Page 81 of Chase Hooper Likes It Hot
“You staying over?” I asked, looking him up and down.
He raised an eyebrow at me like he knew exactly what I was thinking—and it wasn’t like it was hard to guess, let’s be real. Cash was working late and neither of us had work tomorrow, so odds were pretty good he was gonna rail me through the mattress tonight. But he pretended to think about it. “I guess.”
The asshole.
He was lucky I liked him.
The house wasquiet and dark when I heard the sound of Cash’s dirt bike coming down the street. Wilder and Avery had gone next door to Avery’s place, and Miller had left already because he had some early meeting in the morning. There was no noise coming from Danny’s room, so he was probably asleep.
All my earlier fantasies about Lee fucking me into the mattress had died a tragic death, what with the night being hot and my stomach being stuffed with apple pie by the time we’d gone to bed. But we’d made out for a while, finally exchanging slow, lazy hand jobs while the box fan had whirred and clicked in the background.
Lee’s breathing was slow and even, and our skin was stuck together with sweat where he was pressed next to me, but I didn’t want to move. Turned out I had a thing for big sleepy guys holding me while I slept—or at least, one particular big sleepy guy. Still, I reached out to grab my phone and check the time. Cash’s shift had ended over an hour ago. He was late. A tendril of worry expanded in my gut, then pulled into a tight knot, but then I heard his key in the front door and the measured tread of his footsteps down the hallway, and when he slipped quietly into our room, there was nothing about the way he was holding himself to indicate anything was wrong.
At least until I whispered, “You okay?” and he almost jumped out of his skin.
“Jesus!” he hissed, squinting at me in the moonlight. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry,” I whispered, but I wasn’t. Not even a bit.
He set his backpack down on the floor and sat on his bed. I heard the two faint thumps as he took his sneakers off. Then he kicked them under his bed and left the room again. The old pipes creaked when he turned the shower on in the bathroom.
I was almost asleep when he came back into the room in just his boxers and an old T-shirt. There was a faint creak as he climbed into bed, and I heard a sigh escape him.
“You’re late,” I whispered.
“I helped build the Titanic with Mr. Conrad after my shift,” he said.
I hid my grin in Lee’s shoulder, even though it was too dark for Cash to see me. Cash was late home from work at least once a week because he’d been hanging out with an old guy who lived at Sunny Fields. When we were kids, the one thing Cash had really wanted and never gotten had been Lego, so he’d wormed his way into being BFFs with some new resident who had a bunch of it. Well, maybeIwould have wormed my way into playing with the old guy’s Lego collection. Cash was probably less predatory and more genuine about it. Anyway, it made me glad that he was getting to play with it now, even though sitting around in silence following a bunch of instructions and sticking little blocks together wasn’t my idea of fun.
Revolutionary idea for me: we were allowed to like different things.
The box fan whirred and clicked, and Lee let out slow, steady breaths. Cash flopped onto his back, then his side, then his back again, every movement marked by the squeak of his bed frame. When he flopped onto his belly again, I let out a sigh. Cash obviously wasn’t going to settle, which meant I wouldn’t either, and I had to be up early for work.
I peeled Lee’s arm away from where it was draped over my stomach, then crossed the space between Cash’s bed and mine and climbed in behind him. As soon as I did, he stopped wriggling. I shuffled onto my back and he slotted himself against my side with his head over my heart, just like two Lego pieces clicking into place.
Cash’s breath evened out as he slipped into sleep.
Over in my bed, Lee stirred in the moonlight. He swept the bed with his arm and then propped himself up on one elbow. “Chase?”
I hummed in reply.
Lee flopped back down on his back, and I thought he’d fallen asleep again, and then he said, “Nope. This isn’t working.”
“What do you?—”
But before I’d even gotten the whispered question out, Lee was climbing out of my bed and squinting over at Cash and me in the moonlight. Then he pushed my bed across the floor, the legs scraping enough that Cash snuffled awake, and we both watched as Lee lined the beds up next to each other. Then he shoved the mattresses tightly against each other, climbed back in behind me, and lay shoulder to shoulder with me in our new giant bed.
“Better,” he decided, curling his fingers through mine.
I’d complain like shit if I was the one who ended up stuck in the gap between mattresses—and I would, because I was the piggy in the middle—but for now Lee was right. This was better.
“Uh,” Cash said. “Night?”
“Night,” Lee said, a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth even though his eyes were closed.
So there I was, with one arm around Cash and holding Lee’s hand, staring at the ceiling with my eyes stinging for just how fuckingrightthis asshole was for me. I was one hundred percent going to end up falling in love with him, and you know what? It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Hell, I was halfway there already.
I thought of how he’d shoved the beds together.
Okay, three-quarters of the way.
And I was looking forward to the rest of the fall and everything that happened after that. Because for maybe the first time in my life, I trusted that whatever happened tomorrow could only be good and, with Lee beside me, it might even be great.
And I was ready to find out.
