“I only saw you.”
“Sap,” I said, even though it made me feel warm. “Probably because you were breaking my heart.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Mine too. But do you remember what I said?”
But you have to believe me that it’s always been you. I promise. I promise. I promise, because when I look upon these stars, there is nothing I wish for more than you.
“I remember,” I said. As if I could ever forget. As if those words weren’t etched upon my very soul. “That was… smooth. In retrospect. At the time, I thought you were an asshole, but now? Way to go.”
He chuckled. “I am pretty good.”
“Mostly.”
He sobered when he said, “I meant it, Sam. Every word. It’s always been you for me. I loved you even before I knew what it meant. That’s why.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
“Good. Also, I feel it should be said that I will still stab Ruv if he so much as looks at you funny. That’s not jealousy. It’s practicality. And I just don’t like his face.”
“Eh,” I said. “I’ll allow it.”
He leaned in and kissed me, slow and sweet as molasses. And I took everything he was giving me and gave back as much as I could. Because that’s what we did for each other. He might have been my cornerstone, but I wanted to be the same for him, even if he didn’t have the magic I did.
“It’s going to be all right, you know?” he said. “You’ll see. Everything is going to be just fine. I promise.”
And I believed him.
Chapter 8: Getting Bad-Touched by Grandma
“SO,” RANDALL said. “You decided to stop being a chickenshit and face your destiny like a real man?”
I looked at Ryan. “Is it too late to go back into our sex den?”
He made a face at me. “Yes, because you called it a sex den.”
“That’s what it is,” I muttered.
It was the next day after the shirtless pull-up contest, and Ryan had forced me out of the room, with no amount of promises of unlimited blowjays dissuading him from dragging me back out into the real world to face all the problems I would rather ignore. He had training to go to, and I had people to studiously avoid while I made my way down to the labs.
The problem with that was Randall loitering outside of the throne room. He had feigned surprise at running into us (“Oh, well, isn’t this positively fortuitous!”), which led me to believe he’d been waiting for us, like some old crazed stalker wanting to drag us to his basement where he’d dug a hole to keep us in. Knowing Randall, that wasn’t probably too far from the truth. I was convinced that one day, we would either finally understand each other or one of us would murder the other. I was leaning toward the murder side.
“Both of you need to follow me,” Randall said.
“That’s ominous,” Ryan said. “Please don’t hex me.”
“He’s going to put us in his hole,” I hissed at Ryan.
“He’s going to put us where?”
“No, not like that. Gross! Get your mind of the gutter.”
“I wasn’t even thinking about that until you said it!”
“Oh, so now you’re blaming me for your depraved mind? I’ll have you know I was innocent until I met you!”