Page 56 of Say It Again

“Dammit, Aaron!”

Aaron’s blinking doubled.

“The party.” Back to the pacing. “Is that something you do frequently? How often are you working parties like that?”

Aaron hesitated, then continued slowly, “So, most of the time—”

“Oh my God, read the room! Why on earth would I want to know that?”

Aaron scratched the back of his head as he licked his lips and whispered, “I’m sorry, kid. I’m not sure what we’re doing here.”

“We’re talking! Clearly. Final question. So what happens if you start to fall for one of them? For one of your clients.”

“Start to f—? Wait.” Aaron halted, eyeing him. “Before I continue, do you want me to answer?”

Daniel squinted. What the hell kind of question was that? “Duh.”

“Sweetheart, you have to understand something. I’ve been doing this a long time. I have boundaries in place. I don’t stay the night with clients. I don’t do overnight trips. I’ve never developed feelings for one of them. That’d be ridiculous.”

“But what if it does happen?” He bounced a little. “Boundaries slip sometimes. What if it does?”

“Look at me.” Aaron leaned over his knees again and held his gaze. “You. You, you, you, Daniel Greene, of all people, have nothing to worry about.”

He had a way of saying things, didn’t he? It wasn’t that it was perfect. It was that it felt unforced, reassuring. It felt real. Words like that could be life-changing in the right context.

Daniel sat down, then stood up too fast, because he had something to declare. But what? What would he declare? He sat down again because he’d gotten dizzy on the stand. Then he stood back up. Since there was nothing to declare, he sat down, only to stand again. Aaron’s eyes moved like the puck on a high striker at a carnival, following his posture as it continued to ping up and down and back again.

Decisions were not his specialty. It wasn’t that he was bad at them. It was that he was so bad. So, so fucking bad. Since he was a little kid, he’d struggled to get the two sides of his brain to agree on whether a decision was worth the calculated risk or doomed to fail. For someone so palsy-walsy with failure, he sure feared it.

“I’m tired.” He finally collapsed into the seat with a sigh and squashed the urge to breakdance out of the room. “I’m tired of being this person who overthinks everything to death. What if we just tried?”

“Tried… to date?”

“Tried to be together.” He pursed his lips and shrugged. “Tried on a trial basis to be together.”

Aaron’s eyes danced as the corners of his mouth curled. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” That’s always the risk you take when you finally find someone worth liking. “I want to try.”

Aaron grinned, hesitantly reaching for him. “I think it’s a great—”

“But I don’t want to talk about it!” He flailed his arms in the air, which, at least poor Aaron was quick at ducking. “About what you do. At least until I can wrap my head around it. Does that work for you?”

“Sure. Sure, no problem.” It looked like Aaron was trying to decide which angle might be best to get a little closer without getting whacked. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

“And you have to promise you’ll tell me!” Daniel’s flapping had probably gotten predictable by that point, because Aaron was able to grasp his hands and pin them to his lap. “If you start to have feelings for a client, you have to tell me. You have to.”

“Kid.” Aaron squeezed his hands when they tried to jolt into action. “Nothing like that is going to happen.”

He clutched Aaron’s hands back, hard enough for his knuckles to turn white. “Please. Promise I’ll be the first to know. Do me that kindness.”

Aaron slow-blinked as if attending a feral feline, carefully lifting one of Daniel’s hands to his mouth for a kiss. “I promise.”

Someone worth liking. He crashed into Aaron’s chest, letting his bones go limp in his arms, the weight of the evening and the decision pooling heavy beneath his skin as Aaron rubbed his back in slow circles. It was like his nerves got to slip back into their cocoons until the next crisis.

“I’ll be so good to you,” Aaron whispered, pulling them up to a stand where he swayed them back and forth. “So, so good to you. I’ll take care of you. Has anyone ever taken care of you?”

No. He couldn’t quite fathom what that meant, so he said, because it was what people said in the movies, “I can take care of myself.” Then because that didn’t feel wholly true, he followed up with, “Well, most of the time. At least some of the time. When the occasion calls for it.”