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“Wait a sec,” Ian said, standing too, but reaching out
and casually catching Carter’s arm. “I know this is going to be awkward, me being around all
the time. I just wanted to acknowledge that, first off.”

“Is it?” Carter really hadn’t thought much about it;
honestly, he’d been too busy trying to figure out how to get around rule number
one.

“Well, yeah, in my experience it is. Most people who
run into us together are going to want an explanation. Your friends. The players here. The
coaches. The staff. Anyone you meet.”

“And what? I shouldn’t tell them why you’re really
around?”

“I’m…” Ian hesitated again. “I know what my previous
clients and I would do. We’d discuss ahead of time what role I’d be playing. Often, since I was
in LA, they were well known, so it was easy to pass me off as a personal assistant or a friend.
But here—”

“Nobody’s gonna have a personal assistant around
them all the time,” Carter said. “Especially not me.”

Ian looked surprised again.

“What,” Carter retorted, “I’m not an idiot,
okay.”

The frost in Ian’s expression melted a little more.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you were.”

“You wouldn’t be the first,” Carter said wryly. “Why
can’t we just tell people what you really are?”

“You’d be okay with that?”

Carter realized with a jolt that the person who was
really worried about this wasn’t him, the way Ian was concerned about, but Ian
himself.

Wasn’t that interesting?

“It’s hardly like people don’t know my reputation,”
Carter said.

“Oh. Alright. Well, that’s your choice.”

“We can just say you’re my
what…companion?”

“If that’s the word you want to use,” Ian
said.

But as they walked out of the conference room,
Carter couldn’t shake the feeling that Ian was the one who was preoccupied with not
only what to call himself, but maybe even what kind of position he’d be occupying in Carter’s
life.

As they walked down the hall, and Carter pushed the
down elevator button, to take it to the lower level and the team cafeteria, Ian turned to him
and said, “Well, you getting shut down by half the team is pretty good news for rule number
one.”

Carter rolled his eyes. “Not when I could go to the
Pirate’s Booty or any other bar or restaurant or coffee shop in the city and find someone to
pick up in point five seconds.”

“Modest, much?”

“Listen, you wanted honesty, that’s the honest truth
right there.” Carter had sex because it was easy, yes, and it also helped stem the tide
of his temper. Maybe if sex had been harder for him to come by, he’d have found something
else to use.

But sex was easy, for him, so sex it
was.

Or at least it had been sex.

Carter mournfully poured one out for all the great sex
he wasn’t going to be having in the next few months.