Chapter 33
MYLES
“You asked me in the elevator what was happening.”
Charlie and I are on my couch, and I swear, this moment feels like it’s just too good to be true.
We’re sitting side by side, legs tangled together, bodies pressed close and halfway turned to face each other, eyes locked.
I’ve got my arm around his shoulders, and he’s playing with my other hand, just sort of running his fingers over it, brushing them along my palm, sweeping little patterns over my skin.
It’s distracting as hell, and I hope he never stops.
He swallows hard as he nods, and my eyes zero in on the way his throat bobs when he does. God, his neck had been so sweet, I just want to taste—
Nope. Focusing. We have to talk.
“So I told you a while ago that I worked out that I’m demi.”
“Yeah.” His eyebrows pull together and his nose scrunches slightly in an expression I know means he’s uncertain about something. “And…aro?”
He doesn’t say it like it’s a bad thing, obviously, but I can hear the worry behind the question. Under the circumstances, it makes perfect sense. He wants to know what that means for him. For us.
“Aro’s a spectrum, right?”
He nods again. Of course he would know this. He’s Charlie. He knows everything that matters.
“I think the closest thing to what I am is demiromantic, just like I’m demisexual. Demirose, I guess. Only, until recently, I’d thought I was just straight up aromantic.”
“So your feelings for me are new?” Again, he doesn’t sound like he’s judging or even disappointed. Just curious, and, impossibly, I love him a little more than ever for it.
“No.” I shake my head. “Not my—” dammit, but the L word nearly slips out again. “—Not my romantic feelings for you. I’ve realized now that they’ve always been there. You’ve never just been my friend.”
His lips part in this startled expression at the same moment as his breath hitches.
“This is what I was talking to Rachel about that day you saw us together,” I press on, and understanding lights his face.
“I was having these feelings that were confusing the hell out of me, and I just had to talk to someone about them. I hadn’t meant to tell her they were about you, but she already knew even before I really got started.
She called me out on some things and made me see what was right in front of my face all along. ”
“And I thought there was something going on between the two of you.” He squeezes his eyes shut for a second, shaking his head as he lets out an apologetic breath of laughter. “I would have been happy for you, but…it was the total opposite, wasn’t it?”
“Total opposite.” I run my fingers over his shoulder, wishing I could feel his smooth, warm skin without the barrier of his shirt. “Charlie, there’s no one else that makes me feel what I feel for you. What I’ve always felt for you.” There never could be.
His smile lights up his whole damn face, so bright and real, I can feel it as much as see it. There’s that little confused crinkle to his nose though as he asks, “Always?”
“Always,” I tell him, moving my hand higher to stroke over the soft warmth of his neck.
He leans into the touch with a shiver I can feel ripple all the way through his body where it’s pressed against mine.
And oh fuck, what it does to me knowing that I’m affecting him like this—
Before I even realize I’m moving, I’m kissing him.
I’d promised myself that we’d talk things through before anything else happens, and we will, but now that my mouth’s on his again, I can’t keep myself from tracing the seam of his lips with my tongue.
One brush, and he opens for me, tangling his hands in my shirt and groaning as my tongue slides over his.
My arm slips down from around his shoulders to circle his waist, and I’m not sure if it’s me tugging him closer or if he moves first, but suddenly he’s in my lap and my brain is short circuiting.
I don’t know whether all I want is to just sink into the closeness of him and hold him here like this all night—because holy shit, having him on me and against me and in my arms like this is incredible—or whether the feel of his ass pressed so close to my achingly hard dick makes me want to forget everything else and strip him naked this very second.
All I really know is that every taste I get of him is sweeter. More addictive than the last. Every inch of me craves him in every possible way.
How the hell have I lived so long without knowing this?
I make myself pull back from his lips though. It nearly kills me, but if I don’t, we’ll just wind up where we were in the car again, with too many unsaid things hanging between us. I won’t do that to him. He has to understand what everything that’s happening between us means to me.
