Chapter 32
MYLES
All I can hope is that Charlie isn’t anywhere nearly as up in his head as I am right now. If he is, we’ll never make it back to Riverside in one piece. I’d offered to drive, but I’ve gotta admit how relieved I was when he’d said he didn’t mind.
I can’t get that kiss to stop replaying in my mind for a single second. Never, not once in my life, have I felt anything that comes even a fraction of the way toward rivaling what happened tonight.
Whether it’s because I’ve never kissed anyone I’ve loved—not that I’ve loved anyone but Charlie—or whether it’s because I’ve never felt anywhere nearly as attracted to anyone as him, I have no idea. Or maybe it’s simply because it’s him.
Charlie.
My person.
Whatever the reason, kissing Charlie left me shattered in the best way possible. All I can focus on is how I can still feel phantom echoes of his lips and body on mine.
I’d been so afraid of Charlie’s rejection and the possibility of fucking up our reclaimed friendship, that I’d completely overlooked the other, actual danger in giving in to the storm of love and lust he’s woken in me.
Having this one taste of Charlie is only the beginning. Now that I’ve started, I know I’ll never have enough.
Not just his body, which I cannot wait to explore, or the ravenous way he’d kissed me, but the other new layers of us I’m desperately hoping he will be as eager for as I am.
Finally being able to just hold him.
Not feeling like there’s a ticking clock hovering over how long I can touch him or lean into his touches without excuse.
It’s a startling thing to realize that, beyond anything related to touch, I don’t know that anything will change in my relationship with him. Apart from the physical aspects, we’re already as close and as woven into each other’s lives as a true couple.
The possibility that maybe I will be able to freely touch him now is everything though.
Touch is something I’ve had so little of in my life. Even with the way I know I’ve always, until recently, shied away from being too physical with Charlie, I’ve craved his nearness so badly, it hurts.
Even if Charlie never kisses me again and nothing sexual ever does happen between us, if he’ll only just let tonight beat down that barrier that’s kept us so careful with our touches and hold me and let me hold him back whenever we both want, I’ll take it and count myself lucky.
The thing I need most is just him, however he wants me.
What this means for us at the end of the school year, when Charlie packs up and heads back to Seattle and I put Dad’s house on the market, I don’t have any idea.
All I know is that I am fucked. Completely and thoroughly fucked, and the worst, or maybe, for now, the best of it is that I couldn’t be happier about it.
God, it’s taking all I have right now not to reach forward and touch him somehow. His shoulder. The back of his neck. His hand. Literally anywhere, so long as it’s him I’m touching.
No matter what I do, I can’t get the memory of the feel of him out of my head. Not that I ever want to.
In the front seat, Janice’s voice is a non-stop stream of anxiety. Is Charlie going as fast as he can? Did he take the right turn off onto the right highway? Is this the best route? Hadn’t we come a different way?
He has a gentle answer to each of her questions. Patient. Collected.
Only his eyes, when they flick up to meet mine in the rear-view mirror, show the tension that’s radiating from him.
If it’s anything like what I’m feeling, it’s a wild mix of frustrated desire and the need for the two of us to be alone so we can finally talk, mixed up with the superficial background irritation and a touch of sympathy for Janice.
I do my best to help him with her nonstop questioning; jumping in with my own reassurances for her and subtle defenses of Charlie’s driving I can’t help throwing in when she gets too latched on to thinking he’s done something wrong.
Even so, it’s impossible to keep my mind from drifting.
Charlie’s lips tasted like strawberries. They always have this soft shine to them, like Chapstick but glossier, and whatever it is, it had tasted like fucking strawberries.
I stifle a moan, shifting in my seat as my dick, which never fully went down even as I’d shoved our things into our respective bags and quickly checked us out of the hotel, hardens all over again in my jeans.
If there’d been any reservations left in some wayward corner of my brain about kissing a guy, the first touch of Charlie’s lips when he’d full-on tackled me against that door had incinerated them.
Even with the strawberry flavor on his sinfully perfect lips and the fact that every inch of his skin was so goddamn smooth it had felt like running my hands over silk, nothing about kissing Charlie had felt remotely like kissing a woman.
