Page 67 of Stay in Your Lane!

It took me a second to realize I was missing Kyle’s response thanks to staring at him like I was obsessed. “—think they’re crepuscular, actually,” he was saying. “It means?—”

“More active at dawn and dusk, right,” I interrupted, like a jerk, but he just smiled at me.

“Of course you know that,” he said.

“I, um. Yeah.” Now wasn’t the time to go down the rabbit hole ofwhyI knew what crepuscular meant—I’d been searching for words that sounded like insults but weren’t so I could call my brother names without my mom getting mad at me when I was eleven. “I’ve got spare clothes and stuff in my car, so we could just go straight to your place, if you want.”

“Sounds good.” He headed toward his car and I watched him walk away, because why not, then went to my own and—oh, wow. I guess I parked that kind of crookedly, and…wait, was that a ticket? I snatched it off the windshield.

“Illegally parked in a handicapped—dude!” I was barely inside the line of the handicapped spot next to my car, which was huge. A truck could have gotten in there no problem. I checked the signature at the bottom of the ticket, and yep, Detective Bowman. Looks like I’d gotten my own version of interrogated after all. “What a jerk.”

I could talk to Kyle about it and see if his dad could get me off the hook, but…I didn’t want that to be the way things went between us. There was no Code Blue, as far as I was concerned. No giving family outs that normal people didn’t get. Besides, Iwastechnically over the stupid, almost invisible line. So, fine, I’d take my lumps and pay the thirty-five dollars and start quietly plotting my revenge. His dad was going to get signed up for so many mortuary magazines. So. Many.

I’d regained my sense of equilibrium by the time I got to Kyle’s house. I grabbed my spare bag out of the back of the car, then walked up and knocked on his front door. Kyle opened it with a smile, and I had to work not to reach and sweep him off his feet right there because he probably wouldn’t appreciate being swept while he had bruised ribs. Luckily, therewassomeone I could sweep off their feet standing right next to him, meowing up a storm. I hoisted Jeff into my arms and nuzzled his soft, furry side with my nose.

“Nice to see you too,” I laughed at the purring cat, then gave him scritches under his chin until he flipped onto his back—while in my arms, which took some acrobatic skill but he managed it—so I could reach better. “Your cat is so awesome,” I said to Kyle, who was looking at me with his mouth open, like he was about to say something and had decided better of it. “Have you already fed the fish?” I asked as I stepped inside.

“Um, no.” He pushed his glasses a little farther up his nose. “They need it, but I know you like it, so…”

Aw, he was helping me make inroads with Steve! “You’re the best,” I told him as I put Jeff down on the floor. Then I leaned in and kissed Kyle right on the nose. I loved nose kisses almost as much as I did regular kisses. “Shrimp dinner for them?”

“Mmm.”

“Nice.” I peered into the tank and instantly picked out Steve, who was swimming in aggressive back-and-forth motions in the near corner of the tank. “Dude, your daddy spoils you so much,” I told him. “You need to save some of this shrimp for the others, got it? No being a food hog.” Cat still in hand, I opened up the top of the tank, then reached for the shrimp.

You know who else likes shrimp? Cats. Before I could dump it into the tank, Jeff began climbing up my pantleg to get the bowl. “Ow, fuck!” I managed to get most of the shrimp into the tank, but only because I lost my grip on the bowl itself and the entire thing wentplopdown through the hole in the top and then drifted, trailing soft pink bodies, down until it hit the gravel. It was immediately obscured by feeding piranhas, while Jeff had abandoned me completely at this point and was snarfing up the shrimp that had fallen to the floor.

“Jeff, you asshole,” Kyle snapped. Jeff just purred like a tiny freight train, ignoring our glares, while Patches stared with an air of regal disapproval from where she was lying on the back of the couch. “Are you all right? He didn’t scratch you, did he?”

I inspected my hand. “No, I’m good,” I said. “Sorry about the bowl, though. I’ll get it out.”

Kyle grabbed my arm. “Maybe wait until they’re done eating,” he said. “The last thing we need is for you to lose a finger in there.”

He was so nice. “Good call.”

“Here, let me show you the rest of this place.” He went to pick up my bag, but I saw the wince on his face clear as day and snatched it up before he could go more than ten degrees over.

“I’ve got it.”

He took me back to his bedroom, where I duly admired his king-sized bed, goddamn, and put my bag on the floor by the wall where I wouldn’t trip over it in the night if I had to get up. When I looked back at him, Kyle was staring at me with a gaze that was somewhere between hungry and resigned.

I got it. Here we were, in his bedroom, none of our family members around to ruin the mood, but with his ribs the way they were, we couldn’t fool around the way I think both of us were looking forward to.

That didn’t mean we didn’t have options, though. “Do you like blowjobs?” I assumed he did, somewhere between seventy-two and ninety-four percent of men were rated as finding the act “very appealing,” and while I was one of them, I also really liked giving them. It felt straightforward to me, and I liked straightforward, but there were also so many ways to tailor it to what the other person enjoyed. I might have had just a few boyfriends I got this far with, but damn if they didn’t like my mouth.

“What?”

“Do you like them?”

“I—yes.”

Awesome! “Can I please give you one?” I said, aware I was maybe coming off too eager but too into the idea to hold back. “I’ve been thinking about it since probably the first time we met, only I didn’t know you very well then so it was just a passing kind of thought, but now that Idoknow you I basically can’t stop thinking about it. Not,” I added, “that you have to say yes or anything. I know your chest probably hurts, and it’s actually kind of late, and…you know what, we don’t have to do it, it’s fine. We can just go to bed and?—”

“No!” Kyle blurted that out loudly, more so than he was expecting, judging from the look on his face, but he pushed through. “I’d, that would be great, I just wasn’t expecting it. I mean, we already spent a night together and we didn’t…”

“Yeah, because you’d just gotten out of the ER,” I pointed out. “You were on strong painkillers and exhausted and not really in an ideal place for sex. Not that now is perfect either, but your bed is a lot bigger than mine.” I sat down and bounced it for a second. “Softer, too, so much more comfortable for your injuries. So.” I bounced again and grinned. “Can I?”

Kyle shook his head, but he was smiling. “You’re really not shy.”

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