Chapter 39
CHARLIE
I hadn’t been able to stop smiling when I’d checked the forecast for tonight. A cloudless night, cold, but not freezing. No moon. Totally perfect.
The fact that both of us have to be up for work tomorrow morning is way less than ideal, but this will be worth it. I hope.
He’s…he’s excited about tonight. He’s been looking forward to it.
My pulse skips.
Ohmigod, maybe even almost as much as I have.
Even all bundled up in a thick coat, Myles’s body feels amazing beneath my hands.
Firm and solid and dense, and it’s all too easy for my brain to fill in the gaps of what I can’t feel through all the material between us.
How his back and shoulder muscles bunch and tighten when he moves.
The bulge of his biceps and the silky-coarseness of the dark hair that dusts his gorgeous torso.
It’s totally the last thing I want to do, but I pull away from his kisses. They’re getting too insistent, too distracting. Another minute like this, and he’ll have me forgetting we’re supposed to be going anywhere except for straight up to his bed. If we even make it there.
He doesn’t let me go easily.
When I break free of his kiss, his hands tangle in my hair and he pulls me back, drawing my lower lip between his, licking over it. Sucking and nipping until I’m melting into him all over again.
One of his hands disappears from my hair. Next second though, he’s running it up my thigh toward the erection trapped by my jeans—
“Myles,” I moan against his lips, as much in protest as with the throbbing blaze of desire he’s building in me. “We have to go.”
“I couldn’t touch you all day,” he murmurs, pulling away from my mouth with a disappointed huff. “How is that fair?”
My smile is ridiculous. I totally know this, but how on earth could I possibly care? Myles Marlow is sulking because he had to go a day without touching me.
Oh. My. God.
The degree of squealing I’m doing inside would put Gemma to shame on her best day.
“What if I promise to make it up to you?”
He groans, nodding against my forehead. “Yeah,” I can feel the stuttered exhale of his breath ghost over my face.
“You could definitely do that.” He skims the backs of his knuckles up the side of my neck, making me shiver as curls of sensation shimmer through me.
“But only if you know how very much you owe me.”
Ohmigod, the way my dick pulses and jerks at the dark, delicious promise in those words. Pleasure rolls down my spine, and my balls twitch and tighten. He hasn’t even touched me, and I’m more than halfway there.
Myles pesters me all the way down his dark, winding driveway, insisting I tell him where we’re going and why we’re going there so late.
I only grin and shake my head, flashing sidelong glances at him as I avoid the potholes and turn out onto the highway.
He’ll figure it out soon enough, and besides, I really want to see if he remembers.
He does. As soon as we’re pulling over along a simple, white split-rail fence that borders a wide field.
The county has a land trust that’s bought up old farmland acreage and forest, turning the plots into hiking trails and minimally maintained open spaces with free public access.
It’s one of the land trust’s former-farms-turned-meadow, surrounded on all sides by forest, that I’ve brought us to.
The open space is big enough that there’s an uninterrupted view of the sky—a rare thing in Riverside.
“This is—” He leans forward, staring out the windshield through the darkness, glancing up at the sky before turning back to face me. “It’s that spot your parents took us to watch the meteor shower your first summer in Riverside, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I grin as my stomach gives a little swoop of excitement that he’s remembered so quickly. That night had meant so much to me, and I guess it’s something that Myles would totally remember just for its own sake, but I can’t help hoping—
“Do you remember what we wished for?” He asks, doing that Myles thing I love so much where it’s like he can just see straight into my thoughts.
Suddenly, my throat’s too tight to say anything out loud, and so I just nod, because ohmigod, he does remember.
Thirteen and a half years ago…
It’s weird lying on a blanket with Myles right alongside me.
Good weird. The kind of weird that I’ve been feeling more and more, until lately, it’s every time I’m with him.
This need to scoot just a little bit closer.
To look at him just a little bit longer.
It goes along with the fluttery, warm feeling I get in my stomach when he says my name, or when he smiles his real smile.
Not the one he gives teachers or my parents.
It’s not like he doesn’t mean that one, but the one I think of as his real smile is the one I don’t think I’ve ever seen him give anyone except for me.
When he smiles like that, it’s like this light switches on in him, and he’s even harder to look away from than usual.
It gives his eyes this soft warmness that makes me feel like I could fall right into them.
I’m not stupid, and I’m not good enough at lying to myself not to know exactly what’s going on.
I have a crush on my best friend. Probably the biggest crush anyone ever had on anyone. And no, I’m not being dramatic.
The thing is, I think I might actually be in love with him.
It doesn’t bug me at all that my crush on Myles just confirms what I’d already known for a while; that I’m gay.
At Christmas last year, my cousin Todd told everyone that he’s gay.
Todd’s seventeen and the biggest jerkface anyone’s ever met (at least now, which seriously sucks because, until a couple years ago, he used to be so nice and was pretty much the coolest person I knew), but him coming out like he did made me almost like him again.
For about an hour, until Gemma asked him if he wanted to watch The Sound of Music with us, and he’d just curled his lip in this nasty look he’s perfected recently, shook his head, and walked off without even answering.
Anyway, his parents already knew about him being gay.
I kind of got the impression they’d known for a while.
Mom and Dad hugged him and told him they were glad he’d trusted them, and Grandma asked him when we’d get to meet this boyfriend who was the whole reason behind his coming out. And then that was it.
So no, nothing about being sure that I’m gay is any kind of problem. At least not with my family.
What bugs me about my crush on Myles is that I know he doesn’t have one back on me.
At lunch right before school got out for the summer, these other boys in our class were talking about which girls they thought were hot, and one of them asked Myles and me.
I could totally tell there was this weird edge to the question, and I just froze up.
