Chapter 5 Sab
Sab
I’m kissing Galen.
I’m kissing him, and his mouth is warmer and softer than I’ve dared imagine. Palm to my jaw, thumb stroking my cheekbone, his lips part enough that I taste cider on his tongue, and my head spins, even though he’s being gentle with me.
So gentle. I can tell. But the possessive way he grips my face feels different.
Different in a way that has me scrambling to catalogue every feeling burning through me. Every zip of arousal and emotion. Every dying flicker of fear as they give way to something else.
I can’t keep up.
So I sink into it. And he lets me.
Lets me press tighter against him. Lets me kiss him like I have a clue what I’m doing.
I don’t.
I’m shaking.
But Galen doesn’t seem to mind. He’s just there—here—steady and grounding as my existence tilts sideways, and my fingers twist in the fabric of his coat, clinging on.
Because if I don’t, I might float away on the crazy-hot sensation of my lips on his.
Of his on mine as he makes that low sound again.
The one that has me feeling like a storm learning to rise.
Not filthy and desperate, but soft and wild, and I realise it’s not him making that sound, it’s me.
Merde.
I’m a heartbeat from burrowing under his spiced-apple skin and staying there forever.
But that sound I’m making, caught between a gasp and a groan, Galen hears it.
He breaks the kiss and presses his forehead to mine, our noses brushing, our lips so almost still touching we share a breath. “You’re okay?”
I nod, maybe a little too fast. Galen smiles and it transcends the cheeky grin he gave me the first time we met. The one I thought was the hottest thing I’d ever seen, even beyond the literal nudes I’ve seen on his app profile.
But, man, this—the slow curve of his lips in the damp moonlight, the glitter in his emerald-green eyes…it fucking dazzles me.
He dazzles me.
So I kiss him again, and I’m braver this time. I chase that cider taste on his wildfire tongue. Hunt down the thrill of his warm hands shifting around until they find the strip of bare skin under my clothes and above my waistband.
The hollow at the base of my spine.
The small of my back.
I never knew it could feel so much, but the mere graze of Galen’s fingers has me lit up like a fucking Christmas tree. The nervous arousal I started with gains traction I’m not prepared for and my body reacts on instinct.
Without thought, I tug him closer.
Galen chuckles and nips my bottom lip. “For the record, if you’re standing there worried you’re not any good at this either, you’re as wrong as you were about your conversation skills.”
Nice of him to say, but I don’t want to talk. For as long as these magical moments last, I just want to feel. To pretend I haven’t spent ten years dragging wreckage behind me like a knackered bin lorry. Like I haven’t broken everything I’ve ever touched.
But that flicker in my brain, the wandering thoughts leading nowhere good, Galen hears those too. He brushes my lips with the softest kiss yet. Then he eases back. “Let’s walk some more.”
I don’t want to walk either, but I’m as hooked on his gentle persuasion as I am on his mouth. The way he nuzzles my cheek and moves so close our shoulders touch. It makes up for the loss of his hand on my back and without his apple pie scent bewitching me, my feet touch earth again.
We descend the other side of Figgy Mount, and whatever Galen thinks, I really am terrible at small talk these days. At least with humans as devastatingly hot as he is.
“You’re not from here,” he guesses. “You sound like a Brummie when you’re not rattling off French like a sexy poet.”
I snort. “Trust me, there’s nothing poetic about the way I speak French. I’m usually cursing, or being too fucking flaky to remember a whole sentence in either language.”
“All right. But I’m not budging on the sexy part.”
“Thanks. And you’re correct about the Brummie vibes. I grew up in Solihull.”
“Not France?”
“Nope. Never lived there. But we didn’t speak English at home until me and my brother went to school, so…”
Galen’s smiling again.
It seeps into my train of thought.
Derails it.
He has to pick up where I trail off. “So how do you come to be here?”
Here.
In Everwyld.
The whimsical town we both call home.
“I followed someone here too,” I explain. “My brother. Didn’t settle until last year, though. I was in Manchester before that.”
Galen doesn’t ask why. He gives me room to elaborate, and when I don’t, he just keeps walking, dividing his gaze between the stars and the homes we pass that have got in early with their Christmas lights.
We follow the natural path back to where we came from. Back to the start, when I’d never kissed a man in my life, and my hands twitch. I want to grab him. Haul him against me again. I want to know for sure that what I felt up on the hill wasn’t a fluke.
You know it isn’t.
Course I do.
But there’s a devil in me that has to be sure.
“You’re not gay, Sab. You’re just a cokehead with a fried brain.”
