Page 68 of Studs Up
Why don’t you listen to me? I will ruin you. Dump the lawyer.
You play so much better when you keep that ass to yourself.
The worst ones were the ones where they said I belonged to them.
Before the threats came, I had slept with a lot of men, always discreet and quiet affairs. It could be any one of them. Some of those hook ups ended badly. Some wanted more. I just wanted to get fucked and cum. I didn’t need anything else from a man.
Now that I had slept in Nolan’s arms I didn’t want anyone or anything else.
Sweat poured down my face and my back. It dripped down my calves and my arms to the floor.
I was miserable, exhausted, and trapped. I could think of only one person in the world to talk to.
Nolan
“What?” I growled.
“I can’t sleep.”
I could hear the whine of an exercise bike in the background.
“Holden?” I rubbed my face and glanced at my phone to double checked the name. But who else would be calling me in the middle of the fucking night?
“Yeah,” he said.
“What do you want?”
“I need to talk to someone.”
“Don’t you have a best friend for shit like this?” I rolled onto my back. Sleep hung heavy in my brain. I couldn’t put together why he was calling or even what the time was. The numbers on my phone were too tiny and blurry to decipher.
“He doesn’t know how bad it is.”
“So tell him.”
“Cant. He’ll try and fix it.”
“That a bad thing?”
“It’s not something that can be fixed.”
“You told me,” I grumbled. The moonlight was slicing through a gap in my curtains, and I got up to close it. We had been texting every day since we got home. Playful banter. I kept thinking we’d gone too far and he was pulling back. But then he’d text me again and I wasn’t sure what to think. This was the first time we’d talked on the phone and I loved hearing his voice again.
“Yeah,” he said, breathing hard. “But you didn’t try to fix it.” I had just held him, and it put him out like a baby.
I crawled back into bed, tapped the speaker, and laid him on the pillow beside me.
“Don’t you have a hobby or something?”
“Kinda hard to garden at three in the morning.”
“You garden?”
“Yeah, don’t you?”
“I live in a fucking condo.”
“Bummer for you.”
