Tied to Trouble(21)

There were probably some sort of scholarship opportunities he could look into, but fuck, now he remembered that he’d done this a couple of years ago, gotten overwhelmed, and gave up.

What did that say about him? It said exactly what Owen probably thought of him. What most people thought of him. Sometimes he felt like a caricature of a person, that secondary character in a book who always remained in the background and somehow managed to get by despite a shaky backstory.

But Chad wasn’t a caricature. He was real and he felt and he…kinda needed a beer right now. He glanced at the clock. It was four in the afternoon. Well, it was five o’clock somewhere.

He stood up and went to toss the notes he’d made into the trash. But then he stopped himself and stared at the paper in front of him. Without realizing it, he’d doodled all over the paper, little designs here and there, along with the Dapper Dick’s bow tie.

He didn’t want to give up again. Giving up was turning out to be more exhausting and demoralizing than plunging ahead. He’d talk to Marley, because she always had a way of making him feel worth something.

There had to be odd jobs he could pick up, something he could do to get some more cash quickly to build up his savings.

So he sat back down at the computer, placed his hands on the keyboard, and began to research financial aid. The beer could wait.

…

Owen wasn’t sure if it was reality or imagination that he’d been called into Marley’s office more in the last three days than he’d been in there all month.

But it sure felt like it, as if his boss knew that talking about work while facing a picture of the guy who’d sucked him off on Saturday was the worst kind of torture.

He couldn’t get Chad out of his head, no matter how hard he tried. He’d even researched that centaur character but could find nothing like what he’d seen on Chad’s computer. And he couldn’t ask Marley, because how the hell would he explain why he was over at Chad’s place? So he stewed and thought about that beautiful art and what it’d been like to have Chad under him.

Owen blew out a breath and deleted the email Marley had just sent him, asking him to come to her office.

For so long, Chad had been one-dimensional in Owen’s head, and it’d been easy to classify him as Marley’s wild younger brother, the guy Marley always had a funny, unbelievable story about.

But now Owen had met Chad, and despite that he wanted to keep him flat, Chad was slowly ballooning into a 3-D person. A guy with feelings and secrets. He wasn’t classified now. Not at all. He was in the breeze, all on his own, and Owen didn’t like it when he couldn’t pin someone down and figure them out quickly.

He took a deep breath and spun in his chair.

One thing he knew for sure was that he couldn’t get enough of Chad’s body. And that mouth. He liked what it could do and liked the words that came out of it, even when they annoyed him. Chad was unpredictable, and before this, Owen would have vowed that he wanted the opposite of unpredictable. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

He was seeing Chad again tonight. They were heading to a couple of parks that had stages or amphitheaters. And what was the hardest of all right now was keeping two very huge secrets from Marley—one of his few friends and the woman he worked with every single day.

He stood up and made his way to her office. She was inside, working on her computer, and Chad’s picture taunted him from the shelf.

So now that you got me down here, what’re you gonna do?

Owen shook his head to rid it of Chad’s voice and sat down. “Hey, Marley.”

She blew out a breath so the strand of hair in front of her face shifted out of her eyes. “Hey.”

“You look stressed.”

“I am stressed. Grant is driving me crazy. God love him, he’s growing this business, but he’s overextending himself and me and I’m about to slip him some sleeping pills so he’ll calm the hell down.”

“What’s going on now?”

She shifted away from her computer and clasped her hands over her desk. “So Grant is trying to woo this software company to advertise in the magazine, and he invited the vice president down here. Except he screwed up the scheduling, and he and I will be at a conference.”

Owen tapped his fingers on the chair. “Can you reschedule?”

“The conference?”

“No, the client meeting.”

Marley shook her head. “No can do.”

“So what’s the alternative?”

Marley eyed him, her lips twisted into a little bit of a grimace. Owen’s stomach dropped. “Wait—”

“You know the company better than anyone—”