Coda Books 04 - Strawberries for Dessert (MM)

saying?”
    Only in a very round-about sort of way, but I knew better than to argue with him. “I would lov—”
    He held up his hand to stop me. “Before you answer, sweetie, let me warn you: I won’t be any fun at all. I’ll be cranky and moody and sulky and dreadfully temperamental. You have to promise me that however badly I may behave, you won’t hold it against me.”
    “Are you going to tell me why you’ll be cranky and moody and sulky and temperamental?”
    He smiled at me, but only barely. “Eventually. Maybe.”
    “But you want me to come?”
    And again, he looked down at the table so that the fall of his bangs blocked his expression from my sight. “Very much.”
    “Then I will,” I told him, “but I’m paying my own way.”
    That made him look at me again, and he rolled his eyes. “Sweetie, really. That’s completely unnecessary, and it will only make the reservations more complicated.”
    “Then I’m not going.”
    “Don’t be such a killjoy, love. You just said you wanted to.”
    “Not if you’re going to insist on paying. You know how much I hate it when you do that.” I knew he still didn’t understand why my pride prevented me from letting him pick up the tab everywhere we went, and he probably never would.
    He debated for a moment. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll buy the tickets, because I want to surprise you. But you can buy all of our meals, if it means so much to you—”
    “It does.”
    “—and we’ll split the room. Is that sufficient?”
    “It is.”
    “Thank goodness,” he said with exaggerated relief. “Good grief, sometimes I don’t know why I put up with you.”

    NOW that I wasn’t traveling and had a predictable schedule, we fell into a comfortable pattern. Monday through Thursday, he would be waiting for me when I got home, and the weekends were always spent at his place. I realized then that he never traveled any more either, and I wondered when exactly he had stopped. I wondered if it was because of me. I knew better than to ask him—he would say it had nothing to do me, whether it was the truth or not.
    The weekend of our mystery trip drew closer. I was unbelievably curious, but he refused to tell me where we were going. He told me only that I would need one suit and that the weather would be moderate. Friday came, and I picked him up on my way to the airport.
    He had told me he would be moody and sulky. I hadn’t really believed him, simply because I had rarely if ever seen him be anything other than his usual flamboyant, mocking self. But in the weeks since then, he hadn’t quite been himself. And today seemed worse than ever. He was silent all the way to the airport. Finally, when we got to the baggage check counter, he handed me my ticket.
    “New York?” I asked in surprise as I looked at it. “Your house in the Hamptons?”
    “Not this time, love.” He didn’t seem inclined to say more than that, and the lady at the counter was asking for our tickets and our IDs.
    She checked Cole’s first. “Have a nice trip, Mr. Davenport,” she said as she handed it back to him.
    I turned to look at him in surprise. He had his head down, and I knew by now that it was to keep me from seeing the blush on his cheeks. “‘Davenport’?”
    “What about it?”
    “Why did she call you that?”
    “Because it’s my name!”
    “I thought—”
    “Good lord,” he snapped at me, “don’t make a fuss.” I realized then that the woman at the counter was watching us, listening to our conversation with a suspicious look on her face, and I decided to drop it. For the moment at least.
    I finished checking my own bag and followed him through the security line, which was relatively short, to my surprise. I kept waiting for some type of explanation, but he was making a point of not looking at me.
    “Cole,” I finally said in exasperation after we had made it to our gate and were sitting in the waiting area, “you’re really not going to tell me why she called you Mr. Davenport?”
    He flipped his hair out of his eyes and gave me that look that meant I was being an idiot, and an annoying idiot to boot. “I did tell you. She called me that because that’s the name on my license.”
    “I thought your last name was Fenton.”
    He turned away from me again, letting his hair block his expression. “It is.”
    “Are you intentionally being cryptic?”
    “Are you intentionally being obtuse?”
    “Fine,” I said, although I was fighting to keep from