I mean. Charmaine’s not wrong about the fried brain part. There’s a reason I can’t sit still longer than six seconds at a time, and it’s not ADHD. But I wasn’t using when we had a conversation I’ve regretted ever since. Hadn’t been for years. I—
Warm hands touch my face. The same work-hardened palms that slid along my jaw ten minutes ago.
Galen.
He’s stopped walking—we’ve stopped walking. And merde, we’re outside my house, which means we’ve passed his two-bed end-of-terrace on Cinnamon Row, the one he pointed out from the top of the hill, and crossed into the shithole street where I live.
How?
How?
Did we teleport here?
There’s no other explanation. At least not one I can think of right now, while his gaze is so arresting I forget the world around us exists.
My racing thoughts, though.
They’re a different beast. A resilient one, and they don’t still. Not even for hot firefighters who look at me as if I’m worth something.
We’re outside my house.
My empty house.
That means we’re going in, or he’s going home, and I’m not ready for either of those things.
I can’t fuck him.
Kissing him has damn near killed me. But I can’t find the words to say goodbye to him either, and a fraught sensation seizes my chest, tension flooding my limbs.
Fuck.
Or not.
Shit.
I search for salvation in Galen’s green eyes.
He does that thing with his thumbs on my cheekbones again. “Take a breath.”
“I’m breathing.”
A grin different to that smile lights his face. One that’s more comfort than joy. “You’re vibrating. And it’s page one of the advanced firefighter’s training manual: how to spot the panicking Frenchman.”
“I’m not that French.”
“You’re whatever you want to be.”
He’s not talking about my Parisian father, and we both know it. As much as we both know the slow breath I force on myself is hard-won.
“I like walking,” Galen says when I don’t speak. When I just cling to his wrists and stare at him. “And I like kissing in the rain. If you ever want to do this again, you know where to find me.”
I’m too lost in his gaze to comprehend what he’s saying. To do anything but fucking swoon as he gives me another lighter-than-air kiss.
My heart jumps.
My skin shivers.
And it’s such a brand new feeling it blinds me to the reality of Galen easing back again, like he did up on Figgy Mount. To him stepping away, until it’s too late and we’re not together anymore.
Until he’s gone, and I’m alone on Cosmic Avenue with my metaphorical dick in my hand.
My actual dick stays in my hand all night long. I don’t come, but I’m so hard I think I might shatter if I mess with it too much. So I close my eyes and think of Galen until the sun comes up, and by the time dawn rolls around, I look like I’ve spent the night on the sniff.
Red eyes.
Sallow skin.
Restless energy coursing through me that has me pacing Tam’s kitchen, thankful he’s out and Bhodi has to deal with me instead.
My brother’s husband is the sweetest soul on earth. He doesn’t accuse me of relapsing after half a decade of sobriety.
He makes me breakfast while I dance to Noir Désir with Esme, and stops Rudy mauling my shoes.
Bhodi cooks like an Englishman.
Bacon and bread.
Red sauce that belongs in the bin.
It’s not the ham-and-cheese croissants I can sink by the half dozen, but I’m not complaining. How can I when Bhodi is the best Christmas gift we’ve ever got?
I share my sandwich with Esme. She’s a little weirdo who likes the crusts. The cutest little weirdo with ketchup on her face. “You have strong teeth, my sweet girl.”
She laughs and babbles something closer to gibberish than the mishmash of languages she’s picked up from me and Tam. Then she wipes ketchup on my face and I guess that’s what I get for not putting her down since I rocked up an hour ago and interrupted cartoon time with Uncle Bhodi.
I set her on the floor to chase Rudy around while I dash upstairs to wash my face. Should be an in-and-out job, but like so many things recently, I find my attention diverted before I’m done.
Tam used to be a hooligan biker, but he’s a calligrapher these days.
Fancy writing turned into the kind of art that has Christmas paying the mortgage all year round.
He’s so fucking good, it’s hard to believe his tatted hands used to be more at home in petrol and grime.
So hard, I’m caught off guard by his work on a regular basis.
By his skill and the sheer quantity he churns out at this time of year.
Boxes and boxes of hand-drawn greetings cards fill the landing.
I poke around in a few.
Get nosy and sniff around his studio.
His order list is wild.
I snap a picture and go back to Bhodi in time to help him rescue Rudy from Esme. “Thought we’d agreed Tam wasn’t going to work himself into a coma this year?”
Bhodi glances at my phone screen and purses his lips.
I arch a brow. “What? You have nothing to say about it?”
“I have plenty to say about it. And I’ve said it. To him.”