Lance got a call from Luke almost immediately after getting into the apartment with Travis. “There should be some extra toothpaste and stuff in the closet,” Lance told him. “And you know where the bedsheets are.”

That was another part of why it would be good for Travis to stay with him—he already spent so much time at Lance’s place that he knew where almost everything was.

While Travis dealt with that, Lance answered his phone. “What’s up? Everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah, no, just checking on you guys.” Luke sounded worried. “Adam said that Travis is going to be staying with you?”

“Yeah, he’s staying on the pullout.” Lance wasn’t quite sure he liked the knowing tone that crept into Luke’s voice. “Why?”

There was a very long pause, so long that Lance pulled the phone back to check that Luke hadn’t hung up on him. He heard what he thought was whispering on the other end of the line, something about I don’t know and fuck’s sake.

“Um, are you sure that’s a good idea?” Luke finally said.

“…why wouldn’t it be a good idea?”

“I mean, are you sure this is the best thing to do, seeing how you, uh, feel, about Travis.” Luke cleared his throat. “How you’ve felt about him for years.”

Lance had long suspected that Luke knew about his annoying and carefully hidden crush, but it was still like a bucket of cold water to the face to have it said out loud.

His instinct, of course, was to deny. “What are you talking about?”

Luke sighed, creating a burst of static over the phone. “Don’t give me that shit, Lance. You and I both know what I’m talking about.” There was a brief pause. “Wait, is he with you? Can you not speak freely?”

“Christ’s sake, Luke, this isn’t a spy movie. I can ‘speak freely’,” Lance replied, but he kept his voice at a lower register, just in case. “I’m just not discussing this.”

“You sure? Because if you ask me, it’s something that needs to be discussed.”

“Lying never works!” Adam shouted from the background.

Lance bit down hard on the inside of his cheek to hold in his groan. “Adam knows, too?”

“Buddy, I’m sure everyone in town knows.”

“Fuck.” Lance could feel the panic beginning to crawl over his skin like spiders. “Do you think Travis knows?”

“Travis has many talents, but emotional intelligence is not one of them,” Luke replied.

Lance heaved a sigh of relief. He didn’t care if the entire town knew—okay, that was a lie. He did, in fact, care if the entire town knew. But at least Travis didn’t know, and that was what was important. Lance never wanted to have that awkward conversation, the one that he knew would come—the one where Travis would sit him down and say kindly that he was flattered, really, but he just didn’t see Lance that way.

After all, if he had, he would have said something at some point in the, oh, two and a half decades or so that they’d known one another.

Lance would rather keep his secret forever then risk making his friendship with Travis awkward or uncomfortable—which was definitely what would happen if Travis found out and then had to turn him down. It would turn into that weird game where Lance would do everything to show that he wasn’t pining (even though he was), and Travis would pull himself back because he wouldn’t want anything that he did to be misconstrued by Lance as being a sign of Travis’s supposed interest in him.

It would be a goddamn mess, in other words.

“Lance?” Luke asked over the phone. “You still there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.” Lance sighed. “Look, I’m not sure what you want from me. Do you want me to admit it? Because I can. I just don’t see what good that would do.”

“Tell him!” Adam yelled.

There was the sound of scuffling and then Luke said, “You do what you want to do, tell him or don’t tell him, but just—we want you to think about the fact that you’re about to have the guy you have feelings for in your home...which is a tiny home, by the way. You’ve got a one bedroom apartment; there’s not many places you guys can go to get away from each other.”

“You say that like you think we’re going to want to get away from each other.”

“I think that you might, maybe, if you realize the close proximity is too much,” Luke replied.

Lance snorted. “Luke, I’ve been in love with the guy for God knows how many years now. A few weeks sharing an apartment with him is not going to be what sends me over the edge.”

“It’s your choice,” Luke repeated. “I just want you to do what’s best for you, y’know?”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you always do what’s best for Travis. Adam told me you talked to the fire chief for him—”

“He was in shock!”

