Page 33 of Part & Parcel

“Move in with me.”

Kelly tilted his head the other way, not sure he’d heard correctly. “What?”

“You heard me. Up ’til now we’ve had reasons to be apart. Good reasons. But now they’re all gone, and there’s nothing keeping us from being together all the time. Nothing but us.”

Kelly’s chest fluttered, and he pressed a hand there to settle it. “You want me to move to Boston?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I mean, yes. Yes,” Nick stuttered. “But no, I . . . I want us to betogether. I don’t want you to leave your cabin. You love it here, you built this place by yourself. This is your home. And . . . it’s my home, too.”

“You’re saying you want to move here? You want to get rid of theFiddler?”

“N-not . . . no. I can’t get rid of her, she’s . . . she’s been through too much to abandon her. I . . .”

“Nick. We can’t bring theFiddlerhere.”

Nick snorted and closed his eyes, and it was obvious that he was nervous and fumbling to get what was in his head to come out of his lips in the right order. Kelly would never admit that he enjoyed it when Nick fumbled, but it was so rare and so charming that he’d taken advantage of it on every single occasion from the day they’d met and would probably continue to do so until the day they died.

Nick shook his head, taking a deep breath. “I just mean, I want for us to be together no matter where it is. We could spend summers here and then take theFiddlerdown the coast and spend winters somewhere warm, like the Keys or the Caribbean.”

Kelly leaned closer. “What about Boston?”

Nick’s expression softened, and he reached for Kelly, his fingers gliding down the side of Kelly’s face. “If Boston doesn’t fit in our plans, then I’ll say good-bye to her. She doesn’t need me anymore anyway.”

Kelly bit his lip, his gaze dropping to watch his fingers trace over Nick’s bare chest. The sadness in Nick’s eyes was too much for him to see. “You’re wrong there. And I don’t want that.”

“What do you want?” Nick asked.

“You. Let’s just wing it. We’ll stay in one place until we need new scenery, and then we’ll fly to another, or road trip, or take theFiddleron a cruise around the fucking world. We don’t have to plan anything, Nicko, we don’t need any patterns. We’re at endgame right now. The only thing waiting anymore is us.”

Nick stared at him, silent and stunned. He slowly reached with his other hand, grasping the back of Kelly’s neck, and Kelly leaned down to press a gentle kiss to his lips. Nick’s hold on him tightened and the kiss grew more heated. When Kelly finally sat up some minutes later, they were both breathless. He started trying to get out of his shirt as Nick’s hands dragged down his body.

“How’s your knee?” Kelly asked as Nick sat up to chase another kiss.

“What knee?”

Kelly was snickering when he asked, “Can I ride you?”

Nick nodded and kissed him messily, his strong hands gripping at Kelly’s hair and the back of his shirt as Kelly rolled his hips against Nick’s hardening cock.

“Okay, good talk,” Kelly grunted, and Nick helped him push his shirt over his head.

May 31, 2013

They wound up staying in Colorado for almost two months, long enough for Nick to finally have his knee surgically repaired and get through enough rehab that the steps on theFiddlerwouldn’t be much of an issue when they returned to Boston. They took a week at the end of May to head for Baltimore, where Ty and Zane were celebrating Ty’s birthday with the grand opening of their new bookstore, which Kelly was distraught to learn was a front operation for the CIA.

He refused to listen to details, and instead raged for an hour as Ty tried to calm him. Nick sat grinning in a corner the entire time, reading and sipping from a bottle of Yoo-hoo he’d pilfered from Zane’s stash in the back of the store.

Ty failed spectacularly at calming Kelly, of course. Ty and Zane were still involved in a life that might get them killed, and Kelly wasn’t fucking having it. It took Nick all night to talk him down. He convinced Kelly, after a lot of discussion and some physical persuasion, that Ty and Zane were just support operators, that they’d never be involved in anything that might kill them again, and therefore that they’d never drag Kelly and Nick into anything ever again either.

Kelly would believe it when he saw it, but he certainly wasn’t going to giveNickgrief over it. Nick was no longer Ty’s keeper.

They left Baltimore a week later, and Kelly was content in the relative safety and happiness of his friends.

They went on to Boston from there, and they spent the last day of May systematically cleaning out theFiddlerand preparing her for the summer.

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