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37. Brooks

CHAPTER 37

brOOKS

It took a week for Tate to unwind about Dylan and Alex, but his de-Kale-ification was a welcome change. Even though Tate had spent most of his time at my place, he was glued to his phone for the first half of the week, ready to swoop in and rescue Dylan at the first hint of unhappiness over the situation he’d willingly put himself into. By Friday, the phone was on charge in the bedroom and Tate was stretched out on my couch with his ankles propped up on the coffee table, and I took it as a win. He’d arrived later than normal, stopping by his apartment to get the mail and make sure everything was still in order since both of them had been elsewhere for so long.

“Good news,” he said, which was a welcome relief whatever the news would be.

I gave the ice in my drink a swirl and joined him on the couch. I sat beside him and matching his pose. After that, Tate was quick to slide down onto his back and drop his head into my lap. Humming, I brushed his hair back from his face, my cock twitching at the delicate and content way his lashes fluttered at my touch.

“Tell me everything,” I said.

He shoved a six-by-nine envelope into my face, and I didn’t need to take out the contents to know it was his passport.

“It’s here.”

“That was quicker than I expected.”

Tate slid the dark blue book out of the envelope and flipped through the pages, stretching his arm out for me to take it.

“Where are you taking me first?” he asked with a grin.

I stretched my arm down his chest and rucked up the hem of his shirt so I could drag my fingernails up his stomach. “To bed?” I proposed.

“I don’t need a passport to go there.” He arched under my touch, groaning as he settled back into the cushions.

“I’m amused you’ll let me take you out of the country, but you won’t let me pay your rent,” I told him, tossing the passport onto the coffee table.

Tate’s relationship with my money was a complicated one, but we all had our hang-ups. I’d spent the first half of our relationship living with the constant fear he was going to get overwhelmed and leave me. The worry was still buried into the back walls of my brain, but it was much easier to ignore than it had been before. Tate had never worried about me leaving him, or about leaving me. He’d never seen my fetishes as a detriment to our relationship. My money had always been the sticking point, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. It was as much a part of me as anything else was .

“I’m learning,” he grumbled. “You don’t care that I don’t have money, so I don’t think I should care that you do.”

“Finally seeing reason.” I bent myself in half and dropped a kiss against his forehead.

“I don’t know what the future looks like.” Tate rolled onto his side, his breath hot against my stomach. I bent my legs at the knee, thighs pressing against the back of his head to sort of fold him into my body as much as the position would allow.

“No one does.”

“Alex can’t pay Dylan’s rent forever.”

“I don’t think he plans on it,” I said softly.

“Dylan isn’t going to magically be able to afford his rent again when his shoulder is better.” Tate swallowed and hooked his arm over my lap, curling it around my back.

“That’s a conversation for the future,” I assured him, drawing a long, curving swirl from his forehead down to his chin. “Don’t worry about things you can’t control.”

“I can’t control anything.”

He wasn’t wrong.

“Sounds like a good life, darling.” Dropping my head against the back of the couch, I closed my eyes and sighed. “Not a worry in the world to be seen.”

Tate snorted, and we both knew it was a lie.

“I’m very worried about where you’re taking me with this new passport.”

I was very worried about how I was going to convince him to abandon the apartment entirely and move in with me permanently, but I wasn’t an infant. I knew as long as there was a chance in hell Dylan would be returning to their apartment in Chelsea, Tate was never going to give it up. I admired his dedication to his friend, and I was glad the two of them had each other. Even though I didn’t know what their friendship was like before things had started to go south, I was hopeful in the future it would be better than it had been before. I had that with my own friends, even Kale, who had finally yanked his head out of his asshole on Saturday morning and started to come around to his piece in the breakup of our friend group.

“Tell me where you want to go and we’ll go,” I told him.

“You keep talking about pasta.” Tate rolled his eyes, a mocking gesture that wasn’t anywhere close to hiding the smirk on his lips.

“Italy, Tate?” I used my hip to knock him up enough off my lap that I could reach into my pocket for my phone. “We can go to Italy. We can go to Greece. We can go anywhere you want.”

“Antarctica,” he said.

“We could, but why would you want to?”

“Aren’t there polar bears and penguins there?” He smiled. “At the bottom of the world.”

“There’s polar bears and penguins at the zoo and it’s far less cold,” I reminded him.

Tate stretched out and lifted himself off my lap, situating himself against my side so he could see my phone.

“New York is cold in the winter,” he said.

“Not quite the same.”

I had an app on my phone for private flights, and I silently hoped the price tag that was about to flash on the screen wasn’t big enough to give Tate a heart attack. He rested his head against my shoulder while I keyed in our destination and our dates, a short trip unfortunately because of work, and Tate swatted my hand away before I could press Book and Pay .

“That’s like…nothing to you, isn’t it?” he asked, brow furrowed while he counted the zeroes to the left of the pay button.