“—and asked Adam about helping ‘us’ with insurance—”

“Okay, so it was a slip of the tongue, whatever—”

“Lance, bud, I’m just saying, you take care of him. It’s what you do, I get it, you’re the kind of guy who takes care of other people. Who was always scraping Jake up off the bar floor when he had too much, and I was swamped with customers? Who’s always the one taking Davis out to breakfast when he’s gotten his heart broken yet again? It’s who you are, and we love you for it. But you have to look after yourself as well, and I don’t know if letting Travis stay with you is doing that.”

“I’ll be fine,” Lance said firmly. His voice was firmer than he felt, actually.

He honestly hadn’t considered the possibilities that Luke was bringing up. He’d been so concerned with helping Travis out and then with the idea of getting to spend more time with Travis that he hadn’t thought about the flip side.

As if to punctuate this, Travis emerged from the bathroom.

Lance nearly dropped the phone.

Travis had stepped into the shower. Lance had been so caught up in his conversation with Luke that he hadn’t even noticed—but now Travis was standing there wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, with some stray water droplets working their way down his tanned shoulders. Travis was built big, his entire family was, but his clothes mostly concealed that.

There was absolutely no concealing any of it now. Travis’s dark beard and short dark hair were even darker than usual with the water, and Lance could see some of his old football scars displayed on his chest. Coupled with his slightly hooked nose—broken in a fight in high school—and the beard and all, it made Travis look just a little rugged and dangerous, but in the best way. In fact, he looked kind of like a cowboy from the cover of a bodice-ripping romance novel.

Lance just about swallowed his tongue.

“Yo, Lance?” Luke said. “You keep cutting out, is your connection bad or something?”

“Is that Luke?” Travis asked at the same time. “Can you ask him if he has any clothes I can borrow? I realized it’s all… in my house, and you’re way too small, no offense.”

“None taken,” Lance replied because Travis was right. There was no way any of Lance’s clothes would fit him, especially with all those, um, muscles, and—yeah. “Hey, Luke? Can you bring over some old clothes for Travis? Just until we can get his stuff from the second floor.”

“Oh, yeah, Adam mentioned something about the second floor being okay. Yeah, no sense in buying new clothes if his will be okay.”

“Well, they’ll be okay after about a week in the washing machine,” Lance replied, thinking of the smoky smell that was undoubtedly clinging to the clothes, making them stink. “I appreciate it.”

“I’ll drive on over, be there in ten. And Lance?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll offer for Travis to stay with us again when I get there. Think about what I said, okay?”

“Okay.”

Lance hung up the phone, feeling a flash of hot and cold at the same time as he stared, and then tried not to stare, at Travis.

This was far from the first time he’d seen Travis without clothes on, but the last time that had happened had been freshmen year of college when he’d had to pick up a completely trashed Travis from a frat party. In the years since then, Travis had gotten even more toned, more filled out, and really grown into the rugged, bad-boy mountain man look he had going on.

Lance swallowed, his throat dry and clicking. Fuck.

“Do you want anything?” He asked, trying to think of something, anything to talk about to distract himself. “Luke’s going to grab some clothes and head over, by the way. He said he’s sorry he didn’t think of it before.”

“Nah, I didn’t think of it either until I stepped out. You don’t mind that I borrowed your towel, do you? It was hanging right there.”

“What?” Lance all but yelped, not realizing until Travis said it that it was, in fact, Lance’s favorite fluffy light blue towel with the dolphins on it that Travis had around his waist. “Um, yes, I mean—no, as in, no, I don’t mind.”

“What’s got you all flustered?” Travis asked, grinning. Then he stopped, growing serious. “Luke wasn’t giving you a hard time about anything, was he?”

“No, no, it’s all good.” Lance shook his head and smiled, hoping he looked relaxed instead of deranged. “I’m just, with the fire and all. I’m feeling a little jumpy. You could have been in there.”

