The Playboy Doctor Swore Off Love, Then His Best Friend Claimed Him novel · Chapter 21 of 24
Chapter 21: The Ring Box
At three in the morning Elias stood in the dark kitchen in his shorts and drank a glass of water he did not want.
He did this most nights now.
He woke, reached across the sheet, and found the warm back there.
He lay listening to it breathe until the fear loosened enough to let him up.
It was the first week of December, and Damon had slept beside him for every one of the nineteen nights since the corridor.
Elias counted them anyway.
He knew how that sounded.
He knew what it said about a man who had spent ten years in the spare room of his own head.
He had learned to expect a door to close.
There was a bruise on his hip from the stair, and a mark below his jaw that had not faded.
There was a drawer upstairs with ten empty boxes in it.
He had everything.
He kept waiting to be told it was a loan.
He leaned on the island and looked at the new stair rising into the dark, and remembered a night he had not told anyone.
Damon had been twenty-five, and the clinic was a month from opening.
He had taken a woman to dinner at a French place on Hudson Street.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Playboy Doctor Swore Off Love, Then His Best Friend Claimed Him are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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