Read A Boy Called Cin for Free Online Page B

$300/month in town?
    Is this important work?
    Tom wouldn't take Cin away from anything important. He'd spend the summer there instead. There were some nice places near campus he could rent. Two bedrooms, so it wasn't weird.
    Important in that I'll starve if I don't work .
    Dude, you're dating a guy with more money than God .
    Tom wants to swallow the words back as soon as the text sends. They're probably not dating and he knows Cin doesn't care about the money and he doesn't really want him thinking about it, either, because he knows that's the thing he'll struggle to get over. It was the worst possible text he could have sent.
    I was unaware we were dating.
    Yeah, that's it. That was exactly what he expected to hear, and now Cin was never going to be comfortable around him again because he's a needy, clingy asshole.
    I'm not opposed, I'm just surprised, Cin clarifies with a second text .
    Are you telling people we're dating?
    A guilty flush heats Tom's face.
    Maybe one or two people?
    Mostly he'd just been telling people he had met someone, thank you, so they could stop trying to get him to date again. Apparently telling one person he was single for five minutes had been enough to make his love life everyone’s problem—including a few gossip columns that had nothing better to report on. They were probably tired of him not doing anything else they could talk about. It was lucky they didn’t know about the much-younger man he was about to invite to spend the summer with him.
    You're adorable .
    Tom grins down at his phone. Cin called him adorable. He's pretty sure no one's ever called him that before. Not seriously, anyway.
    Why I was asking was I have a place by the beach. I'd like to take you.
    Seriously?
    This was going way better than he'd expected. Maybe Cin liked him almost as much as Tom liked Cin.
    Seriously. I'll email you details later and you can decide.
    *~*~*
    "What have you done?" Poppy asks as soon as she answers the phone.
    "Would you believe nothing?" Tom winces. Poppy knows him too well, and to be fair, there's a better than even chance that on any single occasion, he's done something recently that he needs to confess to her.
    "No. You never call me during the day unless you've done something or there's been a disaster. Since I'm not hearing about it on the national news, I assume you've done something."
    "You think all my disasters make the national news?" Tom would be hurt, but it's Poppy. He knows she loves him.
    "More or less. Still avoiding the question."
    "I may have invited, uh. That boy I was telling you about? To stay with me over the summer. And now I'm not sure if it was stupid. I mean, I really want to spend the summer with him because I like him a lot, but wow am I not a good person to suddenly live with. I can't exactly take it back now, either. I'm gonna scare him off forever."
    Poppy makes a sympathetic noise. "He's half your age . But I know you like him, because you never shut up about him and you're offering to share your baby."
    "How did you know?" He hadn't said anything about inviting Cin to the new house, and he was pretty sure he hadn't even mentioned that he was thinking about spending the summer there.
    "You want to impress the pretty art student. Where else would you take him?"
    "That's… Yeah. That's fair." Tom sighs. "I'm still gonna screw this up."
    "Did he agree?" Poppy asks patiently.
    "Yeah, kinda. I said I'd email him the address and stuff and he could decide."
    Tom still wanted Cin to say yes, that he'd come and spend the summer with him, and it'd be a ridiculous, over-the-top beginning to a great long-term relationship because yeah, he really likes Cin. He can't even put his finger on why. There's just something about him that Tom wants to stick close to.
    "Then when he says yes—which he probably will—everything will be fine. You're not actually that hard to live with. I imagine you're even easier to live with for people who're attracted to you. I definitely find