Love in Tandem

by Natalie Arden

  Two hours later, as he drove up to the parking garage gate of Eamon’s glittering condo building, the uncertain part of him started to take hold again, but he drove it out firmly. His old car might look out of place here, but the barrier opened smoothly when he put in the code and the guest parking was exactly where Eamon said it was.

  The elevator whooshed upwards imperceptibly, despite it’s speed, almost immediately depositing Scott at penthouse level. He looked around the small, immaculately decorated, hallway and pressed Eamon’s doorbell.

  The door swung open all at once, revealing Eamon with a phone pressed to his ear, a black eye, and a split lip. He waved enthusiastically at Scott, pointed at the phone, and walked off into the apartment.

  Scott followed him, taking it all in. He’d never seen a place that Eamon had tried to make his own, he realized first, and then second: he still hadn’t. The penthouse looked like a page out of a fancy magazine, right down to the guy in the center of the living room, still talking on his cell.

  “I have to go, okay? My partner’s here. Yes.” Eamon rolled his eyes at the phone and lifted a hand to his lips to blow a silent kiss in Scott’s direction. He resumed pacing. “Okay. Yes. Fine. I will. See. You. Tomorrow. What?”

  Scott dropped his bag on the floor and watched Eamon pace. He didn’t look injured – aside from the black eye and the split lip. The black eye was only starting to turn fun colors, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t get a lot worse before it healed. The split lip was nothing, except that Scott desperately wanted to take Eamon’s face in his hands and kiss it better. Eamon was still on the phone, listening. Scott restrained himself.

  Looking around, he was struck by the view over the city, and went over to the window to see it better. Lights were starting to come on all around the building, all throughout the miles of buildings and houses and parks that Scott could see. It looked a little empty in the cold, gray October light, and he wondered if it would look more like home if he knew what any of the things he was seeing was.

  Reflected in the window, he saw Eamon coming up behind him, and turned to sweep Eamon into his arms. They kissed, gentle in recognition of Eamon’s split lip, and then harder as Eamon pushed up on his toes and demanded more.

  “Sorry about that,” he said breezily when they broke apart. “You know, I would never have let Kevin punch me if I’d known how much work it was going to be afterwards.”

  “And the black eye?” Scott asked, holding Eamon by the shoulders and looking him over.

  “How does it look?” Eamon tilted his head so that Scott could see it better, watching Scott from half-lidded eyes.

  “Like it’s going to hurt later,” Scott told him bluntly.

  “And you’re the expert?” Eamon laughed.

  “I’ve clearly had more black eyes than you,” Scott said. “Did you get any ice on that?”

  “Someone gave me an ice pack at some point,” Eamon replied. “I don’t know what happened to it, though.

  Scott pulled him close, still peering down at his face. “You should get some more ice on that.”

  Eamon looked up at him earnestly. “The fridge makes ice.”

  His kitchen was gorgeous, spotless, and completely lacking in any of the things Scott actually needed. “How do you live without kitchen bags?” he said finally, wrapping a handful of ice cubes in a pristine kitchen towel that looked like it had never been touched.

  “I...don’t know?” Eamon said. He eyed the damp towel. “Is this really necessary?”

  “Was it really necessary to let some guy clock you one?” Scott said firmly. “Hold this over your eye. It’s probably going to drip.”

  Scott ended up holding the increasingly wet towel himself as they snuggled on the couch, but didn’t really mind. Eamon was warm against his side, one hand holding Scott’s own tightly. The eye not covered by the towel shone brightly as he explained the events of the day to Scott in more detail.

  “I just don’t know how he fooled me,” Eamon was saying for the second or third time.

  Still holding the makeshift ice pack with one hand, Scott leaned in to kiss Eamon’s cheek gently. “You’re too hard on yourself, love,” he said. “So you expect other people to be hard on you too. Especially when they say they see a bigger picture or it’s for your own good – or for CarreSys’s own good.”

  Eamon scowled. “Am I? That seems too...easy an answer.”

  It didn’t seem easy to Scott. It seemed like the end of a long process, part of every phone call with Eamon’s parents where they pushed him to do more and never asked what he was doing now, or every anecdote about Eamon’s adolescence that ended with him being told to work harder because the only thing that could change was himself, never the people around him. Scott had never been the guy to be bullied in high school, but it had taken him an awfully long time to come out to himself, let alone those around him. The freedom he had now in Sellis Creek had been hard won: snatched from the jaws of those who still wanted to judge someone being themselves, and grown from his own determination to be who he wanted to be.

  He’d never judge anyone for making a different choice – even with as different as Eamon’s choices had turned out to be. But Sellis Creek was different now – even if Eamon’s parents seemed more or less the same – and Scott hoped Eamon understood that.

  “You trusted him, and he betrayed that trust,” was all that Scott said aloud. “That’s not your fault.”