Everything about how he kissed—so demanding and greedy as he’d torn me apart at the seams and ruined me for any mouth but his ever again—was purely masculine.
His body was hard and solid against mine, nearly as big and nearly as strong as he’d pinned me against the door.
There’d been that hint of a rasp of stubble when I’d let my lips explore his neck. Smooth in one direction, rough when I moved in the other.
Holy shit, it was hot—
I’d wanted to bury my face in the warmth of that beautiful neck of his and just breathe him in.
Bergamot and rain drops and the smell of strawberries left on my lips from his.
Under his cologne, he’d had a faint, musky, masculine smell that drove me fucking wild with the urge to explore every inch of his body in any way he’d let me.
And then—my dick twitches in my jeans, leaking a fresh damp spot in my boxers at the memory—I’d felt his hardness pressing against me.
That was the moment that it hit me that every sensation I was feeling, he was feeling too.
His balls had to feel tight and heavy, throbbing right up against his body with need just like mine.
Buzzes of pleasure had to be rolling up his shaft as our bodies connected, precum leaking and dripping from his crown.
Fuuck, it was me doing that to him.
But what would have happened if Janice hadn’t interrupted us?
Jumping straight into whatever it would have been without talking first honestly isn’t what I’m concerned about.
It had been him driving forward what was happening, and I’d been only too happy to follow him to whatever end he wanted.
I know what I want. To take literally anything Charlie is willing to give me.
Even more than that though, I want to give him everything he wants.
What’s suddenly got me spiraling is how to do that.
In theory, I get the sorts of things I could have done.
The basic mechanics aren’t all that hard to work out, and I have to admit that more than one fantasy of the two of us together has been living rent free in my head recently.
But I’ve never touched a dick other than my own, let alone sucked one or…
Fuuck, even mid confidence crisis, I’m getting painfully hard again at just the thought of burying my cock in Charlie’s toned, mouthwateringly round ass.
Except I’ve never done that before either.
It just wasn’t something Rach or Sandra and I explored (not that we explored much, to be honest.) More than that, it wasn’t even something I’ve ever given any thought to. I’m thinking about it now though, in a non-stop loop that’s equal parts mind-meltingly sexy and full-blown terrifying.
Because this is Charlie. I want anything I do for him to be perfect, and I’m so afraid that my inexperience will lead me to just let him down instead.
For one second, the scene in my head flips, and I get this brief flash of a mental image of Charlie hovering above my back as I arch up to meet him, his hot, hard dick pressing against a part of me that, until this moment, I’d never once imagined wanting anyone to touch.
My imagination short circuits there. Partially because I can’t imagine how what would come next would feel, and partly because the throb of arousal that pulses through me is so strong, for one awful moment, I’m afraid I’m going to come in my jeans, right here in the back seat of Charlie’s car, with Janice fucking Dawson three feet away from me.
God, I need to pull myself together.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting when we’d finally, and I mean finally, dropped a distraught Janice off at the local hospital. She hadn’t wanted to waste time going for her car first, and since her neighbor had promised to come and pick her up later, Charlie drove her straight there.
What I sure as hell hadn’t been expecting the moment I slip into the passenger seat next to Charlie is for him to be sitting, stiff as a board, hands gripping the steering wheel like his life depends on it in complete silence, eyes fixed dead ahead and very much not on me.
“Hey.” All I want is to touch him. Just to put my hand on his arm, his knee, stroke his hair back out of his face. Anything. The way he’s sitting though, it’s like every wall that ever stood between us is up, higher and wider than they’ve ever been.
His eyes dart to the side to glance at me. He swallows hard. Takes a shaky breath. Then puts the car in gear and swings us out of the hospital parking lot.
I need to ask him what’s wrong. I need, if I can, to make whatever’s happened better.
Even if it means telling him that I respect that he’s feeling like what happened back at the hotel was a mistake that can’t ever happen again, because I can’t think of anything else that could have him looking like he does right now.
Only I’m the world’s biggest coward, because I can’t make myself say a damn word.
We make it two minutes down the road before I’m able to force out a question. “Are you upset?”
Jerkily, he shakes his head. Sucks in a long breath. “I’m scared, Myles.”
“Of what?”