Page 23 of When I'm Gone

He contemplates it for a moment, chewing on his full bottom lip. It comes away rosy red, sending a wave of desire I wasn’t prepared for. “Yeah, okay.”

I reach out a hand for him and he surprises me by taking a few steps forwards and intertwining our fingers. “Gotta make sure you don’t disappear on me,” I tease, gently tugging him into following me as he giggles then tries to cover it with a cough.

Blake eyes me knowingly and stretches out as far as she can on my couch leaving one available spot for the two of us.

When Brady and I graduated college, we decided to split a studio to save money because we were starting out with less than nothing in our pockets. What the hell, we were used to being crammed into the same space, anyway. Even ourupperclassmen suites had us sharing a room, so what was one more time for old time’s sake if it saved us a metric ton of money. We got almost everything secondhand from garage sales, and honestly, we had a good time picking out the best of the worst so we could try to make the place feel like home. We went to an estate sale just outside the city one sunshiny Saturday morning and found an absolute gem. And by that, I mean, quite possibly the ugliest chair on the continent. Velvet, because why the fuck not, and oversized enough to comfortably fit a large person and a half. What really caught our eye was the goddamn color. Holy shit, was she a beaut. Dingy, grimy, damn thing looked like it had bed bugs, but it was fucking purple. And I don’t mean stylish purple, I’m talking about the combination of plum and something that can only be described as Barney and Friends. Then, like it needed another selling point, it reclined. We almost sprained an ankle rushing to load it in the truck. We were out forty dollars for the monstrosity and another fifty for a used upholstery cleaner. Worth every penny in my opinion. I was prepped and ready for a fight when I moved out because that thing was coming with me on my life. Brady, in all his endless audacity, said to throw it in the dumpster because we were adults now. We’re too old for ugly furniture.

I told him to speak for himself because I was certainly not too old for my beloved Purple Rain.

Now, I don’t even think about it because if I do, I’ll talk myself out of it. I pull Easton onto the chair with me so he falls clumsily on top of me, all arms and legs. Not gonna lie, I really expect him to slink off onto the floor and act like I didn’t just pull this stunt, so when he wiggles his ass and makes himself comfortable, packed in tightly enough, half of him is on my lap.

With Easton, I feel like I’m collecting moments like little seashells along the beach. I don’t know what’s compelling meto seek them out; I have no idea what I’m going to do with all of them once I have them, but I need them. I crave these tiny moments where I can feel him give me a chance. A sliver of trust, an ounce of faith, and now this fraction of affection that I know in my bones he doesn’t give easily. I’m doing something that earned it in his eyes, and there is not a shadow of doubt in my mind that I have to keep doing it.

“This okay?” he murmurs as the show kicks off. I can already tell it’s going to be a good season. Hopefully, we can make it through a good chunk before Blake has to fly out.

“More than,” I answer honestly. He feels so right against me, and I’m really trying not to think too much about why that is.

We make it through about half an episode before it occurs to me that I haven’t seen him eat since the sandwich last night and a brownie just now. Surely he made himself something while I was at work. “Did you eat today?” I ask softly.

He stiffens. “You just saw me eat.”

“Anything besides that?”

I watch the heat crawl up his neck out of the corner of my eye as he stammers, “I-I, um, I. Fuck.”

“Is that a no?”

“I, um, didn’t sleep great last night. It didn’t occur to me,” he admits.

It may create more issues than it solves, because now I’m worried about why he isn’t sleeping—maybe nerves about being in a strange place?—but at least he’s honest. “Chinese delivery okay with you?”

He nods his head up and down rapidly, so I swipe on my phone until I find the place I like and hand it over so he can put what he wants in the cart. “Get however much you want,” I instruct him. “Blake, you good with Chinese for dinner?” Dinner is a loose word for it because it’s the middle of theafternoon but we’re all starving from our weird schedules today.

She always is. “Yep,” she chirps with a grin.

Easton hands my phone back to me since I’m closer to her, I pass it along after making sure he actually got something substantial. After she’s done, I add what I want, checkout, and tell them it will be here in half an hour.

When it arrives, Blake hops up lightning fast and says she’s got it, and I’m kind of grateful that she’s taking care of it so I don’t have to make Easton get up. If the spell is broken, there’s a good chance he’ll put some space between us. That would be the reasonable thing to do, but I would also hate it, so here we are.

She distributes the paper takeout boxes and chopsticks, and he doesn’t leave. We argue about who’s going to win while we eat. Easton has very strong favoritism towards the self-taught underdog, I think the guy who puts liquor in every damn thing has got it in the bag, and Blakely likes the crazy-haired grandpa.

In other words, they’re both wrong, but there’s no accounting for taste with this group.

After we’re all stuffed to the gills, Easton starts powering down for lack of a better word. It’s slow, but he starts resting more of his weight against me and leaning back onto my chest. I take a risk and shift so he’s on his side with a leg wrapped around mine. When his head settles at the base of my throat, filling my nostrils with the clean smell of his shampoo, I breathe a quiet sigh of relief.

Now that I think about it, the last time I cuddled with a guy, post sex-haze excluded, had to be my high school boyfriend. It’s normally not my thing, it seems like something that you’d do with someone you really care about, so when the endorphins start to wear off, I’m out of there. Butwith Easton? The jaws of life couldn’t pry him out of my arms.

Oh shit.

I was worried about Brady getting attached and him disappearing again, but I should have been worried about me.

Denial is a river in Egypt and this is my delusion, and I’m sticking to it, damn it.

He won’t leave again. I’m not harboring a soft spot the size of Illinois for him, and even if I was, he’s not fucking taking off.

Maybe I squeeze him a little tighter just in case.

He hums happily, the most he’s capable of when he’s most of the way asleep, so I just press my nose to the top of his head and whisper, “I’ve got you, Chaos. I promise.”

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