Like, just couldn’t think of anything to say.
There was sweat breaking out all down my back, and my stomach was tying itself in knots, just like when I have to talk in front of the whole class, because the idea of telling my family I’m gay isn’t scary, but I don’t want the boys at school to know, and ohmigod, I do not want Myles to know, when, “Charlie thinks Rachel’s hot, but I like Kyra better. ”
It was one of those dangerous moments where I only just stopped myself from hugging him. It would have been totally weird and probably totally showed everyone exactly what I was trying to hide, but I was just so glad Myles had saved me.
Once the other boys headed out of the cafeteria for the field though, what Myles had said started to make me feel a whole different kind of sick. The longer I thought about it, the worse it got.
“Do you really think Kyra’s hot?” I’d asked him, right before recess ended and we’d had to go back to class.
“Doesn’t everyone?” There’d been this sharpness to his voice that made me want to tear up. I’d never heard Myles sound like that before, and on top of how much I’d wanted him to say no, he didn’t think Kyra Welsey was hot because he didn’t like girls like that, it hurt that he was snapping at me.
I’d wanted to thank him for covering up for me, but I’d felt too much like crying, and my stomach felt sicker than ever. Besides, if I did thank him for it, wasn’t that kind of admitting that I had a reason for not being able to answer for myself?
Since then, we haven’t talked about girls.
It’s August now. My parents brought Myles and me out here to this field to watch the Perseid meteor shower since we can’t see it from our house because of all the trees. Back in Seattle, there’d been too much light pollution to see things like meteors.
We’ve been out here for about fifteen minutes, lying on our backs on a blanket in the grass, staring up at the sky. My parents have their own blanket, but Myles and I put ours a little ways away from theirs. Now, it kind of feels like we’re here alone.
It’s too early to see many meteors. I looked it up online and saw that there aren’t going to be many of them until after midnight, but since my parents said that was too late, we came as soon as the sun went down. Hopefully we’ll still get to see at least a couple.
“Have you ever seen a shooting star?” I ask Myles, turning my head a little toward him. I almost turn right back when I realize he’s facing me too. The blanket we’re on isn’t that big, and since Myles is so tall, we’re lying on it at an angle, which means our faces are really close together.
Myles smiles as he nods, and my stomach gets that fluttery crush feeling, stronger than ever. “A few times. But mostly the trees make them hard to see. You have to be looking at just the right time.”
“Have you ever made a wish on one?” Ohmigod, I don’t know why I just asked him such a stupid, little kid question.
I’m instantly so embarrassed, I wish I could just roll over and hide until he forgets I said it.
It’s just that my head gets all jumbled when I get that feeling around him, and stupid, weird things just pop out of my mouth if I’m not careful.
He doesn’t laugh or roll his eyes at me. Of course he doesn’t. He’s Myles.
“I’d never really thought about doing it.” Like my question hadn’t been a totally dumb one. “What would you wish for, if we see one?”
Ha. Like I can tell him the answer to that question.
“You’re not supposed to tell.” There, that’s a safe answer, right?
He grins at me. “Bossy.”
“I’m not bossy, it’s how it works,” I tell him. Inside, I’m grinning. I secretly love it when he teases me like that.
“He says bossily.” He reaches out and pokes my side, and ohmigod, I can’t breathe for a moment.
Because I’m scared what I might say or do if I don’t, I turn my head away from him, straight back up at the sky.
Beside me, I can hear him do the same, and for a few minutes, we’re quiet until we both gasp at the same moment.
Like we’re the same person, our hands fly up into the air at the exact same time, pointing up at the trail of light blazing silently across the sky.
“Did you see that?” We both ask it at the same second, and then we’re laughing, and it’s hard to actually stop, because every time I start to stop, he quiets down at the same moment, and the way we do that, like there’s something in us that’s just totally synced up, makes me more than a little giddy, which just sets me off again.
For some reason, that seems to make him laugh all over again too.
When we finally do stop, Myles turns his head back toward me. I can hear the rustle of it over the blanket, but I don’t turn mine to look at him. I just…can’t.
“So,” I can hear the smile in his voice, and I know what his eyes would look like right now, just from the sound. They’d have that warm softness, like the dark, dark brown in them is a place I could live forever if I just knew how to get there. “What’d you wish for?”
“I told you I can’t tell.” Ohmigod, I’m glad he doesn’t know how very true and very specific my answer is. Myles cannot know what I just wished for. Ever.
“Wanna know what I wished for?”
He’s grinning now. I can hear it. Not laughing at me, but teasing me again. He doesn’t ever do it in a mean way, but he totally loves to work me up over things he knows I think are a big deal but don’t really mind about.
If it ever actually upsets me though, he’ll stop and never do it again. Like the time he told me there was a spider on my back and I kind of had a panic attack.
That was the first time I saw Myles cry, he was so sorry. It was months before he stopped apologizing about it.
“It won’t come true if you tell me,” I warn, only halfway serious.
“Yeah it will. We’ll make it come true.”
My stomach flips and my heart stutters at the sound of his voice, all soft and whispery. This time, I don’t know what look is on his face, and I’m so curious and so caught up with how he sounded just now that I can’t help turning my head toward him again.
He’s almost smiling, but not quite, and his eyes have that look to them.
“I wished that we could do this every year,” he whispers. “Just the two of us. Promise?”
The summer we were thirteen, it was cloudy the entire two weeks there could have been a chance of seeing the meteor shower.
When we were fourteen, the day we’d planned to go was the day that tank of a kid slammed into Myles at football practice, broke his collar bone, and gave him a concussion.
And the summer we were fifteen, I was back in Seattle, convinced that Myles Marlow wanted nothing more to do with me ever again.