“But I wasn’t,” Travis replied. He sounded perfectly soothing and patient, as if it had been Lance’s house that had burned down and not his.

Lance wanted to argue that Travis himself had been in a bit of shock when he’d first seen the blaze, but if there was one thing he could count on, it was that Travis had a protective streak a mile wide. Any lingering fear was probably being doused by Travis’s need to reassure Lance.

And see, it was stupid shit like that, being protective and caring, that had tricked Lance into developing feelings for his best friend in the first place. If Travis hadn’t been so… so attentive, and so determined to protect Lance—especially when another guy had screwed Lance over—then Lance could have just kept thinking of Travis as a best friend and nothing more and it all would have been fine.

Ugh, this was insane.

Travis sat down at the barstool by the kitchen counter, one of four that Lance had stolen when Luke had remodeled Joe’s. Maybe ‘steal’ wasn’t the right word, seeing as Luke had offered them up to anyone who wanted them and Lance had asked permission first. They made up for the fact that Lance didn’t really have a kitchen table, and so the few times he had people over they sat on the stools at the counter or on the couch.

Usually, he loved those barstools. They were fun and kitschy, if you asked Lance, and they were pieces of a place he considered his second home.

Then again, Travis usually wasn’t sitting on one in nothing but a goddamn towel with one foot braced on a rung so that Lance could almost—

Right. Lance was getting himself a glass of water.

“You sure you don’t want anything?” Lance asked, grabbing a glass. “I’ve got beer in the fridge, too.” It was Travis’s favorite, but Lance wasn’t going to think about that because if he did, he’d also have to think about how goddamn pathetic he was.

“It’s late, I’m not sure more alcohol is a good idea,” Travis replied, grinning in a way that Lance liked to think was fond.

There was a knock at the door. Lance tried not to make his sigh of relief too obvious. “That’d be Luke.”

Sure enough, Luke was at the door, a duffel bag in hand. “I just grabbed some stuff I thought would work for your job, and some sweats for around the house.”

“Thanks, man, you’re the best.” Travis accepted the duffel bag and took it into the bathroom. “I’ll just try these on, make sure they fit.”

The moment the door closed behind him, Luke rounded on Lance. “This is a terrible idea,” he whispered.

“This is fine.”

“Then why do you look like you’re a deer in headlights.”

“I do not look like that!”

“You sort of do.”

Lance glared at Luke, but didn’t have time to say anything else in response, because Travis emerged from the bathroom, now wearing a pair of plaid pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. “Thanks, man, these fit okay. A little tight in places, but y’know.”

Luke grinned. “Yeah, yeah, rub it in that you’re bigger, I get it.”

“We should be able to get a hold of Travis’s stuff in the next few days,” Lance said, his mind automatically switching gears to handle things. “I’ll have to put his clothes through the wash, but we should be able to get your clothes back to you in about a week.”

“No rush, really,” Luke said, waving it off. “I’ve got too many anyway, Adam’s been hinting I need to purge my wardrobe.”

“Thanks, though, really. I appreciate it,” Travis repeated.

“Don’t mention it. And hey,” Luke added, sparing Lance a quick, significant glance, “are you sure you don’t want to stay with us? There’s more room.”

“I’m fine here,” Travis said. “Unless, of course,” he looked over at Lance, “Lance has a problem with it.”

“Not at all,” Lance replied.

Luke gave Lance a look behind Travis’s back that clearly said you are an idiot.

“All right then,” Luke said. He smiled. “You guys have a good night, and keep me posted!”

Lance walked Luke to the door and waved down at him as Luke got into his truck, the one that they often teased him about (“are you trying to be a Midwestern cliché?”). Then he closed the door and turned back, the reality of his situation sinking in.

He was going to be spending the next however many weeks with Travis, in close quarters, pretty much 24/7.

And he’d brought it all on himself.