Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 45529 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 228(@200wpm)___ 182(@250wpm)___ 152(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 45529 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 228(@200wpm)___ 182(@250wpm)___ 152(@300wpm)
Perhaps “blizzard” had been a stretch, but it was cold as fuck and snowing quite a bit.
“You stayin’ in Winchester over the holidays?” I asked.
“For Christmas.” He nodded with a dip of his chin. “We’ll head up to my folks’ over New Year’s.”
Nice. I reckoned it’d be the official introduction of his three new partners to his big New York family. I’d learned Sloan didn’t have much family left. Archie’s parents lived in the UK. Corey was a local, but if I remembered correctly, his dad lived in Costa Rica or something.
We crossed the busy M Street in a fast jog, which reminded me I had to pick up Luke’s order at Sprinkles when they opened. Both he and Kit had decided they were in a red velvet mood today.
It’d be a cold day in hell before I ate red velvet cake outside Texas and the South.
To be honest, it’d be a cold day in hell before I bought a cupcake for five fucking bucks.
“Remind me to swing by the cupcake joint on the way back,” I said. “Luke and Kit love to spend a fortune there.”
“Christ—don’t get me started,” Greer huffed. “We stopped at a donut place on our way to the city. Corey doesn’t even look at price tags. I love the kid with all my heart, but if you shell out four dollars for some marked-up Christmas donut without batting an eyelash, you’re a city boy through and through. And that’s comin’ from me.”
Well, Greer had left his big-city-isms behind a long time ago. He and I had a lot in common—and neither of us struggled financially—but that didn’t mean we couldn’t see the outrage in city prices.
We had another thing in common too. Our Littles were well-off. Kit was the mother of all trust fund babies, and Corey had made an impressive living out of illustrating some comic strip online for neurodiverse people.
“Do you feel like you gotta hold back the discipline sometimes?” Greer asked. “For the first time since Corey joined us, he’s been regressing a bit—mostly with Sloan, but it doesn’t really stay there.”
I knew what he was talking about. I sucked in a cold breath and kept my eyes on the pavement. Sand and snow crunched under my feet, and the sidewalks in Georgetown were famously unlevel.
“He loves to shop when he’s in his little space,” Greer admitted, and I had to laugh. “Yesterday, his gifts for the kids started to arrive. I’m tellin’ you, Colt—I wanted to tan his goddamn hide as much as I wanted to hug him half to death. He bought Jamie a fucking four-wheeler for kids. He set a thousand-dollar budget for each of them.”
“Oof.” I winced and chuckled.
“Thing is, he doesn’t see the money,” he went on. “He’s pretty much done building a connection with them—they all adore him because he’s funny and sweet. This isn’t him sucking up to Sloan’s children or anything like that. He just sees things he thinks the kids will love, and he goes with it.”
Kit was the same way.
“Yeah, you can’t really reprimand that behavior,” I said, my breaths coming out faster. “When Kit goes nuts with his spending, Luke and I sit him down once the excitement has blown over. We let him have his fun, and then we try to explain our side. No, he doesn’t need to buy ten boxes of model crafts in one go when nine of them will end up on the shelves. No, we don’t need to order everything on the menu because a brat can’t decide what he wants for dinner. No, we sure as shit don’t need to buy a sixty-five-inch flat-screen for every guest room.” I nodded in acknowledgment as Greer veered left for a narrow backstreet. “He’s gotten a lot better at talking to us when one of those impulses strikes—like the damn flat-screens—but we still come home to surprises here and there.”
I understood Greer’s struggle because Corey and Kit were genuine sweethearts. They loved to make others happy. Kit’s shopping habits were more often than not related to making another person smile. Or with the TVs—he wanted to be a good host and have his loved ones return. And the point Luke and I tried to make was, one, a flat-screen wasn’t the way to do that.
On our detour along smaller streets toward the waterfront, I explained how Luke and I simply tried to maintain a balance between what was reasonable and sustainable, what might promote unhealthy behavior, and what money could and couldn’t solve.
Kit had lost his parents; he’d lived a sheltered life, and he’d had very few friends up until this summer. Corey suffered from some abandonment issues from a Dom who’d fooled us all. Which still fucking infuriated me. We hadn’t seen the abuse for two years. So the boy sometimes felt like he was in the way.