Coming True

By Jay Sallow

We didn't look at cute interns – not at their personal assets, anyway – and we didn't look at one another. It couldn't help but bring me on to wonder; there were plenty of places Alec could look at cute guys to his heart’s content, but for all our honesty and openness that was a conversation we hadn't ventured. I didn't know if he wanted to be out in a general way, or even to his family, and I was guilty of not asking the question. I told myself it hardly mattered. We had commissions enough to severely limit our social lives for months to come, and even before launching our own partnership had thrown us into this life we had none of us cruised or partied as we once had. I could tell myself that, sure. But I knew I was avoiding the question because I didn't want the answer, because Alec out surely meant Alec cruising – if only in curiosity to see who else could hit his buttons now that he had acknowledged that I did – and Alec cruising scared me in ways I didn't want to admit ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jay Sallow
• Release date: Aug 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005096182

Jay Sallow

Jay Sallow fell in love with words a long time ago. She never knows where to tell people she comes from because hardly anyone has ever heard of her home town and the few people who have claim that her accent doesn’t match. Now that she lives far too far away from her family, she keeps herself warm at night writing happy ever afters for sensuously seductive men.

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Coming True

Jay Sallow

Book Four of the Handful of a Houseful series

Copyright 2020 Jay Sallow

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Coming True

I lay back and let the hot water dissolve the tension of the last long and complicated day of a long and complicated week. No complaints – the week had only felt so long because the previous weekend had vanished in a whirl of brainstorming and sketching for the pile of new commissions Alec had brought back for us, the kind of weekend that reminded us all why we had chosen our profession. But that couldn’t be sustained, and a long bath now was exactly what I needed to free my mind to wander into happier channels; channels such as the fact that this was Alec’s bath, and I had every right to be lounging it.

Try telling that to my nineteen-year-old self when Alec tactfully kicked me to the curb – but hard though Alec might find it to believe, I didn't regret for an instant that he had rejected me, hadn't regretted it even a week ago, when my uncharacteristically sullen friend, housemate and business partner had come home from a business trip and I’d had to ambush him to find out what was making him so unhappy when everything was going so well. I could see nineteen-year-old me clearly enough to know that we'd have fumbled through a few encounters, kissed more than we’d talked and been cool acquaintances ever since, if we were lucky.

But the Alec who had rejected my advances but bought me a drink anyway, who had talked with genuine enthusiasm about my latest presentation, he had been my best friend and firmest cheerleader until Vanessa Bowyer came along and joined us on an equal footing against the world. It wasn't lost on me that she too would be a cool acquaintance, at best, if she hasn't rejected both our advances solidly until long after we graduated.

Nineteen-year-old me was an idiot, what can I say? At least he was lucky. I could daydream that Alec had come round to my charms as quickly as Vane, but Vane had always known she liked men, and I wasn't about to fault Alec for coming to terms with that in his own time. Not when he had come to the acceptance at last with such assurance. My cock stirred with the memory of our morning shower, and his slicked hands stroking us to completion with devastating certainty. I glared at it beneath the water; it couldn't want more. Who was I kidding? It could want more, but it could wait.

It was funny how easy that waiting was, in the right context. At work we had always behaved professionally with Vane, painfully aware that even associating with us could damage her reputation if we weren't all careful, and it had been easy to extend that to Alec, to remain polite, friendly and supportive, to keep my eyes on his face or on whatever work he had to show me. But then, much as we considered our control to be for Vane’s sake, our play-hard reputations would have been just as damaging to our own careers if we hadn't matched them on the work-hard side.

We didn't look at cute interns – not at their personal assets, anyway – and we didn't look at one another. It couldn't help but bring me on to wonder; there were plenty of places Alec could look at