Page 54 of Praised
“No, I’m fine. I just…I’m a bit in my head. Cody texted me tonight.”
Drake cursed under his breath. “I fucking knew it.”
“What do you mean?”
The bright lights of the city began to fade into the subtle streetlamps of the residential area where Flynn lived. The houses weren’t close together, and there was plenty of room on the streets and up the long and winding driveways…a complete contrast from my packed apartment block. The difference in our incomes was clearly more of an issue for me than it was for him, and I needed to commit some energy to getting over it if I wanted things with Flynn to work out in the long run.
But…
Did I want them to work out?
Why did I even care?
Sure, the dude was hands down the best fuck I’d ever had, but what else about him was there to keep me interested and inspired? His attraction tomesurely didn’t hurt, but there had to be something more substantial than that, right? And at the end of the day, he was asking me to give up a lot of things that had been very important to me for a long time. My desire for control in the bedroom, for one. But he’d given things up too, hadn’t he? Even if being seriously casual had been a joke at first, Flynn surely was the one putting himself out for me in ways I’d never even imagined to ask.
The very least I could do was manage some concessions of my own. At the end of the day, I enjoyed Flynn’s company. Rather, I enjoyed his company when I wasn’t stressing about how opposite we were, and that needed to be something I made peace with. If a rich dude wanted to fuck me in expensive hotel suites and all over every boring surface in his very bland house, who was I to say no?
But Drake was right.
I didn’t know much about him beyond the physical, and maybe it was worth asking some of those questions. Or seeing him in a setting where we couldn’t end up—or at least socially shouldn’t—with our clothes off.
“Cody was here earlier,” Drake said, my ex’s name drawing me right out of the pleasant softness of my daydream and back into the present conversation.
“Did you talk to him?”
“Fuck no!” Drake almost shouted at me. “I hate what he did to you. But he tried to talk to me and I brushed him off.”
“What did he say?” It was a sick curiosity that compelled me to ask, even though a huge part of me didn’t care about the answer.
Let him miss me.
Let him sit with his mistakes.
“He asked how you were.” Drake hummed, a conniving sound that I was all too familiar with.
“What did you do?”
“I told him you were seeing someone new. Someone better than him.”
“Someone without a last name or a favorite color or favorite movie.”
“He obviously has all of those things,” he said. “You just don’t know them.”
“Yet,” I supplied, turning onto Flynn’s street.
“Yet,” Drake agreed. “But it made Cody a little agitated, I think, a little jealous. It’s probably better you’re not home tonight.”
“Do you think he’s going by the apartment?”
I pulled into Flynn’s driveway and parked near the door. His car wasn’t outside, but he had a three-car garage tucked against the side of the house. And he didn’t strike me as the type to risk rust and water damage by parking outside anyway.
“I don’t want you to have to get a restraining order or anything like that,” Drake said. “I just want you to know he was asking about you.”
“He asked if I was ready to talk.” I cut the ignition and dropped my head against the headrest. Flynn’s porch was illuminated, the monstera he was so fond of standing proud under a wash of warm white light.
“What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t answer him at all. He sent two more after that, but I didn’t read them.”
