Kyle sat alone at the table with his hands folded in front of him. He shifted and tried folding them in his lap, but almost immediately folded them on the table again. The nerves that fluttered under his skin made it nearly impossible to sit still. Fidgety fingers toyed with the hem of his shirt. A thread pulled loose on the bottom button, and when he tugged at it, the whole button popped off, because of course it did. He cursed and ducked under the table. The carpet underneath was full of unpleasant gritty crumby bits, but no button. Kyle grumbled and sat up.
Adam was standing across from him.
Kyle jumped and banged his knee against the underside of the table. Ice cubes clinked together as water in too-full glasses sloshed out and left a darkening wet spot on the white paper tablecloth.
Kyle gaped. How was it possible that this man kept getting hotter? Adam’s perpetual stubble had been trimmed from didn’t bother to shave to distractedly sexy. He wore a gray button-down under a blue sweater that succeeded in showing off the color of his eyes and the width of his chest all at the same time.
“Is this seat taken?” Adam rested his hands on the back of the chair. His mouth quirked up on one side.
Kyle didn’t bother to apologize for his unabashed gawking. “Hey, Mr. Hathaway. Fancy meeting you here.”
Adam smirked. It was a sexy smirk. God, everything about the man was sexy tonight, from his stubble to his smirk. Kyle’s mouth had gone dry at some point. He reached for one of the glasses of water on the table and took a long drink.
“I think you can call me Adam now.” Adam pulled the chair out and sat. It was Kyle’s turn to smirk. He liked the Mr. Hathaway thing; liked the way it sounded formal and respectful around kids, and the way it had morphed into a teasing and sexy pet name between them. And it was highly unfair that even Adam’s nicknames were sexy.
“Whatever you say, Mr. Hathaway.” He took another drink of water. His hands were still shaking a little. They’d been shaking a little ever since he’d received Adam’s text the morning after the barbecue. Kyle preferred to think of it as that, instead of the Morning of the Epic Hickey.
I’m an asshole and a coward.
Would you like to have dinner with me?
Kyle had been so confused, and there had been no one to ask about it. His dad would have given him a Dad Sigh and another talk about being careful for Caroline’s sake. Ben was Ben; he would have smiled and slapped Kyle on the shoulder with a version of I’m happy for you, which would have been no help at all. For the millionth time that week, Kyle had wished Olivia was there to offer advice, although he knew her advice would have been he’s beautiful. If you don’t sleep with him, can you at least get him naked so I can draw his perfect ass?
“Kyle?” Adam glanced over the top of his menu, eyebrows raised up toward his sexy hairline, and Kyle had to stop with that. He was developing a fixation. He nearly knocked his glass over again, and put his hands back in his lap.
“Hmm?” He opened his menu and tried to stay calm.
“I said, did you wait long?”
“What? No.” Kyle turned through the menu, but everything seemed to be written in a foreign language. “Not long. Just a few minutes.”
That was a blatant lie. He’d been so keyed up at home that as soon as Caroline’s dinner had been over, he’d installed her in front of the TV, and he had tried to give his dad a reassuring smile—it hadn’t been a particularly successful attempt—before he’d left. He’d still arrived almost thirty minutes early, so he’d sat in the van and played games on his phone for a bit, then came inside to sit by himself at an empty table and wait.
“Kyle?”
Kyle focused all his energy on a greenish picture of wonton soup. The restaurant had been Adam’s pick. He’d said Chinese was easy and uncomplicated. Everything felt very complicated in that moment. He wasn’t sure the menu was in English.
“Yes?” His voice wobbled somehow, in three little letters.
“Are you okay?”
Kyle smiled and started to say, “I’m fine—” but then remembered Adam’s text message again.
I’m an asshole and a coward.
He reconsidered. If Adam could be honest with him, Kyle would go for honesty too.
“Maybe a little nervous.” He went to take another drink, and more water sloshed over the sides of the glass. “Maybe a lot nervous.”
“Well, I think the worst parts have to be behind us by now.” Adam smiled a sympathetic smile. “How bad could this possibly be?”
How bad? Kyle wanted to give him the obvious list. First, there was every possibility that he wouldn’t be able to talk about anything but Caroline, because apparently that was how his dad brain worked now. And if he managed to avoid that, there was the equally real potential that his clients wouldn’t observe his no calls after eight o’clock rule, because they couldn’t be counted on to do that on a regular day, much less on a first date. And if he and Adam succeeded in avoiding both of those roadblocks, there was the still incredibly likely chance that they would see someone they knew at the restaurant. At that point, they’d have to make the immediate and highly uncomfortable decision of either admitting they were on a date, or playing it off like they were two friends out for a well-dressed dinner on a Friday night. And if that went well—and what were the odds they’d get that lucky?—then they would have to convince themselves that they were more than well-dressed friends, or might be more, or could be more or—
“Seriously, if this is weird—” Adam interrupted the litany of awkwardness.
