Theo really was too smart for his own good. Ollie pressed his thumb into the arch of Ty’s foot.
A barely perceptible shudder went through Ty’s body, and then he went a little limp. After a deep, gusty sigh, he gave Ollie a heavy-lidded look.
Maybe the foot rub should wait until after Theo had gone to bed.
When he had—when they’d turned the game off and fended off complaints, and when Ollie had enforced the “ten more minutes of reading” bedtime rule and was sure Theo was sound asleep—Ollie coaxed Ty into his bedroom and spent half an hour getting a crash course in blow jobs.
Neither of them made a move to get up afterward; they simply lay together in the soft blue of twilight, Ty scratching his fingers over Ollie’s scalp while Ollie lolled on his chest, feeling like an indulgent cat.
“You’re not going to tell me what you were doing today, are you?” Ty said after a long, pleasant silence.
Ollie turned his head enough to press a kiss to his sternum. “Not today. That all right?” He lifted his gaze.
“The suspense is killing me.” But he made the complaint around a yawn, and there was a smile under that.
Good. Maybe that would keep him from worrying about Saturday.
Ty’s nails skittered down Ollie’s scalp to his nape. “You going back to your room?”
Ollie should. God knew the last thing Ty needed was one of Ollie’s PTSD nightmares to worry about. “In a minute.”
“Hmm. ’Kay.”
Neither of them moved until morning.
Chapter 20
WHEN HEwas very young, Ty loved the freedom that came with the end of the school year. It meant pool parties at his friends’ houses and long days riding his bike around town, nights stargazing with his mother on the back deck, state fairs and ice cream and sleepovers.
Then his mother died and Ty was shipped off to boarding school, and suddenly summer break meant long months alone in an empty dormitory, knocking out the requirements to graduate early because he needed something to occupy his time or he’d lose his mind.
The relief and joy Ty felt on Friday when the last bell went and he never had to be a teacher again was like being a little kid times one million—magnified to the power of no more marking ever, divided by the number of times Ty would have to ask a kid to stop chewing gum in class.
“Why do you look like that?” Henry teased as they packed up the last of their things in the athletic office. “Did you hate the kids that much?”
“I love kids,” Ty said seriously. “But teaching is fucking bullshit.”
Henry snorted. “Amen to that.”
“Long hours. Low pay. Administrators.” Ty shuddered, and he and Henry said together, “Parents.”
They laughed as the athletic office door closed behind them.
“So you’re really going back to Chicago?”
Ty glanced at him. He was serious, but also just curious. “That was always the plan.”
“Sure, sure.” Behind them the hallway lights were flickering off for the last time this school year. Their footsteps echoed. “But plans change.”
Subtle the man was not. “Say what you want to say, Henry.”
“All right.” He paused at the heavy exterior fire door. Bright sunshine poured through the narrow rectangular windows. “You could have a life here if you wanted it. I know you think you have to go back to Chicago because—I don’t know. But you don’t. You can choose.”
Ty swallowed.
He wanted that promotion. He’d worked for it for years. Being a paramedic gave him something to cling to when the world didn’t make sense. These past few weeks, living in his father’s house, hearing his ghost list Ty’s failures one after the other, sometimes echoed by the town’s other residents, he’d clung to that job.
The job that said he did something right. He did something important. The job that recognized him for it.
