Liability (Suncoast Society #33)(49)

“Okay.” He looked at Kim. “I guess we need another FetLife status update.”

Another thumbs-up.

This time, the men curled up on either side of her as they tried to go to sleep.

“Oh, yeah,” Cole said. “This is what I meant. This is perfect.”

“Yeah,” Mason said. “You’re right. It is.” And considering he had a hellacious downtime coming up shortly, he wanted every last minute of perfection he could get. The week before the downtime, he would hardly have any time with the two of them, and he’d soak up every available second with them now.





Chapter Nineteen


It was almost midnight Thursday night. Mason was not only exhausted, he was extremely sleep-deprived. The planned downtime, that should have had him going home by noon after getting to work at one a.m. Thursday morning, had gone sideways, hard, without lube or a kiss. A process that they hadn’t expected to goof up borked their whole scheduled plan when a database server randomly and coincidentally crashed and created a cascade effect from hell.

Mason was now at about twenty-six hours since he’d gotten any sleep.

When he pulled into his parking space at the condo he sat behind the wheel for a moment before he realized he needed to shut the damn car off and go inside or he was going to fall asleep right there.

Doing that took some brain power he wasn’t even sure he possessed. Finally, he got the ignition turned off, managed to snag the handle of his messenger bag that he used as a briefcase, and began to trudge his way toward the front door.

Lock it, *.

He held up his left hand, where he held his keys, and hit the button.

After accidentally setting off the car’s panic alarm, which woke him up, he turned and got that shut off and hit the lock button on the key fob.

“Mase!”

He squinted in the darkness as he spotted someone hurrying toward him, and it took him right up until the person was about ten feet away to finally realize who it was.

Maybe I fell asleep and this is a nightmare. “Freddie?”

“I’ve been waiting hours for you! Where were you?”

Nope, after squeezing his eyes tightly shut and opening them again, there stood Freddie.

“What are you doing here?”

Freddie had looked like he was trying to swoop in for a hug, but at that tone, definitely tired and aggravated Dom tone, the younger man pulled up short. “Aren’t you happy to see me? I wanted to surprise you. Where were you?”

“I am sooo not in the mood for this,” Mason said as he started to turn and head for his front door.

“But aren’t you going to invite me in? I’ve been waiting for you. For hours!”

Mason wheeled around. “Why, Freddie? Why have you been waiting for me for hours when you didn’t even know when the hell I’d be home? That’s just stupid!”

He realized he was yelling when Freddie recoiled.

He also realized he didn’t care.

“Because when we’ve been talking,” Freddie said, “you said you usually get off work around six. I was going to surprise you.”

Mason stared at him for a breath or two. If he didn’t get inside and horizontal in the next few minutes, he was going to keel over where he stood.

I’m nearly forty-five. I’m too old for this f*cking shit.

The work bullshit and the relationship bullshit. “I have been at work for over twenty-four hours. I’m tired, I’m worn out, I’m aggravated as hell, and I need to go to sleep.”

He once again turned to go.

That’s when Freddie caught him by the arm. “Please? I just want to come in and see you. I waited all this time for you. I haven’t seen you in nearly six months and—”

Mason wasn’t sure when he’d dropped his stuff, but the next thing Mason knew, he’d also yanked his arm free of the other man’s hand, turned, and was shoving Freddie down the sidewalk. “Do you no longer comprehend English? I said I’m tired, and I never asked you to wait for me. Had you said you were going to, I would have said absolutely not. In fact, forget you know where I live.” That had been a mistake for sure, giving Freddie his address in the first place when he moved.

Mason forced himself to stop moving and pulled his arms back, away from Freddie. “Get out of here!”

“Why are you being such an *? I love you and I want to be with you. That’s why I’m here!”

Nightmare. Has to be. That was the only logical explanation. The only thing that made a lick of sense.

The kid actually looked like his feelings were hurt.

“Let me get this straight. You show up at my door in the middle of the night when I’ve had zero f*cking sleep, after the single most horrible day of work in my damn life, and you expect me to, what, take you inside and make love to you or something? All I want to f*cking do is go to sleep.”

From the look on Freddie’s face, he could tell that’s exactly what the kid had hoped.

Mason shook his head. “Unbef*ckinglievable. So you thought you’d just visit and drop by unannounced and—”

“I’m not visiting. I moved down here.”

Mason’s mouth snapped shut as he attempted to process that. “What?”

“I moved down here to be with you. I wanted to surprise you.”