slip into that strange space between sleep and awake as he slid up next to me.

The cloth he used to scrub me clean was very warm and scented like lavender, and he was so gentle that he didn’t pull me fully back to consciousness. I barely even noticed when he turned the lights off, and I settled even heavier into the sheets when Aravind’s body slid alongside mine and he wrapped both of his legs around the knee that wasn’t covered up in my brace.

“I’m a cuddler,” he said.

“Fake boyfriends who fuck me that good get all the cuddles they want,” I told him.

He burst into laughter, hiding most of the sound against my shoulder. “I didn’t think I was going to like you this much.”

“Me either.” And man, it was going to suck when we had to face the reality that this had to end.

But maybe we could be selfish for this little while. It sounded like we both deserved it. And considering we both knew what we were getting into, if we got hurt, we’d only have ourselves to blame.

CHAPTER 14

ARAVIND

I woke quietly at first—a slow crawl toward consciousness—and then suddenly all at once. It had been a while since Leon and I had shared any kind of bed, so I didn’t confuse the warm body steadily breathing beneath mine for his.

Thank god.

The last person I ever wanted to think about was my ex when I was with Tiago. I never, in my wildest fucking dreams, thought I’d be lying on top of the searing hot D-man, but here I was.

And here he was.

He had both arms flung up over his head, and his mouth was slightly parted with his breath, and he didn’t stir when I carefully unwound my legs from his. I had a mark on my calf from where it had been pressed against his brace all night, and I grimaced.

Was he meant to be sleeping in that? I had no idea what his recovery was supposed to look like.

We hadn’t talked about it. We hadn’t talked about much apart from his shit-ass family and how much he apparently liked me. That was still sitting heavy in my chest.

The way he spoke to me—the way he spoke about me—was so different from everyone else. I embraced being pretty like it was a shield. I’d always sort of toed the line with gender expression. I spent my formative teenage years trying to figure out if it was because I wasn’t a boy at all or if it was just because I liked soft, pretty things.

For now, it was the latter, but in reality, I didn’t care how people saw me.

I’d always been small and delicate. I let that distract people who preferred guys like me from looking any deeper because it was easy to get rejected by men who didn’t want anyone fem. It was a more comfortable pill to swallow when I became too much for them.

Like with Leon. It was easy when he was just into dressing me up in silk and fucking me silly in front of a mirror. But when he started to get to know me—when he spent most of his time telling me that I was too loud and took up too much space—that’s when I started to feel the cracks forming.

But I didn’t want simple anymore. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life looking for easy.

I just wanted to be enough for someone as I was, and I couldn’t rely on Tiago for that. That wasn’t what this was. My offer to convince his family that I was in love with him was genuine. They deserved to eat a mountain of fucking crow until they were shitting beaks and feathers for a year.

But I would never, ever tell Tiago how good it felt to pretend like I really was in love with him.

I wasn’t, of course. I barely knew him. But he was that quiet, unspoken fantasy I hadn’t ever let myself get too attached to. And it felt almost cruel that the universe would dump him in my lap like this.

Holding back a groan, I slipped from the bed, stretched a few times until the ache left my spine, then tiptoed into the hallway to use the second bathroom.

I snagged my robe on the way, and after my bladder was empty and my hands were washed, I set out to find some coffee. My dad really had made sure the place was stocked. My aunties must have sent over a list because the freezer, fridge, and pantries were full of what would eventually become weeks of meals.