  Eamon’s smiled twisted. “It’s going to be a lot of work to fix what he tried to destroy, you know.”

  “But you can do it,” Scott insisted. “I believe in you.”

  “I’ll have to spend more time in the city,” Eamon said gently. He took a deep breath. “But I don’t want it to be like that forever.” He rubbed a hand through his hair. “I don’t know. Kevin got me thinking. Am I a micromanager?”

  “Yeah,” Scott said immediately, and shut his mouth with a click. “Uh. I mean–”

  “That’s what I thought,” Eamon said, wrinkling his nose in a rueful smile. “I don’t think I like that about myself anymore. That’s what we fought over, isn’t it? That I push other people as hard as I push myself.” He stopped, taking a deep breath. “And maybe that’s too hard.”

  “I don’t want you to give up what you’ve worked so hard on,” Scott said, biting his lip. “I would never want that.”

  “But I don’t work so hard anymore,” Eamon said with a dry laugh. “I thought I did, but really I was just peering over the shoulder of the people doing real work and trying to make them go further.” He squeezed Scott’s hand. “I want to get back to coding. That’s what I realized today. I know you didn’t want me to change your system, but I think the reason I kept going with it was because that’s what I really want to be doing. I’m sor–”

  “It’s a good system,” Scott cut in, apologetically. “I didn’t see it at the time because I was overreacting, but I’ve been using it, and you did know exactly what I needed. That was never the problem.”

  “Really?” Eamon looked as delighted as he could with a wet towel still being pressed to his face. “I never had a chance to fully test it, obviously, so I wasn’t sure...”

  “It’s good.” Scott shot Eamon a crooked smile. “Even when I was busy hating it, it did exactly what I needed it to do. You are still good at that kind of thing – not that you need me to tell you.”

  “It’s nice to hear,” Eamon said, a hint of cockiness in his smile. “So I’d like to get back to that more. I won’t give up on CarreSys or anything. But I think I can take a step back. Be more of a board member than a CEO.” He lifted a hand to Scott’s cheek. “Which means I can be in Sellis Creek a lot more. Not all the time. But most of it.”

  “Yeah?” Scott said softly. What felt like a mountain lifted itself gently from his shoulders. “That’ll be nice.”

  “I want you in my life,” Eamon said, pushing the towel away from his face and meeting Scott’s gaze only slightly cockeyed. “I want to
make this work. Some things are going to have to change, I think, but I won’t try to change them without asking you again. We can do this together and keep Sellis Creek our home.

  “That’s all I ever wanted,” Scott said, sweeping Eamon into a kiss.

  They broke apart abruptly when Scott tasted blood – Eamon’s split lip resplitting from the force of their kiss.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, dabbing the towel at the thin drop of red.

  “I don’t even know why you stopped,” Eamon said with a grin, and leaned up to kiss Scott again.

  Epilogue

  Scott

  ”Hello! I’m home!” Scott caroled from the front hallway before remembering that Eamon was still supposed to be in Columbus for another day.

  He nearly dropped his keys when a voice from the living room replied, “Welcome home!”

  Scott kicked off his boots and tossed his coat in the general direction of the coat rack, diving for the living room and his long-absent boyfriend – who’d been gone for all of two nights and was supposed to be gone for a third.

  On the couch, Eamon was curled up with his laptop and a mug of coffee, his dark hair adorably mussed from the way he ran his fingers through it when he was thinking. Scott flung himself down beside his lover, grinning wide. “So, what brings you here tonight?”

  “I live here.” Eamon lifted an eyebrow.

  “True,” Scott said with all the smugness his little heart could produce. It had been less of a fight than he’d imagined to remove Eamon from his parents’ old place and install him at Scott’s, but every time he thought about it, he was still delighted by the results. “But aren’t you supposed to still be at the penthouse?”

  “Meetings finished early today,” Eamon said with a shrug. “And I wanted to see you.”

  “I missed you too,” Scott told him, and leaned in for a long, lingering kiss that he felt right down to his toes.

  Eamon, still cradling his coffee mug, leaned into Scott’s side. “Besides, I had some work here that I needed to get done before we head to Florida.”

  Scott laughed. “I knew it couldn’t only be my charms that dragged you home.” He’d seen a lot more of Eamon’s workaholic tendencies since they moved in together, but it was hard to mind when Eamon seemed so much happier when he had a project – or seven – on the go. The apps he was developing were something of a mystery to Scott, but he seemed so much more relaxed now that he’d taken a step back as CEO, that Scott could hardly complain that he’d found something to do in Sellis Creek.

  Particularly not something he could do at the Cycle Works when Scott had to put in long hours on big repair jobs.

  “I could have done this work at the penthouse,” Eamon pointed out. “But I wanted to see you.”

