Page 21 of Finding You

The only problem was that was how he felt with a lot of women in his life too. He’d had a girlfriend in high school because it had been the thing to do. They tried to have sex because all her friends were doing it, and she wanted to stop being left behind.

But he couldn’t get hard.

She’d dumped him, but she’d been kind enough not to spread rumors.

He lost his virginity his junior year of college, high on a low dose of mushrooms. He’d taken a girl—Caroline—to a concert. The look on her face was pure joy, and that had done something to him. They’d talked all night, and he felt this strange pulsing in his chest, and then…

Then he’d kissed her. And they kept kissing. They got back to his dorm room, and his roommate was out, so they slipped between the sheets, and he fingered her until she shook and begged for his cock. Then he’d fucked her.

They didn’t see each other again after that, but when he thought back about her, he didn’t think about the orgasm. He thought about the way she laughed, and how she’d held his hand, and how it made his heart beat so hard.

How he felt like he could talk to her for the rest of his life and never get bored.

Apparently, he was the only one who felt that way, but he didn’t have regrets. He just had more confusion because it was years before it happened again. His friends were all obsessed with sex, and he just didn’t get what he was missing out on.

Then Katie had come along, and in the beginning, it was amazing. He wanted her. The feeling was new and different and kind of profound in a way he didn’t have words for.

But it hadn’t lasted. It never lasted. He settled back into his normal life of not really thinking or wanting sex, and that hadn’t been enough for her. Now he was here, more confused than ever and wondering what it all meant.

Dallas kissed Audra’s forehead, and she blinked sleepily at him before Frey buckled her back into the stroller and headed for the doors. When she was gone, Dallas sagged forward over the bar, and Lane put a cautious hand on his back.

“Want to talk in my office?”

Dallas laughed. “Yes, please.”

Lane grabbed his hand and swung it between them, making him laugh again. “Come on, I have some good snacks in there Bowen brought back from his last day on set in Savannah.”

Dallas followed quietly through the narrow kitchen hall, then into a small space that smelled like it had recently been used as food storage. It was cold, but he didn’t mind that. Lane gestured for him to sit in a worn banquet chair while he plopped into his desk chair and leaned back.

“So,” Lane said, then dug into his desk drawer. He pulled out a white paper box that ended up being full of chocolate truffles. He took one, then handed the box over to Dallas. “Let’s hear it.”

Dallas wasn’t sure how to open the conversation politely. Did he make small talk first? Was there even a good segue into “How did you come to realize you wanted to suck Bowen’s dick?” Which wasn’t actually his question, but everything in his head felt about as crass as that.

He popped a truffle into his mouth and chewed, profoundly aware of the silence between them.

“Are you okay?” Lane pressed.

Dallas blew out a puff of air after swallowing down the chocolate. “Remember how I told y’all about the guy on the plane? The one who helped keep me from panicking?”

“The pilot,” Lane said. His brow furrowed.

Dallas licked chocolate from the corner of his lip, then nodded. “Yeah. I…he. Uh.” He couldn’t start with Kylen telling everyone Dallas was his boyfriend. That sounded like creepy stalker behavior, and he knew this wasn’t that. And it wasn’t even the issue.

The issue was he was pretty sure he kind of liked it. He liked the idea that he could be someone like Kylen’s boyfriend.

And he had no idea what that made him.

Lane rolled his chair around the desk and set his hands on Dallas’s knees, meeting his gaze. “Hey. What happened?”

“It’s a really long story.”

“Okay,” Lane said, “so start from the beginning. I have time.”

Closing his eyes in a long, slow blink, Dallas did. He told Lane about the conversation he and Kylen had on the plane—about Kylen’s shitty family and Dallas saying he should make up a boyfriend. He left out the part where more than half his thoughts were consumed by thoughts of Kylen and the dreams he’d been having. That part could wait. But he told him how safe Kylen had made him feel. How good. And how he hadn’t stopped thinking about him for the rest of that week.

“…and the next thing I know, there he is, in my classroom because apparently, I’m teaching his daughter.”

“Was he alone?”

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