Epilogue

(SIX MONTHS LATER)

Harrison sets the frame down on the coffee table. “I think it should go here,” he says, turning it so that the sketch of him is facing toward the entry to the room.

“I still can’t believe you framed that.”

“I said I was going to. It looks good here, right? Or should we put it on the wall in the hallway? Oh, we could make the whole wall photos, and framed art, your art, your sketches and drawings, and your books, we could frame your books and put them up there, too.”

“All my art?” I ask, raising a brow.

“Yes. No. Our special art can go in our bedroom, oh, oh, oh,” he starts, and I can’t help but smile at his excitement. Moving in together is a big step, or it would normally be, but we’ve been practically living together for months now, so it was silly for him to still be paying rent where he was.

“We’re not putting up those sketches anywhere,” I tell him, opening a box labeled coffee mugs. As I pull each one out and set them in the drawer, I realize not one of them matches another.

“What is it with these?” I ask, holding up one that has a black Perfect Blend logo on it.

“They’re coffee mugs, you’ve seen coffee mugs before.”

“Yeah, but why do none of them match?”

He scrunches up his nose. “Why would they? How do you know whose cup is whose if they are all the same? That one is actually Duckie’s. I stole it. It’s bigger than my other ones. Don’t let him see it when he gets here.”

I put it at the back of the drawer and add in the others.

“Can we get custom wallpaper for the bedroom?” Harrison asks, turning the frame a little to the left and standing back to admire it.

“What’s wrong with the walls the way they are?”

“Nothing, no I mean of the art, we could get custom wallpaper made using all the sexy sketches then we can look at them all the time.”

I stare at him, watching his face, looking for any hint that he’s pulling my leg, but he grabs another box from the stack in the hall and starts unpacking his records onto the bookcase with not even the slightest hint of a smirk.

“Umm, even if we found a place willing to print and ship wallpaper like that, I don’t think we’ll be doing it.”

He pouts my way.

“But I love seeing cartoon Arlo in all those naughty positions.”

“And you can look at them anytime you like, in the sketchbook, that”s in the drawer, that now has a lock so that your sister’s kids don’t almost discover them and are scarred for life.”

“Okay, true. I do not want to have to explain those to my sister.”

The front door closes and in walks Beth, Harrison’s older sister.

“What do you have to explain to me?”

“Nothing,” we both reply, and she eyes us suspiciously. “Where are the kids?”

“They’re with Duckie. They found his stash of ducks and are creating a welcome army, I think they called it, for the new roommate.”

Harrison laughs.

“I don’t know if Ryan understands what he’s agreed to live with,” he says, placing his record player on the sideboard by the television. “Who wants to listen to some music?”

He pulls out a vinyl record and sets it to play, the second the music starts he’s holding an imaginary mic under his lips and he’s singing the opening for Bohemian Rhapsody.

Beth throws her bag onto the couch and joins him in singing along, the smile spreads across Harrison’s face and warmth floods my chest. They turn to face me, singing as they wave me over.

I shake my head. Harrison sideways steps toward me one arm stretched out, his fingers curling as if to entice me toward him, and it’s too fucking adorable to resist.

He holds out his invisible mic but instead of singing into it, I grab a spoon from the top drawer and hold it up and let rip.

We dance and sing around the apartment, finishing the song and falling back onto the couch exhausted, but happy.

“Thanks for helping,” I tell Beth, and she waves a hand my way.

“I was overdue for a visit with this one anyway,” she says, grabbing a box and starting to open the tape.

Harrison leaps up and takes it from her.

“Plus, you could never resist a chance to snoop through my things.”

“Please, it’s not like you have anything I haven’t seen before, we lived together for half your life.”

She goes to take the box back, but he moves it out of reach.

“What are smarts?” she asks, tilting her head to one side.

I follow her gaze to the box where, in Harrison”s handwriting, SMART is written on all sides.

“It’s nothing, bedroom stuff, boy stuff, you don’t want to open it, trust me,” Harrison says, moving toward the bedroom.

“You could have just said it was underwear, bro. No need to go into details.” Beth laughs, grabbing another box labeled records and adding to the stack Harrison already lined up on the bookshelf.

“What boy stuff?” I ask, and he shakes his head eyes wide, and I let it go. Whatever is inside can wait.

We finish unpacking everything else and unmake the boxes so they fit in the recycling bin downstairs, and Beth heads off to collect her kids. We’ll meet up for dinner later at Gordon’s.

“Okay, now it”s just us, what’s in the box?”

“Sexy Man art,” Harrison says, and I burst out laughing.

“Like porn?”

He shakes his head. “Your sexy man art. I ordered samples so we can see what customers are getting when they order.”

My publisher loved the second book, and with it coming so easy, the third and fourth practically wrote themselves and release dates for them are now set six months apart following Harrison’s book, which coincidentally is releasing on the same day as the final Banana Ball game of the season in October.

But it’s my new side hustle that has really taken off. Harrison set up an online shop for the naughty art, selling them as digital downloads and print-on-demand posters and cards. I was nervous at first that someone would discover it was me and my children’s book career would be in the toilet, but he created a whole identity for me separate from the children”s books. James Roe, our two last names are forever connected and attached to some of my favorite drawings of all time. The baseball poses still sell the best, but the hockey ones are inching toward the lead. I altered the ones with Harry and me in them to look less like us and more like no one in particular before they were uploaded, but we still have the originals of us locked away in my sketchbook drawer.

Harrison sets the box on the edge of the bed and opens it up. The box is full of small stacks and some cylinder rolls. Opening the first stack, I smile, the art is perfect, crisp, clear, and really fucking hot. Harrison unrolls one of the posters from a tube and hip-bumps me.

“Check us out,” he says, and my stomach drops. Fuck, we didn”t upload the wrong image, did we? I look over and it’s not us. It is, but it isn’t. The art is one of the originals I drew of us, but I redrew it with different heads. He just has it still rolled up, hiding the heads so that he’s just looking at where his crouched ass is popped out, sucking me off on the pitch of a baseball field. My cock twitches.

“How long until dinner?”

Harrison drops the poster into the box, turns, and wraps his large arms around me.

“What did you have in mind?”

“It is the official first day living together.”

He glances down at the stack of art in the box. “Pick a card and let’s celebrate.”