Page 34 of Sizzle

I’m amused by the question, by this whole charade, since I know damn well he’s sitting there looking at the ass end of my car in the driveway.

“I did. Boring as always, but the food was good this time.”

“Nice.”

A beat of silence. I wait it out, because he’s obviously got something on his mind.

Three guesses what.

“About Joelle,” he says finally.

“What about her?” I’m suddenly glad he decided not to have this conversation face to face. I can’t think about the woman without getting hard and this is no exception. I lay a palm over my stirring dick.

He’s quiet for a minute.

“I really like her, man,” he says in a low voice.

Shit.

“I really like her, too,” I tell him, because lying is not what we do. Maybe I can’t always tell him everything, but I don’t lie to Elliot. Not ever.

“I know,” says Elliot on a choked laugh. “I caught that.” His voice has dropped and my cock fills, rising fast now.

“I won’t get in your way,” he says. “It might fucking kill me, but if I can’t be with her, it should be you.”

“I can’t do that to you, Elliot.” Much as I want Joelle, Elliot is too important to me to risk losing him.

“The other night—” he says.

Finally. The goddamn elephant in the room. I have absolutely no idea where he’s going with this but I can already tell I’m going to be in for one hell of a cold shower when it’s over.

“That was fucking hot.”

I frown at him through the window even as my dick jumps. Whatever I thought he was going to say, that wasn’t it.

“I thought you’d be mad,” I say slowly. Elliot laughs a little.

“I thought so too,” he says. “Weird, huh?”

It is, but maybe no weirder than what we did in the first place. I stroke an idle hand across my erection.

“She’s something else,” I venture.

“You don’t know the half of it, bro,” says Elliot. I can hear the smile in his voice, and it makes me turn back to the window. I can just barely make out his face in the light from his phone and the dash of his car.

“She’s going to single-handedly save Duckbill, did I tell you that?”

“The food’s that good?”

“It’s that good. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have much hope. Jimmy and I ran the numbers this weekend,” he sighs, the smile I heard before gone. “Barring some miracle, we’re probably going to have to shut down before New Year’s.”

Shit. It’s going to break his heart, closing that place. I say the first thing I can think of that might cheer him up.

“Joelle looked pretty miraculous the other night.”

Elliot’s breath catches, and I can’t stop myself from adding, “At least, that’s the way it looked to me. Maybe you had a better view of things.”

For a moment, all I hear is Elliot’s breath picking up speed.