“Who the hell is calling at this ungodly hour?” he growled at me. “And do you not have a Do Not Disturb setting on your phone?”
“I do, actually,” I told him, getting out of bed, finding my jeans and pulling the phone from the back pocket. Of course it was my brother Tiernan. No one else called over and over; everyone else left a message. “What?” I growled at him, putting him on speaker.
“Are you home?”
“Why?”
“Because I just checked your location on my phone and it says you’re at your house.”
I really needed to remember to stop sharing my location with him, and everyone else in my family, when I was working. “Yeah. So?”
“So, it’s Sunday, dickhead. You better get your ass over to your mother’s house for fuckin’ dinner like all the rest of us.”
“No—I just got back from Portland and I’m tired, and I’m still workin’ so I have Benji with me and––”
“Benji?”
God help me.
“Who the hell is Benji?”
“He’s the guy I went to protect who’s with me now.”
“With you? Like, you brought him home with you?”
“Yeah,” I answered, barely awake.
“Like you brought him home to protect him or you brought him home ’cause you like him and he’s your guy?”
Leave it to Tiernan to always, always, drive right to the heart of the matter.
“He’s my guy,” I replied, my voice thick with emotion.
“I’m your guy?” Benji asked from the bed.
“Yeah, you’re my guy,” I snapped at him, glowering for good measure, annoyed that he didn’t know that already and at my stupid brother for calling. “Isn’t that what we said before we did…what we did?”
“Yes, it was,” he agreed, smiling at me like he was about to swoon.
“So, are we good now, or are you confused about something?”
“Oooh, remind me never to wake you out of a dead sleep. You’re kind of a douche.”
“I’m tired,” I growled.
“Clearly,” he agreed.
I growled at him again.
“So you’ve got a guy? Is that what I’m hearing?” Tiernan was clarifying like he always did.
“Of course that’s what you’re hearing, because that’s what we just said,” I barked at him. “Now get off the phone. I’m not coming to dinner. We’re exhausted and we have jet lag.”
“I don’t mind,” Benji chimed in, still smiling like he was lobotomized, lost in what I could only assume was a postcoital sex fog. “I would love to meet your family.”
“Oh, I heard that,” Tiernan crowed. “He wants to meet your family. That’s a good fuckin’ sign, right there.”
“We’re not coming. I’m dead on my feet.”
“Yeah, I don’t give a shit. I’ll tell everybody you’re comin’ and you’re bringing your guy. They’re gonna be ecstatic.”
“Could you maybe not do that?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
I muttered under my breath.
“You better not be takin’ the Lord’s name in vain on the goddamn sabbath.”
“Do you even listen to yourself when you talk?”
“Are you drunk?”
“No, I just told you I’m tired,” I whined.
“Just shower, get all the jizz off, and get over here. Can’t wait to meet your guy,” he said and hung up.
I turned my head to look at Benji, who seemed very much awake and alert and ten times more cognizant of the world around him than I was.
“We should stop and get a bottle of wine or something,” he suggested.
“I wanted to sleep with you some more.”
“Baby, we can sleep later. I want to meet your mother.”
“Yeah, but it’s not gonna be only her.”
Judging by the way he jumped out of bed, I didn’t think he was listening to me.
It took us half an hour to get from Lincoln Park out to North Riverside, which, I explained to him, was amazing.
“Why?” Benji asked, holding the bottle of red wine he’d picked out for my parents. I had insisted we didn’t need anything, but he had been adamant about not going empty-handed.
“Because this is Chicago, so there’s always traffic,” I assured him.
It was so strange to be home, with him, after being away for only forty-eight hours. It felt like a dream, but not in a good way. I felt disoriented, unbalanced. Not that I wasn’t happy to have Benji there with me, but it was fast, too fast. I needed to stop and process. I wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment guy, even if my present situation suggested otherwise.
“What’s wrong?” he asked me, slipping a hand around my wrist when I parked my Ford F-150 SuperCrew a half block from the house.
“This doesn’t all feel fast to you?”
“Everything feels fast,” he apprised me with a grin. “But I’ve basically been on this ride since I met you.”
“You have?”
He nodded.
“Did I rush you into all this?” I asked, worried.
“No,” he promised, stroking the underside of my wrist with his thumb. “But one second I was alone—even with Sian and Delly there, I was—and the next moment you were there, larger than life, making me safe, but more importantly, making me feel safe.”