The One Decent Thing (Santa Rafaela, #1)

by Eliot Grayson

Poor kid. He didn’t know it, but right now he was my everything: my lifeline, my only friend, my only connection to the real world. I had to hide that; I had to play it a little bit cool. That was a metric fuck-ton of bullshit to put on one person who really didn’t owe me anything and hardly even knew me.

“I don’t like mushrooms,” I called after him, as he disappeared down the hall. “I knew you were an asshole,” his voice floated back.

Because it was starting to be clear to me that Aidan might be physically a big, muscular brute, but emotionally…yeah, he was a big marshmallow.

“What…what the hell? Where did these…I mean…what? Do we have elves?” Today was Thursday, but the landscapers had come the week before. They hadn’t been here this morning. Had they? Why would they plant a rainbow? “Like, gay elves?”

it had gotten basically impossible for me to hide the sappy, dumbass, I’m having sex with him and he’s so pretty look on my face every time his name came up.

I had everything I’d never known I needed right there in bed with me.

Sebastian buried his face in my chest again, his breath coming in heaves. Did something? Cheated on me, knocked over a liquor store, joined the circus, broke the laws of physics by getting a top quark and a bottom quark to fuck, and now we were all going to die when the universe exploded?

“Dude? Really?” Aidan was a true product of southern California. He called me dude, he called his jacket dude, he called Rick dude — though only when Rick wasn’t in earshot. One time he’d called me ‘Dude, baby’ when he was drunk. Like, really? I was his boyfriend. I should be exempt. “Don’t you love me anymore?” “Cheap shot, dude-baby,” he said with a grin. God, he was so gorgeous when he smiled like that. It was so unfair. “I love you more than anything.”