Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76523 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76523 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
“Yes.” Gareth’s confident answer had Brady nodding slowly and Jude rolling his eyes and muttering about us being insane. “We’re dating him together.”
Gareth seemed to think that would explain away a lot…and for some reason it did.
The first few times he’d said it, my stomach clenched like it was expecting an oversized bean burrito to appear any second, but the more times I heard it, the less weird it felt. There was obviously some merit in exposure therapy, but I still wasn’t happy about the cockblocking nonsense.
I’d been trying to figure out a way to make Gareth think we should suck Bates’s cock again, but Jude had shown up before I could work on the details of the plan.
How was I going to get better if I didn’t practice?
I wasn’t going to defile the bananas just to get rid of my gag reflex.
Brady was quiet for a few seconds before he turned around and looked at Jude again. “Daddy, he’s keeping the weird neighbor for both of them. And Cashel called him Sir.”
Yep.
We were keeping Bates…our Dom or something.
Jude groaned. “Brady, they slept over at a stranger’s place to talk about spankings and have sex. That’s dangerous.”
“Why?” Gareth was studying them like they were bugs. “You were a stranger who talked to him about Santa, and spankings, and then took him to sleep over at your place.”
Oh.
He had a good point.
“And we’re doing it together so that’s safer. Brady’s mom said so.”
Brady blinked. “I think she said we should go run errands in pairs because that was safer.”
I shrugged. “She said it could apply to a lot of things.”
She’d been kind of upset when we’d lost Gareth in Walmart and had started lecturing us on the buddy system. She hadn’t technically said it didn’t apply to dating, so Gareth might’ve had a point.
“She did…” As his voice trailed off, Brady turned to Jude again. “Daddy, I think it makes sense. They’re using the buddy system and everything. Do they get an apology for an accidental cockblock?”
Yes.
Gareth nodded too. “Yes.”
As Brady and Jude debated who should give us the apology, Gareth turned to me. “Do you want to get dressed and go grab something to bring Bates for lunch? He said we should come back later when everything is fixed up here.”
I wasn’t sure it was going to get fixed since the problem was confusing to begin with, but I liked Gareth’s plan. “I think he’d like a sandwich from that Italian place down the street.”
Bates seemed like a real-food kind of person not a fries or pizza kind of person.
“That’s a good idea.” Gareth headed back toward our bedroom, so I followed him as Brady started telling his Daddy about the merits of hands-on research. “But how do we know which one to pick?”
Hmm, another good question.
“The owners seem as nosy as Bates is. I’m pretty sure we’ll just need to describe him and they’ll know what to make for us.” Gareth’s nod said he thought it was a good idea, but he didn’t get distracted by it.
As we got to our bedroom and he closed the door, Gareth took a deep breath. “That was weird, right?”
“Oh yeah.” I just wasn’t sure I could list out all the ways why it’d been weird. “I think they’re just concerned for us, though?”
Maybe?
“But Brady did it too.” Gareth gave the door a confused, slightly concerned look like he was imagining Brady and Jude. “Didn’t he?”
Shrugging, I wasn’t sure what to say. “I think it’s a case of do as I say not as I do? But I don’t know why.”
Gareth finally pulled his focus away from the door and went over to sit down on the twin bed on his side of the room. “Was it wrong for us to have had a sleepover with Bates?”
Before I could even shake my head, he went back to worrying. “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. They didn’t fuss at us for dating him together, but do you think that’s—”
“No.” Cutting off whatever he’d been going to say, I went over and sat down beside him, not really sure if I could hug him or not. “Brady doesn’t care about that and Jude just hasn’t figured out how to start worrying about it yet. He’s just a glass-half-empty kind of person.”
I wasn’t sure they realized we were both dating Bates yet, much less dating each other. They’d gotten stuck on one part and hadn’t moved past it. “They seemed kind of distracted on the asking a stranger about spankings part.”
“But that was what Brady did.” Frowning again, Gareth let out a sigh and leaned over to rest his head on mine. “We even know Bates is real and where he lives and his name. We know he’s human.”
He had a point.
And he didn’t seem worried about the touching thing like I’d been, so I wrapped my arm around him. “I think we did great when you look at it that way.”