Page 22 of Finding You

Dallas shook his head. “He was with his sister.”

“The one being an asshole about him being gay?”

Dallas nodded. “There was this kind of awkward pause, then she asks if I’m the Dallas. I was too afraid to say anything. Kylen looked mortified, and then his sister asked if I was the guy dating him, and I realized he’d taken my advice literally. He made up a boyfriend, but he used my name.”

“Oh,” Lane breathed out. “Well…shit. What did you do?”

Dallas let out a high, tense laugh. “I played along. I didn’t want to let him get humiliated by her, and honestly, she was so nasty to me when she picked up Kylen’s daughter. I kind of wanted to watch her eat crow.”

Lane grimaced. “That was kind of you.”

Dallas shrugged. “I wasn’t really trying to be nice. But Kylen was totally freaked-out. He told me he was going to tell her the truth, and I, uh…I told him not to.”

Lane’s eyes widened. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said, throwing his hands in the air. “He obviously gets a ton of shit from them, you know? It seemed cruel to force him to admit he made up a boyfriend.”

“Yeah, okay. I get that. But what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. He wants to meet up this weekend to talk about it.”

“And you said yes?”

Dallas shrugged. “I mean, yeah. I figured if I’m going to play along, we should have our story straight, you know. And it’s not like seeing him again is a hardship. I’ve only really known him those few hours on the plane, but it was nice.”

Lane cocked his head to the side. “May I ask something?”

“Anything,” Dallas said, desperate to not control the conversation for a moment so he could catch up to his thoughts.

“Did it occur to you that you don’t have to do this?”

Dallas let out a trembling breath. “I guess so. But there’s something else that made me say yes.” He licked his lips, then asked, “When did you know?”

Lane blinked, looking confused. “When did I know what?”

“About…about Bowen? About how you felt?”

Lane’s eyes went wide, and he sat back against his chair with a quiet thud. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Dallas said, rubbing his hands down his face.

Lane steepled his fingers and pressed them under his chin. “Okay. Are you attracted to him?”

“I don’t know,” Dallas admitted miserably. “That’s what’s making me feel like I’m losing my mind. I think about him a lot. I had a dream about him—a s-sexy dream, but does that actually mean I’m into him?”

“Well,” Lane said slowly, “when I met Bowen, it took me a little while to figure out it was more than just aesthetic attraction. Objectively, he was hot, and I’d found other men attractive before, so that wasn’t new. But it took me a few weeks to realize I wanted to put my mouth on his mouth.”

Dallas laughed, but it wasn’t funny because he wasn’t sure he’d ever really felt that way. Yeah, he’d been sexually interested in his ex from time to time. But he hadn’t ever just looked at her and wanted to put his mouth on her mouth. The need to touch her like that, to kiss her and be with her, had come after long nights of laughing and cuddling and feeling a deep warmth in his chest.

Fuck. Was he broken?

“Dallas?”

He blinked at his friend, then panicked. “Uh. Thanks. This was helpful. I should probably let you get back to work, and?—”

“Dallas.”

He froze, halfway to standing. His thighs burned.

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