Page 53 of Chasing You

He knew that was what he needed to tell Adele when they finally sat down to talk. The day had been wonderful, and in spite of his body betraying him, the ferry and thebeach had been perfect. Adele was good at listening. He was good at knowing when he fucked up, and he was so perfect at making it right afterward.

But that didn’t mean it would be like that forever. He needed to know that Adele understood that this disease was forever. It wasn’t going away. There was no cure, and treatments only helped so much. He would face remissions and relapses, and while his life expectancy wasn’t shortened, that didn’t mean he would be the same man he was before he left.

At least not physically. He had no idea what Adele expected from him, and right now, he was a little afraid to ask.

Still, he needed to be a grown-up about it. He had to put on his big-boy pants, nut up, and tell Adele everything he was afraid of. And what he had going for him was the fact that he knew Adele better than he knew himself. He’d be able to tell if he was lying, and if that was the case, he’d cross that bridge when he had to.

Taking a deep breath, he squared his shoulders and shuffled to his dresser for a pair of sweats. He smelled like lavender, and he swore underneath it, he got a faint whiff of come. He knew that wasn’t possible, but the idea of it crawled under his skin and settled there.

It was all he could do not to think of the way it felt when Adele had snapped, pinned him to the side of the tub, and then kissed the life out of him. His toes had curled, his stomach clenched, his cock ready to shoot off from that alone.

And he’d begged. God, it should have been pathetic, but Adele looked at him like the sun rose and set on his smile, and Kash felt himself giving everything he had to that man.His hand had pulled him over the edge, the orgasm almost blinding as he let go.

“Enough,” he murmured to himself as he got his sweater over his head. He stopped in front of the mirror and finger-combed his hair, and by the time he felt like he was presentable, at least twenty minutes had gone by. Adele hadn’t come to look for him, and that probably meant he knew Kash was somewhere between panic attacks.

Opening the door, he stuck his head into the hallway and heard Adele humming softly. He did that when he was lost in thought—made up little tunes that often got stuck in his head. Kash’s chest warmed, and he barely noticed his stiff, unresponsive feet as he braced himself on the wall and made his way to the living room.

Turning the corner, he came to a sudden halt, his heart in his throat at the sight of what Adele had done. The sofa had been pushed against the wall, and the coffee table was nowhere to be found. In its place were four chairs from the kitchen, sheets draped over the tops, and a mountain of pillows underneath.

It looked exactly like the blanket forts they’d made back in middle school, hiding in his parents’ basement from his dad’s after-work wrath. It was the one place Kash had felt the safest when his home life was ugly and volatile.

The fact that Adele had remembered—the fact that he’d known Kash would need this even when Kash himself had no idea—was almost too much. God, if he hadn’t been in love before, he was now.

With his whole heart and every atom of his soul.

“Need a hand?” Adele asked, crawling out from under the fort.

Kash swallowed against a dry throat and shook hishead. “No, ah. I think I can make it.” He walked over, then dropped to his knees and crawled into the center of the pillow nest. It took him a second to get comfortable, but before he had to struggle too much, Adele was there.

He lifted Kash’s legs and got them settled, elevated to ease the pressure off his hips.

“You didn’t need to do all this,” Kash rasped.

Adele snorted. “If the situation was reversed…”

“Yeah, yeah.” Kash was smiling so hard his cheeks hurt. He shifted over a little, making room for Adele’s sizable body, and he felt something settle in his chest when Adele slid alongside him and rested his temple against Kash’s shoulder. He looked up at the ceiling and realized the sheets had stars on them. “Where’d you get these?”

“Left over from Gage’s astronaut phase,” Adele murmured. “They were buried in the linen closet.”

Kash hadn’t been around for that, and he felt a small pang because there was so much he’d missed because he was running from his feelings. He reached between them and picked Adele’s hand up, kissing his knuckles softly.

“Can I take that to mean you’re not outright rejecting me?”

Kash sighed and squeezed his fingers. “Needing to talk isn’t a rejection.”

“But it’s also not the moment you’re going to confess to being ass-wild in love with me with a plan to run to Atlantic City for an all-night wedding chapel, right?”

“I wouldn’t do that no matter how I felt, and you know it,” Kash said with a sniff. “I expect a grand wedding with the most expensive catered menu.”

Adele turned and propped up on his elbow, looking down at Kash, calling his bluff. “Don’t tempt me.”

Kash wanted to. He wanted to tempt him intoeverything. To get lost in his gaze, in his touch, in his kisses. He wanted to accept that this was all real and it would last and last until they were wrinkled and old and forgetting their own names.

But he was too much of a realist.

“I know that look,” Adele said softly. He looked heartbroken.

Kash let go of his hand and wrapped his fingers around the back of Adele’s neck, drawing him in for a kiss. “It’s not the look you think it is.”

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