Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(44)

He blinked, scrubbing a hand through his tousled hair. “You . . . you asked me to respect you. Which I do, I’m just trying to—”

“Oh really?” I gave him a derisive sneer as I threw wadded clothes into my bags and began slamming about, looking for odds and ends I might have missed. “That’s what you call this? You offer to put me up like your personal rentboy in some no-tell motel and promise to drop by every few days for a booty call while your wife’s in town, and you think that’s not demeaning? Well, f*ck you.”

“What do you expect me to do? Toss you out on your ass?”

I paused to give him a long, injured look. “At least that would have been honest.”

“So, according to you, discarding you like I don’t give a shit is less demeaning than trying to take care of you.”

He folded his arms across his chest, leaning a bare shoulder against the door jamb. He was positioning himself like he was looking down at me, like he was the only reasonable one, patiently and maturely waiting out my tantrum, and I f*cking hated him for it. Condescending jackass.

“I never asked you to take care of me! This? This is exactly what I didn’t want. You promised me . . .” I shook my head, my eyes burning as I turned my attention back to packing. I jerked the zipper of my suitcase so hard I’m surprised I didn’t pull the damn tab off. “Let’s be honest, hmmm? You’re not trying to take care of me, you’re trying to take care of you. You want to have your respectable, white-bread, married, straight family life as well as your faggy brown boy toy on the side, and seriously? Fuck that shit. I trusted you, Brendan! I trusted you to respect me enough not to pull something like this, not to try to keep me dangling along so you could have it both ways without giving up anything.”

He gave me an incredulous look. “You want me to give up my family?”

“No! But you don’t get to have it all. None of us do. We agreed that this was wrong. We agreed that we needed to stop. We’ve been clear on that from the very beginning. Why couldn’t you just have left it at that?”

“So you’re upset that I didn’t dump you?”

Fucking hell, how did this once-intelligent man become so damned clueless?

“Oh, for f*ck’s sake, get over yourself! Hate to break it to you, boyfriend, but you are not all that. I’m upset because you think you can play games with me, and that is so not going to happen. I’m f*cking better than that!”

He rubbed his forehead as though he had a headache brewing. “I don’t understand you, Topher. I don’t get why you’d think I was doing that.”

“Yeah, well there’s your first problem. You don’t get it. You can’t even see what you did. You’re going to sit here today and you’re going to convince yourself that you were right and I was unreasonable and you won’t even think about what you just tried to make me into.” I hauled my backpack over my shoulder, then the strap of my laptop case. The strap of my duffel bag hung over those two and f*ck did all that weight on my shoulder hurt. I wheeled my suitcase behind me, my progress awkward, bulky, and off-balance, and glared at Brendan until he stepped aside to let me bump down the stairs. I’d have to make another trip for my keyboard, damn it. “But hey, it’s not my problem, now. You think what you want. I’m gone.”

He sighed and reached for my suitcase. “Will you at least let me help you down the stairs?”

“Fuck off.” I’d rather break my neck than let him give me a second of assistance.

“Topher, come on!” Now he sounded annoyed, and seriously, f*ck him, he didn’t get to be pissy over this. I turned around and gave him a withering look.

“Be sure you clear the lube out of the bedside table before you bang your wife in that room. It’s a dead giveaway.”

I knew he must have been watching me from the house as I stacked my shit in my car, but he didn’t try to talk to me again when I made my second trip to get my keyboard. Feeling his gaze on me, I kept my head down and refused to wipe my eyes until after I’d driven away.





Give me one good reason

That I should let you stay

That I shouldn’t walk away

And cry me a f*cking river

You can’t deliver anything but pain

—Casey Stratton, “Congratulations”

“Well, look at it this way,” Robin reasoned as I sat with him and Geoff at their kitchen table that night, half-plastered from the pitcher of margarita they’d blended up. Was I going to have a tequila hangover in the morning? Oh, honey, you bet your sweet ass I was. And how many f*cks did I give?

Not a one.

“Even if you were overreacting to read what you read into this guy’s offer—which I don’t think you were, though I doubt he actually thought it through enough to intend it to be read that way—you still have to ask yourself: What’s in it for you, hanging around some motel room waiting for a married man to make a booty call? What benefit would you get out of that situation, or out of prolonging your relationship with him? He might not have meant it to be an insulting offer, but it was absolutely a one hundred percent selfish offer. There was no upside for you whatsoever, unless the sex really was just that amazing.”

I shook my head before taking another drink, then shrugged morosely as more lime-flavored bliss washed over my tongue. “Eh. It was good, but not good enough for that.”