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“Foster, I have a meeting in the morning.”

“Nine minutes then.”

I turn my face into his shoulder. He smells like apple, cinnamon, and sex. His arm comes around me automatically, his hand finding my hair, stroking in slow circles.

As the post-orgasm bliss starts fading, I know I need to ask him some questions.

Fox doesn’t just show up randomly in the middle of the night, two whole weeks before I was expecting him to arrive alongside the rest of the band. Hall of Fame spends Thanksgiving at the farm. It’s been tradition for years.

Winterberry has been the unwritten Hall of Fame sanctuary since the band first retreated to my parents’ farm after their first big recording deal.

This is why Fox and I set rules when we started hooking up ten years ago. One of them is that our hookups are planned because we can’t afford to get caught.

But he’s warm, and I’m boneless, and the questions are way too heavy for this time of the night.

I settle on, “How long are you staying?”

Fox is quiet for a beat too long.

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he says.

I should push. I know I should push. But I don’t.

His hand is still in my hair. My eyelids feel heavier than they should.

At least the benefit of a good orgasm is that my brain no longer has the energy to worry about the work spread out on my kitchen table. That’s tomorrow Finn’s problem.

I let my eyes close.

He kisses the top of my head, which isn’t something a no-feelings, no-strings hookup should do, but Fox has already broken all the rules tonight.

CHAPTER TWO

FOX

I can’t remember the last time I woke up with someone wrapped around me. It was probably Finn because he’s been it for me for the longest time, but it would have been a nap after multiple rounds of body-melting sex. Not an all-night stay. Not waking up in the morning together.

That is against the rules.

But I have Finn’s warm weight against my chest, his arm across my ribs, his leg tangled with mine, and his slow, even breathing against my collarbone.

Finn is wrapped around me like he’s been doing it for years, like this isn’t the most against-the-rules thing we’ve ever done.

At the end of the summer, the band decided to take a break. We finished a tour, played some extra gigs, and then retreated to our various homes. Bastian, our lead singer and Finn’s brother, came back to Vermont. Mik, our guitarist, settled in Connecticut with his daughter Kay. Our drummer Stone went back to California, where his mom lives.

I share a Los Angeles apartment with my brother Nikko, our tour manager, because we’re never home long enough to make separate places worth it. It’s the perfect lock-up-and-leave. It’s big enough that we don’t bump into each other when we’re home and close to our parents and our sister Nina.

I should have been happy to be home. After all, Nina and her husband Pete just had the most beautiful baby girl in the entire world. I love being an uncle, and I love my family. Apart from Nikko, I don’t get to see them enough.

But months of being idle after years on the road made me restless.

I told myself it was the hiatus, the uncertainty of what came next, the change of pace after twenty-five years of another album, another tour—rinse, repeat.

Turns out, I just needed to get laid because whatever this restless thing has been, it went quiet the second Griffin opened his door last night and I kissed him against his bookshelf and heard the small sound he made in the back of his throat.

That’s something I should probably dedicate some thinking time to, but I file it away for later. Much later.

Right now, I have a more practical problem. How can I convince Finn that it’s a good idea to let me stay with him for the two weeks between now and Thanksgiving?