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“I hate that all your friends call you Archie,” I admitted, grimacing as the words left my mouth.
Archie laid his hand on my thigh, giving me a squeeze before going in for another bite of meat and cheese.
“I started going by it after I moved out here,” he said.
In the marrow of my bones, I knew why he’d made the change, but asking him and receiving confirmation felt like a point of no return for us, so I didn’t ask him out loud and he didn’t offer to share.
“I like Swiss cheese,” I said instead, preempting his rebuttal of the cheese question back onto me. There had been a time when I leaned into spray cheese like it was a drug, but I hadn’t eaten it for years because every time I picked up a can, I could hear him taunting me over my affinity for it.
“Swiss and raclette.” He huffed a breath out of his nose. “Do you want to have fondue? We can go tonight.”
“If you want.”
“I’m asking what you want. You have a day and a half. I want to make sure you’re getting your trip’s worth.”
The truth of the matter was I wanted to spend the next day and a half with him. It didn’t matter to me what we did or where we were. I would have been happy to stay in bed with him until it was time to climb the rickety stairs back up onto the plane, but the withdrawal from sex would be worse than when I’d given up the cheese.
When I’d given up him.
“Where is your favorite place in L.A.?” I asked.
“Rob’s back yard,” he said, quick and decisive. It was an unexpected answer that had me smiling.
“Why?”
“Because he has more expensive liquor than me and a salt water pool.”
I tried to not picture Archie’s life without me. But I could see him when I closed my eyes, clear as day, in an expensive back yard with a glowing pool and a glass of whiskey. All his friends and all of their boyfriends swimming together naked and God knew what else. It made my stomach simmer and burn with an unexplainable jealousy that I’d never felt before.
“What was your last serious relationship?” I asked him, desperate to get my mind off the pool.
He made an unhappy sound in the back of his throat and poured more wine into both of our cups.“You don’t want the answer to that one,” he said.
I took that to mean that even if it wasn’t recent, it had been very serious, and that ended up making me feel worse than the pool had.
“Tell me more about the pool,” I changed the subject back, giving myself whiplash, but it was better than drowning.
“How about we just finish our day here, go get some fondue, and then I’ll take you to his house so you can see for yourself?”
“Is he going to mind?”
Archie laughed, using his first finger and thumb to pull a red grape off the stem on the corner of the charcuterie plate.
“That’s never stopped me before; I don’t know why it would now.”
CHAPTER23
ARCHIE
If I could addan entire life I’d never get to live with Owen’s hand in mine to the quickly growing list of regrets in my life, I would. But it felt like an overstatement and understatement all at the same time. The jingling cadence of his laugh when I hopped the fence in Rob’s back yard immediately burned itself into my memory, and I knew it was a sound I would come back to often after Owen was gone.
“Are you sure he’s not going to be mad?” Owen asked when I flipped the latch on the gate to let him in.
“He won’t be mad.”
Grayson might be mad, though, but that was a problem for Rob and not me. I was entirely too fond of Grayson, and endlessly pleased that Rob had managed to get his head out of his ass long enough to not fuck that whole relationship up. The two of them were perfect together—in practice, not on paper. Rob needed someone to keep him in line sometimes, and Grayson was more than up for the challenge.
Because of how much I liked Grayson, and only because of how much I liked Grayson, I fished my phone out of my pocket and texted him to let him know we were at Rob’s, immediately prompting a replyfromRob in the Trophy Doms Group Chat, which had become the bane of my existence.
