“I’m a big boy,” Carter said, bumping his pelvis pointedly against Jeff’s. “I can handle it.”
Jeff fought the urge to look down. He was afraid if he moved everything on the stove would boil over.
But Carter interrupted his train of thought with a tilt of his head. “Everything okay with Trix? Things seemed kind of tense onstage last night.”
Of course Carter picked up on that. Jeff sat on one of the kitchen stools and hooked his feet on the bar underneath it. “She didn’t exactly ask me if it was okay to make me play a song I’d written that she found in my notebook when I foolishly left it in her grasp.”
“What?Crap.” The pasta pot boiled over. Carter took the lid off and turned the heat down, then stirred frantically until the danger passed. “What the hell, Jeff?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said too.” He shook his head. “She came to apologize and… explain, I guess. There were mitigating circumstances. It still wasn’t okay, butwe’reokay.”
Carter still looked a bit like he wanted to chase Trix down and defend Jeff’s honor, or the honor of his song, but he let it slide. “If you say so.”
“I do.”
Which brought Jeff to his next topic of conversation. “So listen… you can say no.”
With a soft-focused look nonetheless sharp enough to cut right through Jeff’s bullshit, Carter said, “Can I, though?” Then he switched the burner off on the pasta sauce and the pasta. “What am I allowed to say no to?”
Jeff cleared his throat. “Well, you have your laptop now. And you have the go-ahead to work from home for a little while….”
Carter drained the pasta. When he’d finished and Jeff still hadn’t gone on, he prompted, “You know you have to actually ask me something in order to give me the opportunity to say yes or no, right?”
“Come on tour with me,” Jeff blurted.
Carter sloshed a few penne noodles over the side of the strainer onto the floor. “Seriously?”
“Maybe not the whole tour,” Jeff backpedaled. “I mean, you’d be welcome. But at least to Vancouver and Victoria. It’s beautiful, and you—”You need a vacation.Nope, if he framed it like that, Carter would find a way to back out. “Maybe it’s selfish of me,” he said instead. “But I’m not ready to let you out of my sight yet if I don’t have to. I can have my travel agent book you on our flights.”
Carter left the pasta in the strainer and turned around to face Jeff. “You don’t think I’ll be a distraction?”
“You’ll definitely be a distraction,” Jeff said wryly. “But maybe not a bad one.” He fought the urge to look down at his hands and mostly managed to meet Carter’s gaze. “We’re gonna write another album. I don’t know what we’re going to do about recording or producing yet. I hate our label. But writing would be a lot more fun with a muse around, so….”
He didn’t know why he felt so vulnerable—it wasn’t like Carter didn’t know that song was for him. But he still didn’t relax until Carter dumped the penne into the sauce, stepped across the kitchen, and cupped his face to kiss him. “I have to double-check with work,” he said when he pulled back, “make sure there’s no weird tax thing. But if they say it’s okay… then yeah. Why not?”
Jeff grinned. “Really?”
Carter kissed him again. “Really.”
Okay. That gave Jeffoptions. That gave him time. That gave him….
An erection. Okay, it was Carter kissing him again—his cheekbone and then his dimple and then his ear and then his neck—that was doing that.
“Hey,” Jeff said, suddenly finding himself sitting on his own kitchen table, “pasta reheats well, right?”
Carter laughed against his mouth and let himself be led to the bedroom.
LESSON FIVE
Decide Who You Want to Be
TYPICAL SELF-ABSORBEDadvice from a rock star—50 percent of a relationship’s success is up to you. Which begs the question: Who are you?
That summer, I hardly knew. Was I the kid who’d left town at fifteen and never looked back? Or the exhausted thirty-year-old who crawled home to lick his wounds?
Was I the frontman of Howl, the rock star, the guy in the band? Or was I a budding solo artist?
Most of the time I didn’t even know which of those guys Iwantedto be, so I focused on being Jeff the boyfriend. (Don’t do that. It’s stupid.)
