Chapter 44 #2
“Better be careful what you wish for.” His grin is so wide, it’s practically feral, and ohmigod, I love it.
“Now that I don’t have to be afraid to touch you,” he drops his lips to my neck again, working his hand up the back of my crop top.
“I feel like the more I have of you, the more I want,” he breathes against my skin.
“I’ve never cared for anyone but you, and I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you either.
I’d always thought of the two things as so separate, but with you, they’re—”
“Inseparable. Self-perpetuating.” I don’t want to interrupt him, but I want him to know that I know exactly what he is saying and how he feels.
“Exactly.” He pulls back, staring into my eyes as I run my hands down his back to slip them up under the hem of his tee. “Is this how lust and emotion always are for you?”
There’s curiosity, but even more, I see insecurity in his expression. If what he’s feeling right now matches my own thoughts at all, I know exactly where it comes from.
“No.” I shake my head, hoping he can hear and see the utter sincerity in my answer. Because it means the world to me knowing that he’s never felt what he feels for me for anyone else, and I want him to know he’s not alone in that.
“Maybe if I hadn’t always been so totally—” I check myself only just in time before the words, in love with you spill out.
He has to know that I’m in love with him and always have been, but the transformation of our friendship into more is new, as is his awareness of feeling anything more than platonic affection for me.
He doesn’t need the pressure of reminders of how all-in I’ve always been when it comes to him.
“—hung up on you, I might have felt something like this for someone else, but everything with anyone else I’ve ever been with has always felt shallow. Like there was something missing.
“The desire and emotion were there, sure,” I cast him an apologetic look, stroking circles over his skin as my hands explore the plane of his back.
Talking to him about my past relationships feels like a jerk thing to do at a moment like this, but he needs to hear what I have to tell him.
“But I never felt anything that scratched the surface of what I feel for you, Myles.
And you were always there. In the back of my mind; sometimes front and center.
This bar no one could ever come close to reaching.
“Don’t worry,” I laugh as his eyes go wide with what looks like protest. “I don’t have you up on a pedestal or anything.
I’m well aware that you’re human. You can snap at people when you’re caught up in your own thoughts, especially if they’re stressing you out.
You worry too much about things outside your control.
You’re ridiculously hard on yourself, and when you’re sick, you snore and drool in your sleep. ”
The look on his face is half indignant, half mortified, but he melts into me the moment I tug him forward for a long, soft kiss.
“Drooling and snoring aside,” I whisper when we break apart, lips lifting into a smile when he cringes at my words.
“I’m not going to try to assume I know how you feel, but I know that what I feel for you is nothing like what I’ve felt for anyone else, so does that at least put us on the same page? ”
“Yeah.” He nuzzles his nose softly along the side of mine, and there’s so much heat and wonder in his eyes when he pulls back enough for me to see them, their dark beauty leaves me more than a little breathless.
“What?” I ask him, more because I’m afraid if I don’t fill the silence with words that are completely under my control, something I don’t mean to say aloud might pop out instead.
He hums quietly, brushing my hair back from my forehead as the fingers of his other hand trace circles along the skin at the top of my hip. “You’re just so pre—”
Color springs to his face and he slams his lips shut, eyes snapping wide.
“So…what?” I challenge, pushing forward off the wall. He’s caught off guard by my movement and the weird embarrassment he’s gotten wrapped up in, and I take shameless advantage of the situation, walking him back the few steps it takes to topple him down onto my bed beneath me.
I have a fairly good guess what he was going to say, and I totally love it if I’m right. But why would he be so weird about telling me he thinks I’m pretty?
“I’m so what, Myles?” I lower my mouth to his neck, completely obsessed with the way his Adams apple bobs and his tendons twitch when I graze my lips up the column of his throat.
Slowly, I run my fingers up his stomach and ribcage under his shirt until I find his nipples. The moment I brush over them, they harden into tight nubs and his back arches, pressing his body up against mine.
I love how responsive he is and how needy he gets when I play with him like this, and I am so not above using it to my advantage now.
My teeth close gently around the skin just below his jaw, and I give a soft tug, following it up with an open-mouthed kiss before pulling back, just out of reach at the same moment as I let go of his nipples.
“Tell me.” I stroke a teasing circle around each of his pecs, and he groans.
“You’re so…so pretty.” He says it in a whisper, so quiet, I can barely hear him. “But that’s a weird thing to say, isn’t it?”
“Myles Marlow,” I scoot up over him so that my lips hover just a hair’s breadth away from his. “You can call me anything you want. But do you have any idea how much I love you calling me pretty?”
“It’s not weird? You’re a man—”
I laugh. I can’t help it. “Yes, I’m a man. A man who wears pink crop tops and lace panties. I think it’s safe to say pretty is kinda what I’m going for.”
His eyes fall closed and he tips his head back with a breath just shy of a whine. “Fucking hell, Charlie, those panties—”
“I love that you liked them.” I drop a soft kiss to his lips.
Everything in me wants to deepen it, to just lick into his mouth and lose myself in him, but I need him to know this first. “I’ve never felt like I couldn’t be myself around you.
” Another kiss. “It feels so good, and I want you to feel like that too. Not like you’re going to mess up or like you have to worry about saying or doing the wrong thing, because you’re not. I just want you, Myles.”
He tugs me down against him, kissing me fiercely.
“I just want you too, Charlie.” His warm breath over my lips sends the most delicious shiver through me as he strokes his fingers over the exposed skin of my lower back.
“You have me,” I whisper as my hands cup the back of his head, holding him to me.
You have me forever.
But I can’t tell him that. I love him too much to tie that weight to him when I know I’m going to have to let him go.
He doesn’t give me time for the lump forming in my throat to tighten into something I have to fight against before he’s kissing me again, so deeply, it feels like he’s everywhere in me, blurring the lines of where each of us starts and the other ends.