Forehead pressed against his, I suck in long breaths, trying to get myself back under some sort of control.
I have to make him understand.
“Before I knew I was demisexual, I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought I should be attracted to people—to girls—and so I tried so hard, but,” I shake my head, “nothing.
“And then when I realized you had feelings for me, I wished so badly that I could just feel the same way for you. It fucking killed me inside, Charlie, that I thought I couldn’t.”
He pulls back just enough to scan my face, and that little crease between his eyebrows and the wrinkle of his nose are back.
“I didn’t feel any sexual attraction to you then.
Not because of anything to do with you,” I rush to explain, “but because it was like that part of my brain and body just hadn’t switched on yet.
I didn’t know anything about being any kind of demi or even what that was, and I thought that I was supposed to feel things all one way.
Like I thought everyone else did. Crushes that came with feelings and desire all at the same time, and anything else didn’t count. ”
I can see understanding washing over his face.
“I never stopped having feelings for you, even though I didn’t understand what I felt for you.
I haven’t had a lot of people in my life to feel anything real for, and so I thought the difference in how I felt about you was just because you mattered most to me in the world.
Stupid really, that I didn’t put together why that might be. ”
He grabs hold of my hand, pulls it away from where it had been moving up to rub at my neck and twines his fingers with mine.
“Not stupid,” he shakes his head. “It makes total sense, Myles. And I don’t think it’s true that most people always feel those two things all at once—physical and romantic attraction.
Think about how often people want each other but don’t have any emotion invested?
Isn’t that like, the whole basis for hook-up culture? ”
“Kind of not my scene.” I laugh, and he joins me.
His fingers drift back up to my hair, stroking again. “For what it’s worth, it’s not mine either. I’ve dated some, and I really tried with Ben, but…” He trails off, looking down to where he’s gone back to tracing his fingers over mine again. “Like I said, it’s always been you.”
Those words get my heart racing. They sound so close to a confession of love…
“But that’s what I was saying, Myles. I realized how I felt about you when I was twelve.”
My arm that’s around his waist pulls him closer in an involuntary movement.
Because fucking hell. I know I’ve loved him for just as long, but I didn’t see it.
It was hard enough not understanding why Charlie’s always been the most important person in my life, but for him?
Thirteen years of knowing how he felt, and all the while believing I couldn’t ever feel anything but friendship for him?
Shit.
“I thought about things like kissing you,” his mouth twists into this embarrassed little smile as he peeks up at me.
“But in the way a twelve-year-old thinks about kissing their first crush. I didn’t want you like I wanted you when I was fifteen.
Or like I want you now.” He rocks his ass, just once, in my lap.
As one, we both let out a stifled groan.
“My point,” and god, I love that his voice has gone a little breathless again now, “is that people’s feelings change over time. I think everyone’s do. Yours just took a bit longer to sync up than mine did, and longer than you’d been expecting. I can see why that would have been confusing.”
Instead of pulling him in for the kiss that I’m dying to give him, I squeeze his hand. Safer that way, since there’s more we still need to talk about.
“Thank you,” I tell him, “for understanding me. My whole life, I feel like you’ve been the only person who always has as completely as you do. It’s one of the many, many things that makes me care for you.”
It’s his turn to lean in and kiss me. Just a peck on my cheek, but it’s still enough to make my blood run just that much hotter, even through the frustration that’s just burst through me.
“God, Charlie, I should have talked to you about what I was feeling.” So many times, I chose to hide from him instead of talking to him. “But there were things I felt like I couldn’t tell you.”
“Like?” Again, he’s curious, not judging. Fuck, why have I ever kept anything from him?
“For one, when I saw you again.” Nerves churn in my stomach. They’re a fluttery, pleasant kind of nerves though. They match the way I can feel my cheeks heating under his intent eyes. “I started noticing these things about you.”
“What kind of things?”
He knows exactly what kinds of things I mean if the smug look on his face is any clue.