Read Make a Right for Free Online Page A

away the remnants of spices and stuffed the dried pasta box haphazardly in a cupboard. “You know me better than to need to ask,” he said. “Being alone gets to me.”
    Cade rubbed Suzie-Q’s silky ears. “You picked a good one. She’s sweet.”
    “All mutt, all heart.” Enough. One more inane scrap of small talk and Tuck would explode. And he’d forgotten to turn off the stove. He pushed the spaghetti pot off the burner. “If this is payback for before, fine. I deserve that. If it’s not, you want to tell me what you’re doing here before I accidentally burn the place down?”
    Cade snorted softly. Not quite a laugh. “Would it help if I said I didn’t know?” He let go of the dog and looked down at his empty hands. “I didn’t think it’d rattle your cage this hard.”
    “And then some.”
    “You weren’t jumpy before.”
    “Things change.” The churning in his gut, jeez. Tuck couldn’t take it much longer. “You coming back here, it’s—you honestly thought that seeing you here, home , with no warning, wouldn’t blow my mind to pieces?”
    Cade nodded, silently at first, then said, “I guess that makes us even.”
    “Jesus Christ.” Tuck slid to the floor near Cade, six degrees of separation between them still. “Even when you say things like that to me, you know what? I still miss you.”
    “Tuck.”
    “It’s true.” In for a penny, in for a couple of Benjamin bills, and if the gloves were off, Tuck wasn’t taking the words back. “Come home, babe. For real. You look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want to, and I’ll back off. You’ll never see me again if you tell me that’s what you really want. But, Cade, I’m going to know if you’re lying. So look at me and tell me the truth.”
    Cade watched Suzie-Q trot away in search of who knew what. “It’s not that easy.”
    Yeah . “Can you blame me for trying?”
    “You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t.” Cade stood.
    Tuck stayed where he was, watching Cade rove restlessly about the room. Not much space to pace through, and what there was brought him to the edge of the bed with its rumpled sheets and dark blue blanket mostly cast onto the floor. Two pillows, not one, bunched together. “You moved this out of the bedroom?”
    “Memories,” Tuck said shortly. “Hey, you remember how we had the furniture set up in our first place?”
    “God, don’t I?” Cade toyed with an old key chain he found on the bookcase. Just idle movement, keeping his hands busy. “We had to jump over the back of the couch to get to the bathroom.”
    “Sucked when we really needed to get in there, but I could probably have beaten some serious challengers at the pole vault after a while.” Thinking back on that made Tuck laugh. Felt good. He kept talking fast, not willing to let that glimmer of pleasure slip through his fingers. “You remember that tiny table at the foot of the bed? Night after night you’d be sitting there fucking buried in papers and maybe half a foot from the kitchenette. You—”
    Cade had fallen too silent. The air rushed out of Tuck in a long sigh. “You want to know where I got Suzie-Q?”
    One of Cade’s shoulders lifted. “Yes. Tell me?” He was listening. That was a start.
    “Found her out back,” Tuck said, jerking a nod toward the rear of the apartment building. “Starving and scared shitless, with a collar still around her neck. Guess someone didn’t want to take her when they moved.”
    Cade winced. Sorry he’d asked, wasn’t he?
    Tuck went on because he had to. “She kept trying to lead me to this one door. Trying to go home. You ever hear a dog cry? They do, you know. She got loose once, and I found her on the third floor, trying to dig under a door. Nearly scraped her paws raw, she was so crazy to find the person she loved who just walked away. Fucking broke my heart.”
    Cade covered his eyes with his hands. “Tuck, stop. It’s cruel.”
    “So is all of this.” Tuck nailed Cade with a