I debated trying to downplay it, but Tate wasn’t a fool.

I shook my head.

“Maybe I should have let you pay Dylan’s rent,” he said, letting go of my wrist.

I booked the flight, and then tossed the phone to the side and hauled him onto my lap. He laughed, throwing his head back as he straddled my thighs, curling his fingers around my neck and pressing our foreheads together.

“I’d pay yours,” I reminded him.

His eyes sparkled and he pressed our mouths together. “I know you would.”

“I’d pay it and let you live here.”

Tate nodded, kissing me again. “I know.”

On the other end of the couch, my phone vibrated with the confirmation alert for our trip.

“When do we leave?” he asked.

“Tonight.”

“Of course.” He chuckled. “We should pack.”

“We could buy clothes there,” I suggested.

“Do you think I would look good in an Italian suit?” Tate leaned back and smoothed his hands down the front of his chest.

“You’d look good in anything,” I said, shoving his shirt up to expose his chest. “You look best in nothing.”

“Then what am I doing in all these clothes?”

He took his shirt out of my hands and pulled it over his head, tossing it onto the floor. I wrapped my hands around his waist, grinding his ass down on my lap with a barely restrained groan.

“We do have a flight to catch, darling.”

“I’ve never fucked on a plane.”

I hummed. “Can you wait that long?”

“If you tell me to,” he whispered, cheeks burning red.

I slid my hands up his sides until I reached his face. Grabbing his cheeks, I slanted our mouths together and speared my tongue into his mouth, kissing him until he made that needy little whimper that he always let loose when his erection was so hard it started to hurt him.

“Is that what you need tonight?” I asked, licking the corner of his mouth. “You need me to drag it out until you can’t stand it anymore?”

I kissed my way to his ear, and Tate tipped his chin toward the ceiling, giving me more room to suck and worship. I collared my hand around his throat loosely, noticing the way he bucked on my lap when my fingers wrapped around his neck.

“It feels like it’s been forever,” he whimpered.

“I fucked you this morning.”

“I mean since I cried for a good reason.”

There was a very real concern I was going to come in my pants right there in the middle of my living room, Tate still half-dressed on my lap.

“Go pack a bag, Tate.” I lifted him off my lap and deposited him onto the couch.

He grabbed me before I could go, nuzzling his face into my crotch and rubbing his cheek up and down the length of my erection. I fisted his hair, yanking his head back to make him stop, but when he looked up at me, his pupils were shot and his eyes were glassy.

“You’re in a mood,” I said gently, giving him one more shove away from me before letting him go entirely.

“Horny?”

Tate and I had been intimate—repeatedly—over the past week, but it had been muted versions of our normal encounters. That wasn’t to say I took it easy on him, because I definitely never had, but I wasn’t as aggressive as I could have been. He hadn’t complained so I wasn’t sure he noticed, but now there was no doubt in my mind he’d caught on.

“Don’t let me do it again,” I warned, bending down so we were face to face. He was perched on the edge of the couch, hand rubbing slowly between his legs. It was so reminiscent of the Tate I’d met the first night at The Black Door what felt like a lifetime ago.

“Hmn?”

“Don’t let me neglect you.” I grabbed him again by the throat and hauled him to his feet. He gasped, circling his fingers around my forearm…for support, not to fight. “If I’m not giving you what you need, darling, tell me.”

He nodded, swallowing. His throat bobbed against my palm, and I tightened my hold. His cheeks darkened, not just from the flush of arousal but also from the restraint of his air flow.

“I’ll tell you,” he rasped.

With nothing besides reluctance, I set his feet back down on the floor and let go of his throat. Tate whined, swaying into me.

“Go pack a bag,” I told him again. “The sooner you do as you’re told, the sooner we can get in the air. ”

He sucked in a breath and nodded, then turned and scampered up to the bedroom. I liked that he had enough of his things at my house to pack a bag for an overseas trip, though I hadn’t been kidding. I would have bought him anything he needed—or wanted—once we were in Italy. I still would.

I’d give him everything.

Something crashed upstairs, and I headed up behind him. My steps were slower, not in a rush at all. Drawing out the end was part of the fun, after all. In the bedroom, I found Tate in the closet, digging out a clean pair of jeans and underwear for his duffel bag. I sat on the edge of the bed and booked a villa at Castelle di Casole, chuckling when Tate threw my own empty overnight bag at me.

“I’m ready,” he said.

“You’re primed, that’s for sure.” I slid my phone into my pocket and grabbed the empty bag, brushing past him into the closet. “Don’t think that just because you’re on the plane you get to come. Are you sure you want to move so fast?”

He groaned, adjusting his cock, which somehow looked like it had gotten harder. “There’s no other speed with you.”

A smile flashed across my face, and I dug out a pair of handcuffs from the back of my sock drawer, making a show of dropping them into the bottom of my bag.

“I have plenty of speeds, Tate. Maybe we can use tonight to change gears.”

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