  “And you hate the penthouse,” Scott reminded him with a chuckle.

  Eamon curled deeper into his embrace. “Only when you’re not in it,” he said softly.

  “So, almost always?” The compromises they’d worked out over the last few months allowed Scott to take a little more time away from the Cycle Works, but he still couldn’t accompany Eamon every time he had to go back to Columbus and deal with CarreSys. For a while Scott had worried. Not because he thought that Eamon would find city life so spectacular – he could recognize someone falling for the sleepy charms of Sellis Creek anywhere. But he’d worried what being thrust back into the rush of CarreSys business would do for Eamon, if he’d remember the thrill of big business and the hectic pace at which he preferred to work.

  Scott needn’t have worried. Going back to business meetings after taking so much time on secretly coding a new system for Scott had only reminded Eamon how much he hated dealing with that side of the business. One board meeting later, and he was drawing up paperwork for the new VP of Operations and passing on almost everything that needed to be done in the office. He’d shown up in Scott’s living room days early, in honest shock that he’d done this for years without complaint.

  Kind of like tonight, actually.

  “How boring were the meetings?” Scott asked, pulling Eamon closer.

  “Absolutely deadly.” Eamon rolled his eyes.

  “And this?” Scott teased.

  “It’s really interesting, actually!” Eamon visibly perked up at the chance to discuss what Scott privately thought of as his real work. “You know I was saying that I didn’t know where that bug came from? It was actually part of a macro that got accidentally reduplicated. So the pointers...”

  Scott might not know what any of those words meant, but he knew when Eamon was happy. He rubbed his cheek across Eamon’s hair, feeling content.

  “Which all adds up to: I’m going to be done before Florida,” Eamon said triumphantly. He eyed Scott for a moment. “Are you packed yet?”

  That, Scott understood perfectly. He hemmed and hawed for a moment. “I’m more packed than I was when you left?”

  “Is that what you’re calling the empty suitcase lying on the bedroom floor?” Eamon said, amused. “Almost broke my neck on that earlier, by the way.”

  “To be fair,” Scott joked. “It would be a hazard even if it was full.”

  “You’d still feel guilty,” Eamon told him, laughing.

  “That’s true.” Scott stroked his knuckles along the perfect column of Eamon’s neck. “I like your neck as is.”

  Eamon leaned into the touch, back arching. “Don’t think you can distract me,” he said lazily. “We’re still going to Florida for Christmas.”

  “I’m looking forward to it,” Scott protested. Surprising himself most of all, he actually was. He’d done his time worrying about what would happen to the Cycle Works while they took their holiday, about how Derek, Angie, and their one friend he hardly knew would handle splitting their shifts between the three of them, about what would happen if someone brought in a surprise winter repair his little cadre of substitutes didn’t know how to manage. “Besides, we’ve already bought the tickets.”

  Laughing, Eamon rested his head on Scott’s shoulder. “You’re looking forward to the beach,” he corrected. “Sorry in advance for my parents.”

  Scott was looking forward to meeting them too, actually, though he didn’t really want to explain to Eamon that he was planning to be a shield between his lover and their criticism and was looking forward to the job. He’d been a silent party to all of their fretting as Eamon had stepped back from his CEO position after all, as well as Eamon’s intense crises over whether or not he was making a good decision. Being there in person would probably mean the criticism would be worse, but then, it would also be easier to avoid, even if Scott had to drag them to the beach twice or three times a day. Not exactly a hardship for a Midwest boy.

  “I am looking forward to the beach,” he said peacefully.

  “The nude beach, judging by your taste in packing,” Eamon said slyly.

  “I bow before your greater expertise,” Scott teased, which set Eamon off into whoops of laughter.

  “My parents would die,” he choked out, finally, wiping at his eyes. “Simply die.”

  “I promise I’ll pack clothes then,” Scott said, grinning.

  “You’d better,” Eamon told him. “I know this is a lot for you, love.” He stroked Scott’s cheek. “Are you going to be okay spending Christmas away from your parents?”

  This would be Scott’s first Christmas away – a fact he’d admitted to Eamon early on and then had to be teased about unmercifully – but it was going to be fine.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” he said again. A chance to make something new with Eamon appealed to him, as much as it had when they’d combined their households and slowly figured out how to fit their lives around each other, changing what needed to be changed and clinging fast to what was already good.

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” Eamon said with a laugh, “But I’m glad you’ll be there with me.”

  “So am I,” Scott replied, stroking Eamon’s cheek. As Eamon looked up at him lovingly, a si
milar moment came to mind and reminded Scott of another thing to be grateful for.

  Eamon’s parents already blamed Scott for everything that had gone down with CarreSys. At least they wouldn’t get a chance to blame him for the long-faded black eye too.

  About the Author

  Natalie Arden writes steamy MM romances and loves every minute of it!