Some Like it Hot - J. D. Light Page 0,9

thing about normal, but he could sit around without his shirt on, if he wanted to. I sure as hell wasn't going to be the one to tell him to get dressed. I knew he'd done it to make me more comfortable, and to a point, it had definitely worked, since I didn't quite feel so exposed any more, but now things were getting uncomfortable in other ways.

"Oh. Those were all boyfriends of your brothers? Not like, your lovers?"

"You thought…? No."

He nodded, squirming a bit as I looked him over, not doing nearly as good a job of hiding it as I normally would, but it wasn't every day that the man you'd been fantasizing about since you met him, ripped his shirt off in front of you.

I'd seen him shirtless countless times on his videos. Hell, I'd seen him naked and masturbating––which was something I really needed to avoid thinking about––but he'd never been so close to me when his beautifully smooth and lightly bronzed body was on display. I could actually see the slight pebbling of the skin on his pecs and the way his abs contracted every time he breathed out.

He cleared his throat, snapping me out of it, and I dropped my hands down in front of my pants as nonchalantly as possible, since the fabric of these particular jeans was thin and soft, and my dick was neither of those things at the moment.

Leaning forward again, he grabbed his shirt off the table, flipping it inside out. "You go put on a shirt. I'll put mine back on and try to act like less of a weirdo, while I order Chinese food. Then you can come back over, if you aren't terrified of my extreme awkwardness, and we can watch a movie."

I grunted out another of my laughs that Wagoner had once told me sounds a lot like a burp, and headed toward the door with a nod. "Okay."

Again, I wasn’t really sure why I was agreeing to this. Spending time with him wasn't going to make this damn crush on him lighten, and regardless of his rambling when he was around me, I really doubted he was into me in that way.

Maybe he was just lonely. I'd wondered that about him more than once. I never saw anyone coming and going, except a delivery man here and there. I had a ridiculous amount of family and I still got lonely fairly often.

Did Bates need a friend? Could I be that friend without fucking it up? I was a gruff man. Not mean. Not even really grumpy. I was just unused to having to converse with people outside of my family on a regular basis, since most people avoided me, because––as Wagoner and Langston liked to put it––I wasn't all that approachable with my serial-killer vibe.

"What do you like?" Bates asked as I opened the door to his apartment, and I turned, shrugging.

"Order whatever you usually get. I'll eat anything."

"Are we back to that?" he asked, meeting my eyes and tilting his head to the side.

"Huh?"

"Huh?"

I shut the door behind me, chuckling softly at the look on his face. It seemed the sweet little omega, with the beautiful body and the not-so innocent side, had a small problem with watching his mouth. It was incredibly endearing, and just another thing to like about the man.

Just what I need, another reason to like him.

He was still on the phone with the restaurant when I let myself back into his apartment, so I wandered over to the couch, sitting down.

Turning to me when he was finished, he pointed to the remote, once again looking a little nervous.

"I wasn't sure what kind of movie you'd want to see, so I decided to let you choose, but you can't go wrong with comedy."

I nodded, picking up the remote and flipping through the movie options in the Comedy section, finding one that I'd seen the preview for, but never got around to watching, and raised my eyebrows in question at him, and he smiled, nodding.

We settled in to watch the movie, sitting a few feet from each other, shooting glances in each other's direction. I hadn't been on many dates, but the atmosphere was similar somehow, even though I was pretty sure that wasn't what we were doing here.

I was almost relieved when the food arrived… or I was, until he opened the door and gasped excitedly, throwing his arms around the man standing there with two armloads of food.

"Lukas!