Take the Edge Off by TA Moore

Author:TA Moore [Moore, TA]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: gay romance
ISBN: 978-1-64405-179-5
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2019-06-11T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

THE ENVELOPE sat in the middle of the coffee table. It looked innocuous, brown and wrinkled at the edges, but they both knew it wasn’t. Neither of them wanted to look at it. Joe, at least, was tired of plain brown envelopes that threatened to ruin his life. He thought briefly about the coolness in Cal’s eyes when he handed the envelope over—“it’s all there”—but he couldn’t dwell on that with something like panic.

“Kris,” he said. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

She looked at her nails and picked at the cuticle on her index finger. When she was younger, she bit them down to the quick—Joe had seen the pictures—but she’d broken herself of the habit. Ladies, she told him once in her sour impersonation of her dad’s pompousness, don’t have ugly hands. Now she picked at them instead.

“I don’t like him,” she said.

“You don’t have to.” Joe walked over to the whiskey and tapped his finger against the bottle. Too early to drink or did the fact he needed a drink make it a bad idea whatever time it was. “You should go home.”

“You’re my home.”

Hell.

Joe twisted the top off the whiskey and poured a finger’s worth into a tumbler. There was no ice, but neat would do what he needed it to.

“Stop it, Kris,” he said. “This isn’t going to work. What did you think was going to happen? That you’d pay off my driver and I’d have to ask you to chauffeur me around? Then we’d be stuck in traffic so long I’d fall back in love with you? There are Ubers in London, you know, and taxis.”

She muttered something that he didn’t catch. Joe took a swig of whiskey and then turned to look at her.

They’d known each other their whole lives, in the way that rich kids from the same city did. His best friend had dated her younger sister. They’d both driven down to a mutual friend’s Halloween party in Balboa Park every year, and they both had issues with their families. Not friends, but they’d known each other in passing.

Joe asked her out the first time because a friend had walked in on him and a man whose name Joe had never learned, half-naked in the back seat of a Hummer. He’d thought he could make himself what everyone wanted, and she was the first step.

It wasn’t fair to either of them.

“I don’t want to get married, Kris,” he said.

“We don’t have to,” she said as she got to her feet. “If you’ve got cold feet, if that’s what this is about, we can put the wedding off for now. Go back to how we were.”

“I don’t want to.”

She flung her hands up in frustration. “Why not?” she demanded. “We’re good together, Joe. We have fun, the papers all want our pictures, our parents are happy. I know we weren’t… you know… passionate, but we were happy. So why not?”

It had been good, and Joe had thought it would be good enough.

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