At No Time || Bruno Mars

59

Peter did not want to leave Georgia, not after the night he and Trystan had. He wanted to abandon his responsibilities in Los Angeles and stay with her, at least for a little while, because getting her off of his mind was not a motion he would even attempt to try.

He could not stop thinking about her, her tangerine scent, how soft her skin was and how it flowed like melted chocolate, her almost-black eyes and how they showed what they wanted when she wanted them to. In the mirror he took pride in the red welts he saw against his shoulders, remembering when she had clawed at his skin as she indulged in her ecstasy.

Peter had not had that kind of love-making in what felt like a lifetime. Sure, he had had sex and sure, there had been times where it was wild and rough, but none of those times had consisted with Trystan wrapped in his arms. She always made everything better, in a place where other women simply could not compare, and the anticipation of seeing her again nearly had him getting right back on a jet.

Peter even wanted to see little Raina again, who he felt he had bonded with as well. He was still deciding whether or not he was good with kids, but her personality, strung together by darling giggles, had him anticipating the next time he would see them both.

When he went to pick up Jewel from Roger's when he arrived back in California, the younger man would have feigned offense at the dog jumping all over her original owner as if she could not wait to get out of his home had he not been interested in Peter and the wide smile he was wearing.

"What the hell are you so jolly about?" Roger asked as Peter tried to calm the canine down.

He cocked a brow, the grin still on his face. "What, I can't be happy to see my dog?"

"I've never seen you this happy when picking her up before."

"Well, there's a first for everything isn't there?"

Roger twisted his lips, eyeing his friend's mannerisms and noting that they were indeed atypical. Peter was a stoic individual—always had been—and he knew well enough that it was not his pet that was breaking his character.

"You weren't in Cleveland were you?" Roger inquired and garnered Peter's perplexed expression.

"I had to be in Ohio for a business trip–,"

"Neal owes me a two-hundred-fifty dollars now."

Peter erected, thoroughly confused. " Rog, what are you talking about?"

"You weren't in Ohio because you were in Georgia—with Trystan," Roger told him, and Peter could not fix his mouth quick enough to deny it. "Neal bet that it would take you another month to do it, but I told him you'd do it sooner than that. And I bet that when you came back here you'd lie about it, which is what the extra fifty bucks is for."

"To do what?"

Roger would have been annoyed had he not found it hilarious that Peter would simply not stop lying. "To sleep with her," he deadpanned. "And considering how you came in here smiling so hard your cheeks almost broke, I'd say she's got your ass sprung."

Peter wanted to tell Roger that no, he and Trystan had not partaken in anything sexual, that they were simply friends, but then he thought that that would not be fair to either of them.

They had not spent four years apart to treat each other as they used to, like secrets that, if were revealed, would destroy something. He liked protecting, keeping her from prying eyes and ears, but it was not fair. She meant something to him, and he would not deny that right to the face of people closest to him anymore.