It was. They’d just professed their love, had a fast and dirty, mind-bending threesome, and now they were discussing the varying species of vampire.
“I love you guys.”
It didn’t get any better than this.
Epilogue:
Three months later…
Essie talked him into a damn cooking show with his Nonna Gina. She and David were developing new content for their channel all the time, and Rig and Rory had been drafted. The viewers seemed to like them, especially once they filmed themselves talking in the pool after a long day of moving.
Shirtless 4 Star Trek. That’s what Essie titled the video, since they’d started by wishing movers would develop transporter technology, and ended an hour later with Rig arguing that a replicator could never win a cooking competition against an Italian.
This is what bragging gets you.
Honestly, doing the show didn’t bother him. After these last few months, he’d be willing to do whatever made David or Rory happy. He’d even tried to catch up on David’s science fiction and Rory’s vampires, just so he could contribute to the conversations.
So many years, but his patience paid off. He had them both and it was more precious, more everything than he’d ever thought possible. The way they looked at him, laughed with him, fought with him? He lived for it.
Even the hard days. Last week Rory’s brother James had made him read a letter from an old friend of his father’s. James had actually sought him out to discover the name of Rory’s attacker—something Rory made Rig promise never to tell his brothers.
The letter told the story of what happened when Rory’s father disappeared for two days. He’d gone back to work and pushed through transfer paperwork on the child molester instead of charges. And then he’d dragged the man behind the precinct and—with his men surrounding him—beat him until he was unconscious and they had to drag him off the body. The friend said he’d sat in his office for hours after that, hands bloody and tears in his eyes.
Younger, who’d come to support Rory, had been as angry as Rig was. What did a few punches matter? The point was he’d left Rory alone and he’d hurt him by hiding the truth.
Rory was upset too, but saw it a little differently. “I kind of wish we could tell Uncle Shawn he was right.” He turned to Younger and smiled sadly through his tears. “He was still in there somewhere. The boy who defended his brother. Only for a minute. But he was there.”
Rig had fallen in love with Rory the day they met. He was pretty and defiant and brilliant at everything, but there was something inside those bright blue eyes that drew him in. Something that told him not to give up on Rory Finn. To wait and see. So he waited. And waited. Then he waited a little bit more.
And then one day the universe had given him one hell of a gift in return. Rory liked to call it the Mistletoe Meltdown.
Rig smiled, thinking of David’s moans of pleasure as he’d woken him up in time for breakfast this morning.
Two gifts.
He was never giving either one of them back.