Page 88 of Code Word
“I wish I knew. I wish we hadn’t missed out on the last decade.”
He shook his head, sad, pensive. “Nah. If we had, maybe it wouldn’t have worked out. Maybe it would have ended terribly because we were young and stupid.”
I sighed and took the ice pack off my knee. “Now I’m just old and stupid.”
“Twenty-eight isn’t old,” he said, unscrewing the cap off the jar.
We both recoiled at the smell. “Jesus. The fuck is that?”
Luke held his nose with one hand and read the label. “Ingredients: ointment, dirty feet, and unwashed assholes.”
I laughed. “Smells like it.”
Luke smeared some of the goopy terribleness onto his fingers, then proceeded to rub it on my knee. “This feel okay?”
I nodded, taken aback by his gentleness, his surety. “Yeah,” I whispered. Now, over the last ten years, we’d rubbed heat gel on knees, shoulders, backs. We’d massaged each other’s sore and tired muscles; we’d learned enoughphysical therapy over the grueling years to help out. But this felt different.
A tenderness he’d never shown me before.
It struck me, right in the solar plexus. This man, my best friend, the one person on the planet who made me feel peace.
“Here,” he said, pulling his shirt over his head. Then he wrapped the shirt around my knee like a bandage and tucked it all in so it held. “So you don’t ruin the sheets.”
“Ruined your shirt though.”
He looked at the shirt, then at me. “It was your shirt anyway. I took that out of your dirty-clothes pile about five years ago.”
I laughed. “Thought it could have been familiar.”
“I dunno where my wardrobe ends and yours begins, to be honest. If I see it in the laundry?—”
I took his face in my hands and kissed him, soft and sweet. “Like I said before, everything I have is yours. And I like you wearing my clothes.”
He blushed and the smile he gave me made my heart squeeze, but he was holding his hands out kinda weird. “I need to wash my hands. I have that nasty stuff all over.”
“Ointment, dirty feet, and assholes,” I said.
“It was unwashed assholes,” he amended as he got up. He took the ice pack to the sink and washed his hands before I heard him duck up the stairs.
I turned to scope out the stairs, dreading even the thought of it. There was no way I was climbing those...
The couch was comfy enough. I’d certainly slept on worse. I was patting and plumping one of the cushions when Luke came back down. He was carrying the bed cover and a pillow. “Figured you weren’t up for climbing the stairs,” he said.
“You read my mind.”
“Get yourself comfortable,” he said, dumping the bedding on the coffee table, then switching the lights off. The moon outside gave us enough light to see.
I lay down on the sofa, careful with my knee. “Hey, do you remember the first place we all lived together? That couch? A box of nails woulda been more comfy than that.”
Luke took the blanket and laid it over me. “Of course I remember. We shared a room. How could I forget?” He took the pillow and propped it under my head, and when he sat on the edge of the sofa, his smile was kinda sad. “Best and worst years of my life. God, remember when we shared that double bed for a time. That was torture. I spent many nights telling myself that wanting to jump your bones was just hormones and nothing else, wondering what it’d be like to wake up in your arms.”
I slid my arm around his waist and pulled him backward. “Well, you don’t have to wonder anymore. You’re sleeping here with me tonight.”
He chuckled. “On this couch? Will we fit?”
I pulled the blanket up and he got himself situated, careful of my knee, of course. My arm under his neck and my other arm around his middle. It was snug and neither of us was rolling over in a hurry, but it was awesome.
“Perfect,” I murmured, kissing the back of his head.
