Play by the Rules
Page 18
“Put that away. We’re in crisis mode here,” I said, stifling my laughter. But I did lean down and gave the tip of his cock a little kiss. “Sorry there, Joe Junior. We’ll have to pay attention to you some other time.”
“You know, it would have been so easy to just push you down a little farther. But I’m a gentleman, so I’ll keep that to my thoughts, instead.”
“My throat thanks you,” I muttered, looking back at my phone and scrolling down all the gossip rag sites. I sighed.
“I can do this. We can do this,” I said, emphasizing that we were in this together. I felt like it was more for my sake than his, that I was trying to cement everything through our words, actions and closeness.
“Even when I can’t be your sugar daddy anymore?” He joked. This time, I was the one who laughed.
“I wouldn’t take your money, anyway,” I said. “I have too much pride for that. Well, no I don’t, and I would definitely not mind having a sugar daddy, but I would rather have a boyfriend.”
“Good answer, Mister Yang. I approve,” Joe replied. “For the record, I would much rather have a boyfriend, too. Less fuss. Less mess. And we can still have the kind of sweaty locker room fun I once had, but with each other.”
“I’m not even joking when I say we need to definitely do that one day,” I said. Just the thought was enough to turn me on, but truthfully I had more pressing matters to attend to and other things I needed to discuss. “But probably not today. Today, we need to talk to someone about how to proceed with this. Am I going to get swarmed by paparazzi, I wonder?”
“I highly doubt it,” my quarterback deadpanned.
I fluttered my eyelashes at him. “But a guy can dream, right?”
Chapter Twenty
It turns out that Joe was right. I needn’t have worried.
He was turning out to be right on a lot of different things. I shouldn’t have been surprised.
The Stylish stood by my article. It wasn’t as though I was doing a hard-hitting exposé or some kind of investigative journalism. It was a couple of softball questions in what was otherwise a complete fluff piece made so that Joe Kaminski looked like a good guy. He already was, and he still is, so it wasn’t like there was some kind of intense, immense backlash to what I’d written.
His publicist had basically just said something to the effect of, “sleeping with someone you’re interviewing is completely unprofessional” and “don’t do it again” as though I was making a habit of fucking around on people. But that’s fine. She didn’t know me, and she didn’t know just how serious I was about Joe Kaminski.
In fact, in the past six months since becoming official, Joe and I were pretty much inseparable. There was still this tiniest part of me—one that I absolutely hated—waiting for the other shoe to drop. I don’t think it was really ever going to go away. My insecurities and my fears were pretty strong, but every day Joe was proving that he was true to his word.
It hadn’t taken long for Joe to tell me we should just move in together. It had only been, what, one month of dating—apart from when we weren’t official—for him to ask about it?
So now, here we were—at my apartment. If he were any other person, the warning bells would have resounded. But I knew he had a stable hold of his finances. He was never late with rent and we had our own income streams. He took a job as a coach of the local college’s team and was basically just doing it to fill in time. He was probably planning on buying more real estate and just renting it out to people, or something. I didn’t think to ask. We weren’t even one year into the relationship and we’d already broken a couple of rules.
Not that I expected any different.
What truly surprised me was that he wanted to share my cozy apartment, though. Maybe he was just trying to show that he was okay with the fact that I was trying to take things slow considering how quickly we got into something so domestic together. For the past couple of months, it seemed like he hadn’t wanted to stay in any of his own properties. Not his home in Anglo-Saxon suburbia, and definitely not his other apartments in the city. He decided to stay with me in my little hole-in-the-wall studio apartment because he liked how cozy it was. It was also probably much cheaper.
The truth was he was probably waiting for the right moment to tell me he wanted us to move to a bigger space. I’d seen him leaving a brochure or two by the nightstand and knew it was his way of considering maybe buying a new property together. I wanted to wait for him to bring it up because it seemed like we wouldn’t fit in this studio any longer. Besides, I liked the idea of us having a home office together. A big place was going to be hell to keep clean, though. Whatever the case, I didn’t want to think about that. What I did like thinking about was Joe and I, together in whatever our home could be.
It was nice to have someone with such a great head for his own finances. That was one of the reasons why I wasn’t worried. He was definitely the exception to the rules, and not the norm.
Today though, I was worried. I felt a lurching sensation in my stomach even as I sat beside Joe, whose shoulder was gently pressed against mine.
I think I’m going to be sick.
“Just relax,” Joe said. “If anything, I should be the one stressing out right now.”
“Yeah, I can’t believe just how calm you’re being,” I muttered underneath my breath, fidgeting. I adjusted the cuffs of my shirt for what seemed to be the hundredth time today.
I turned to look at him. He was as handsome as ever. This time, he looked casual in a pale pink button-up with the top button open. He was wearing gray slacks that made him look taller. He looked like the quintessential magazine model, truth be told, with his five o’clock shadow and debonair good looks. He’d gotten a haircut recently, too, and he had that kind of swoopy undercut that never lost its classic appeal. I had to adjust my thick, hipster glasses just to look at him more clearly.
Damn. I can’t get hard now. Emmett Yang, control your body!
I looked at him and tried to smile. “It’s not every day you meet the family for the first time. It’s a one-time thing. I just don’t want you to be overwhelmed.”
“So you’re the one doing that for me?” he said, raising his eyebrow.
I laughed, but it was a mirthless one. “Laugh it up now, but when my sister asks us if we’re tested and if we’ve been good about our sex lives because the risks of getting STI’s are a lot more prevalent in gay men, don’t come running to me.”
Oh, the perks of having a doctor for a sister. And a doctor for a friend. They always had some medical fact in their back pocket to shove in our face.
Joe laughed. “I don’t think it’s going to be that bad,” he said, shaking his head. “I think this is just going to be like the time I met your friends for the first time. Remember when Ysa got tongue-tied?”
That was a first. I actually smiled at the thought. “You’re the first person to ever make her lose her train of thought the way you did. That was amazing. It’s going to go down in history, I think.”
“I think it’s going to be like that,” Joe said, nodding. “Relax. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” He clasped his hand over mine, entwining our fingers.
It was these little gestures, these little moments, that really made the difference. I didn’t care about big, grand gestures. I mean, I appreciated them, but it was the way he looked at me and the way he held me that told me exactly how much I meant to him. I wanted to show him, every day, how much he meant to me, too.
“Okay, so just to quickly recap. Your mom is secretly a sweetheart but she’s very reserved. She’ll also probably have a lot of inappropriate questions that she’ll ask if she ever got us alone. Your sister is also reserved but she’s a lot more vocal about the health and well-being thing, being a doctor. One of your brothers is an alcoholic and will probably try to minister to me because he’s found Jesus after going to rehab. The other brother is cool, but he’ll probably be confused at the whole gay thing. Am I right so far?”
“And this niece of yours—this is your doctor-sister’s daughter, correct?”
Again, I nodded. “It sounds like you have it down pat. Oh! Confused-brother is bringing his wife and daughter, who are also cool. They’re both into the health and wellness thing. She just joined a gym.”
It was an afternoon I was not looking forward to at all, but I figured if anything, Joe could handle himself well. I would be clutching my pearls in the background, trying not to feel secondhand embarrassment from whatever it was my family decided to say.
But, well, as he was so fond of saying, Joe never played by the rules.
I didn’t need to worry about him. He would find a way to win my family’s heart, just as he won mine.
I didn’t say it often enough, but I knew in the bottom of my heart, that I loved him.
I loved Joe Kaminski. With every passing day, I was beginning to understand that he loved me, too. It might not have been vocalized often, but we would get there eventually.
And right now, that was all that truly mattered.
The End
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