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“I never got around to it.”

“It didn’t take long to do it for your mother.”

Nate bent to straighten the sleeping bag. “I wasn’t going to make her sleep on the floor.”

“But it’s okay for you to sleep on it for weeks?”

He had a point. Nate had barely thought about it lately. He worked, he ate, he crawled into the sleeping bag. There had always been something more pressing to do than make himself comfortable.

“I was planning to sell the place when it was finished,” he said.

Leo did not appear convinced by that explanation. “You can still sleep in a bed in a house you’re going to sell.”

“Yeah. I suppose you can.”

It sounded a bit ridiculous now that Leo had pointed it out. Nate spent hours choosing things that would make this house somewhere people wanted to live, then went to sleep on the floor. But setting up a bedroom for himself would have meant picking a room he liked, putting his things in it, getting used to being there.

He hadn’t wanted to get used to somewhere he was going to leave.

“You could still sell it,” Leo said.

Nate looked up.

“If your mother can do what she said. With the ring.” Leo glanced toward the window. “I wouldn’t have to stay here.”

Nate sat on the sleeping bag. “Is that what you’d like? For us to move somewhere else?”

“I don’t know.” Leo turned back to him. “But you weren’t planning to live here. Before me.”

“I wasn’t planning on you either.”

“That’s kind of my point.”

Nate’s small smile faded.

Leo drifted closer, then settled beside him. “I don’t want you to regret being with me.”

“I don’t.”

“You can’t know you never will.”

“No,” Nate said. “I can’t. Neither can you. You might get sick of living with me.”

“I won’t.”

“You complain about me often enough.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

Leo frowned at him. “I enjoy complaining about you.”

Nate laughed, a short, surprised sound. Beside him, Leo’s expression softened.

“Well, I’d hate to take that away from you.”

“You’d better not.”