“No!” Kyle smiled. “Not weird at all.” That was only mostly true, but honesty was best served with a side of optimism. And some moo-shu pork.
As if he had sprung from Kyle’s fluttering brain, a waiter appeared. He was dressed in a white shirt and red vest. His name tag said Bill, but Kyle doubted that was what his friends called him. They ordered food, including moo-shu pork. Adam admitted he’d never had it, to which Kyle clutched his chest and told Bill they’d need the moo-shu ASAP, and a couple of beers. Then Bill disappeared again, and Kyle was left to sit across from horribly sexy Mr. Hathaway with nothing to say. Silence stretched like an elastic band pulled tight. Kyle braced mentally for the snap.
“I thought you were a vegetarian?” Adam said.
“What? Oh. The moo-shu. I’m not vegetarian. I like to think of it as being an opportunistic omnivore. It’s better for you anyway, and Caroline’s mom was vegan when I met her, so we never cooked meat at home. I’ll make exceptions if I’m out somewhere, although there are lots of good vegetarian options these days. The first time Olivia and I—” Oh god. Now he was talking about his first date with Olivia on a first date with someone else. He cleared his throat and redirected. “How was your week?”
Adam shrugged, like he wasn’t feeling the same tension Kyle did. “Pretty good. Your daughter wrote a short story that she claimed was original, but was about a princess named Amarazonia, who lives in the jungle with her animal friends and battles the evil queen.”
“I have no clue how she came up with that,” Kyle said. “Kids have amazing imaginations.”
“Clearly.”
Bill appeared with their beer. Kyle’s fingers itched to take his phone out of his pocket again, although he wasn’t sure what he would look up or text.
“Kyle, are you okay?” Adam said.
This was a disaster. Small talk felt so forced.
“Fine!” Kyle took a sip of his beer, then a longer drink. “I haven’t done this. In a while. You know. Been on a date.” The table between them seemed huge.
As if he could read Kyle’s mind, Adam stood and came to sit beside him, so they were sharing one corner of the table, rather than sitting across from each other. The closeness should have made Kyle more uncomfortable, but it calmed him. It made it feel like there were fewer people around them, so he could focus on Adam.
“A while since you’ve been on a date?” Adam asked.
Kyle rolled his eyes. “There’s a small princess-obsessed person at home who has been cramping my style on that front for almost seven years.” Adam nodded, then he frowned. This close, Kyle could see the small creases that formed between Adam’s eyebrows. He wanted to smooth them out.
“When was the last time you went on a date with a man?” Adam asked.
Kyle paused his contemplation of Adam’s sexy eyebrows. “A man?”
“I assume from . . .” Oh hell, now Adam was blushing. It stained his neck under his stubble. He wanted to touch it and see if the skin felt warm. “From the other night . . . I assume that I’m not the first . . .”
“What?!” Kyle said. It was suddenly too hot in the restaurant. He took a swig of his beer. “No! No, you’re not the first guy I’ve . . .” the words were too loud and he gestured frantically and almost knocked over his drink, “not the first guy I’ve . . . But you’re the first I’ve . . . well . . . Since college. When I met Olivia then . . . well . . . And then with Caroline . . .”
Bill appeared with spring rolls and wonton soup. Adam had to lean away to let him put the food down. Kyle missed his closeness, and tried to distract himself by wobbling his half-empty bottle at Bill, who nodded in waiterly understanding.
“What about you?” he asked, between spoons of soup. He didn’t bother to chew the wontons, but shoveled another one into his mouth to keep himself busy.
“What about me?”
“When was your last date?” Kyle bit his cheek and winced as he tried to inhale another wonton. “And why did it take you so long to tell me you were gay?”
Adam sat back a little and glanced around the restaurant. Kyle kicked himself mentally. His verbal filter was faulty at the best of times, and his nerves were only finding new tears in the mesh to slip words through.
“You don’t have to answer that last part.” Kyle stuffed a spring roll into his mouth. It squirted something hot and oily against the back of his throat, burning the sensitive skin there. He kept his lips clamped together. Bill appeared with a fresh beer, and Kyle smiled up at him with chipmunk cheeks.
“It’s okay,” Adam said. Kyle had to think back through scalded tongues and benevolent waiters to remember what he was talking about. “It’s not a secret. More like information on a need-to-know basis. Who I’m in a relationship with isn’t relevant to the parents of my students.”
Kyle frowned. He still didn’t understand this line that Adam kept trying to draw between them. Adam knew lots about Kyle’s personal life. “Has anyone ever made a big deal about it?”
“I’ve had some . . . experiences . . . at work—”
“In Red Creek?”
Adam shook his head. “No, at Newcastle. Where I used to work. When I lost my job—”
“They fired you for being gay? Jesus, Adam, it’s the twenty-first century!” Kyle’s voice rose. Adam glanced around them again. Kyle wished again for those replacement verbal filters. He would pay any money for them right now.
“No.” Adam’s tone was steady. “It wasn’t like that. But I was . . . involved . . . with someone. He worked there too.”
