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“I’ve met Jack before,” Wei said.
Harry’s eyes went round.
“I bought your teddy bear here,” Jack said, a smile tugging up the corners of his mouth.
“Oh!” Harry brightened. “They have teddy bears?”
“Why don’t we go and look at the flat first?” Leo suggested and ushered everyone up the stairs.
He wondered if between Tristan and his ambition to try everything in the shop, and Harry and his love of teddy bears, the place would be bankrupt in a month. Then he decided that was an overreaction. Neither of them would get past Wei.
He pushed open the door at the top of the stairs. “Here it is.”
When he got his first glimpse inside the flat, Harry stopped dead. “This is nice,” Harry said, a note of wonder in his voice. “Like, really nice.”
“I told you,” Tristan said as he leaned over and ruffled Harry’s hair affectionately. “I said it was nice and that Leo would take care of you.”
“Yeah, you did,” Harry admitted, stepping farther into the flat and wandering around the living area, taking everything in.
“Let me give you the tour,” Leo said. Harry and Jack followed him around as he pointed out the bedroom, bathroom and tiny second not-a-bedroom. “It’s only small.”
“But there’s no black mould or dodgy floorboards,” Jack pointed out. “It’s great.”
“And the rent’s really not any more than the other place?” Harry asked, because Harry and his insecurities came as a package deal.
“It’s actually a bit less,” Leo said, “since you’ve had to go to the trouble of moving.”
Harry beamed at him. Jack threw Leo a grateful smile and took Harry’s hand and tugged him downstairs. “Come on. Let’s get our stuff.”
Tristan wrapped an arm around Leo’s waist and pressed a kiss to his temple before saying “I don’t know how to break it to you, but you’re failing as a slumlord. You’re far too decent.”
“I don’t mind,” Leo said, leaning into the embrace. “Did you see how happy they were?”
“Mmm. Shall we help them unload? The sooner we’re done here, the sooner we can go back to your place.”
The thought of Tristan being at his flat and waking up next to him every morning filled Leo with joyous anticipation.
“Our place, you mean,” he corrected. Sure, it was a temporary arrangement, but Leo could pretend it was more, right? Tristan rewarded him with one of his dazzling smiles. Then he turned and cupped Leo’s face in his hands and drew him into a kiss that lasted right until they were interrupted by Jack and Harry clattering back up the stairs with their arms full of boxes.
“Is there a back door?” Harry asked. “This place is great, but I don’t want my preschoolers’ parents seeing me leaving a sex shop.”
“Yeah, I’ll show you the side door.” Leo suspected that Harry also didn’t want to walk past shelves full of dildoes and vibrators on his way to and from work each day. He got it. Hell, a few weeks ago he would have worried about it, too, and he didn’t have parents and the moral outrage to worry about. Well, except his own parents. They had plenty of moral outrage to go around. And he and Tristan were going to give it a real workout at the yacht club.
That thread of rebellion that had been twisted around in Leo’s stomach since Uncle Jimmy’s funeral? It was a core of steel now.
Or at least it would be, with Tristan by his side.
Chapter Seventeen
On the morning of the party, Tristan awoke in Leo’s very beige bedroom, stretched, and stared up at the ceiling. Then he turned his head and squinted at the window. Bright sunlight was slanting through the blinds. It promised to be a lovely morning outside, for people who liked that sort of thing. Tristan was really only a fan of mornings when he could sleep through them. Leo, though, got up early and did morning things like eating a healthy breakfast and sometimes even jogging, which Tristan personally thought was taking things too far, but each to their own. The past few days had been kind of fun, finding out those little quirky details about each other. He enjoyed this relationship business. It was like the discovery proceedings of a lawsuit, where everyone had to be open and honest and show off all their secrets. Like the fact that Leo folded his socks instead of balling them up, because “that way you don’t stretch them out and they last longer, Tris!”
He wondered idly if he should wear socks or go full Miami Vice for the fundraiser tonight. He still hadn’t settled on the perfect thing to wear, despite Ambrose and Harry’s advice, although he was contemplating a gold mesh crop top under a tuxedo jacket. The problem was slipping under the doorman’s radar. He knew from experience that unless he had the right connections, gaining entrance to some of the yacht clubs in the city was more difficult than getting tickets to the NRL Grand Final.
He snuggled against the soft cotton sheets for a minute before sighing and levering himself upright. Leo didn’t know he didn’t have anything to wear yet, so Tristan was going to have to find something this morning, even though he’d much rather find Leo and drag him back to bed. If he did that, Tristan knew it would be afternoon before they emerged again, because Leo was insatiable. While normally that wouldn’t be a problem, today Tristan had a responsibility to make himself the worst possible boyfriend, as a way of showing he was the best possible boyfriend—or something.
It was too early for this.
It was—he reached for his phone and squinted at the screen—ten a.m.