Kyle found he’d stopped moving. He was pretty sure this was more words than he’d ever heard perpetually restrained Mr. Hathaway say about himself in one go.
Bill appeared with another round of food: a chicken stir-fry and bowls of fluffy white rice. Adam spooned a large serving of rice onto his plate.
“Private schools are a small community,” he said. “My relationship ended, and I didn’t . . . handle it well. And word . . . gets around, in a place like that. There’s not much that’s actually private in a private school.”
Kyle knew that feeling. He knew people found out details without having to hear them from the source. He’d seen the sympathetic faces when he and Caroline went anywhere in town together. Those people weren’t seeing him as just another busy dad doing the grocery shopping on a Saturday afternoon. He didn’t know how they knew, didn’t always know who they were or how they knew who he was, but they did.
“Word travels,” he said. Adam’s blue eyes shifted to him, and he smiled. Kyle felt warm from his ears to his toes. He took another drink and spooned some food onto his plate.
“Word travels,” Adam said. “By the end of the first week after our breakup, the whole campus knew everything. And then there was this . . . slow distancing. No one was overt about it. There were no protests or petitions, no helicopter parents telling me to think of the children, but things changed. Some of the other teachers avoided me at first because I made things awkward after the last big fight Daniel and I had together, and then because it had become a habit. Some of the parents stopped staying to chat when they picked up their kids. And then the school didn’t renew my contract, but by then it just seemed like the next logical step, since it didn’t feel like the right fit for me anymore and . . . And when I came to Red Creek I . . .” He shrugged. “I decided to keep . . . certain things to myself.” He took a bite of his food.
Kyle watched him for a second while he chewed. He considered how this new information fit into what he knew about Adam.
“Is that why you took off on Saturday?”
“I’ve made a good life here. Getting involved with someone so close to my job is risky for me. If it ends badly, you could—” He bit off the end of that thought, to Kyle’s relief. He hadn’t liked where that was going, didn’t like the implication. Adam continued. “I was a bit of a mess when I got here two years ago. The last months at Newcastle weren’t good for me. It’s risky for you to get involved with me too.”
Kyle snorted at that. Adam’s eyes popped up again.
“I can’t see how,” Kyle said.
“What?”
“Please. Do you want to go there?”
“Go where?”
“The hot mess—” Kyle stopped short as Bill appeared with the moo-shu. Kyle leaned forward and breathed in the steam from the plate.
“This stuff is amazing,” he said. “There was this place, down the street from where my office was in Seattle, they served the best moo-shu pork ever. It was the sauce. Nothing ever stacks up to it, but I order moo-shu everywhere I can, in case I find someone else who knows the secret recipe.” He assembled his meal and took a big bite. It was hot and salty, a little sweet. Not as good as Seattle, it was missing whatever their secret ingredient had been, but the taste was still comforting and familiar.
“So?” Kyle watched as Adam took his first bite. There was a blob of sauce in the corner of his mouth on the side closest to Kyle. He resisted the desire to lick it off. It was unfair that he was here with this gorgeous human being who was already prepared to write off Kyle on the chance that he might break Adam’s heart and ruin his career at some point in the future. Kyle didn’t know that he could ever be that diabolical.
“It’s good.” Adam wiped the corner of his lip. “You were saying?”
“Hmm?”
“About a hot mess? You were going to tell me why I’m wrong?”
“Right.” Kyle swallowed. “Here’s the thing. I think if you want to put your hat in the ring for president of the Hot Mess Club, you’re going to have to go through me. I’ll give you the hot part.” Kyle at least got a small measure of gratification when Adam smiled. “But there’s no way you can get past someone like me on the mess side of things.”
“Someone like you?”
Kyle gaped. Wasn’t it obvious?
“Hello? Have you been paying attention?”
Adam’s expression was blank, and he cocked his head toward one shoulder.
“Paying attention to what?”
“I’m a single dad? Living with his dad? Dubiously self-employed? Dead partner?” Kyle was pleased that he held his voice steady on the last one. “I mean, it’s only been seven months. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be thinking about—” He reached for his beer. It was empty. When had that happened? “Thinking about dating again, much less making out with my daughter’s hot teacher in the front hall of my father’s house. That last one is definitely not an approved activity in the parenting handbook. So yeah, kind of a mess.” He gulped and waited.
Adam’s eyes twinkled. Where did people learn tricks like that? Between one breath and the next, Adam leaned forward until his nose brushed against Kyle’s skin. “You forgot the hot part,” he said, then he left a soft kiss on Kyle’s cheek. It had taken less than a few seconds, from the time Adam’s eyes had done their sparkly bit until Kyle was blushing furiously under the remembered sensation of Adam’s lips on his skin. The tension he’d felt a minute earlier when he’d mentioned Olivia fizzed away, and he smiled like an idiot, while Adam munched on his moo-shu and looked smug.
“Very smooth, Mr. Hathaway,” Kyle said. “Moves like that will get you an automatic suspension from the Hot Mess Club without a hearing.”