Chapter 34
James
Istood in the doorway to Marc’s bedroom and appreciated how unbelievably adorable he was curled around a pillow, his hair sticking up in all directions.
Despite my resolution to enjoy whatever time we had together, my heart still gave a pang at the thought of leaving.
Most of my life, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.
Enlisting had merely been a way to escape the pomp of “high society” and the expectations that came with it. Now I knew exactly what I wanted.
I wanted to wake up every day and have Marc smile sleepily at me when I gave him his morning coffee.
I wanted to spend hours working beside him in the shop, even though I didn’t know a damn thing about flowers.
We’d tease each other, trade kisses, carve out our place in this small town.
The town as a whole still had some rough edges where the queer community was concerned, but we’d work together to change that, make life better for us, for little Rumi, for Frankie the installer, for everyone.
The only problem was I didn’t know if that was something he was remotely interested in having.
We were having a great time together. Did I really want to jeopardize that by dumping all of my feelings on him?
Andy kept encouraging me to be upfront about how much I was falling for him.
Except there was no “falling” to it. I was completely fallen, head-over-heels in love with Marc.
Then there was the not so small matter of the clock running out on my leave.
My CO had pulled a lot of strings and shuffled some dubious paperwork to give me as much time as he had. Not easy, given that my contract was all but up. My window to figure out what I wanted to do was rapidly closing. A point driven home by the three emails currently taunting me in my inbox.
Marc shifted in his sleep, and a smile stole across my face at the cute noise he made as he snuggled tighter into the pillow.
Would he ever hold me that way, or was that yet another empty fantasy?
Behind me, the coffeemaker beeped. I turned back to the kitchen to make our respective cups.
When I’d woken at for-fuck’s-sake-o’clock, I’d debated going for a run, but the idea of returning to see his sad expression because I’d gone without him made the idea far less appealing.
Coffee in hand, I rapped on the open door. He jolted awake, and I bit back a snicker. “Rise and shine, sleepyhead.”
He blinked at me bleary-eyed, then picked up his phone to check the time. His subsequent groan had a chuckle slipping out of me. “Why are you evil?” he grumbled, turning to flop on his back and covering his face with the previously snuggled pillow.
“If I were truly evil, would I have made you coffee?” I asked as I stepped into the room.
He tugged the pillow away from his face enough to peer at me. “What happened to it being a day off?”
I moved close enough for the steam wafting out of the cups I was holding to be clearly visible.
“Still is. It also happens to be a beautiful morning for a run.” His gaze slid from the cup down my body to latch onto the running shorts I wore.
I took a sip from my Orange Beach coffee cup and tried like hell not to preen.
Marc’s affinity for my “ridiculously short shorts” had definitely not escaped my notice.
“I suppose I could do with a run,” he finally said with a put-upon sigh that I didn’t buy for a second.
“Coffee first.” He finished sitting up and held out his hand.
I dutifully brought it closer and watched his beautiful face relax with appreciation as he took his first sip.
“Mmm, perfect, just like always.” He squinted at me, then curled his finger for me to come closer.
Curious what he was about, but trusting he wouldn’t do anything to risk spilling our drinks, I leaned closer. “Did you need help disentangling yourself?” I teased.
In lieu of answering, he hooked his free hand around the back of my neck and tugged me closer for a kiss that lingered and tasted even sweeter than my coffee. When he pulled away, happiness sparkled in his eyes. “You were too far away.”
My heart threatened to grow wings and fly out of my chest. Did he have any idea the effect his words had on me?
Was he even remotely aware of how unbelievably in love with him I was?
Would he still talk to me like that if he did?
I pushed the questions and doubts away and offered him a playful grin as I stepped out of reach once more, loving the little pout that pinched his handsome face.
“I’m about to be a lot farther away if you don’t hurry and change,” I threatened, taking a deep pull of my coffee.
An impressive five minutes and two to-go cups later, we were rolling down the road toward Flying Creek Nature Preserve. Marc glanced at me as he polished off the last of his coffee and finished parking.
“Something on your mind?” I asked once I unfolded myself from the passenger seat.
He shrugged and reached into the back seat for the drawstring bag of water bottles, which he slung over his shoulders. “Nothing much.”
I walked around the vehicle to face him. “Nothing much, my ass. What’s got you making that face?”
“Well, now that you mention it, your ass does look amazing in those absurdly short shorts,” he said with a playful grin.
Tempting as it was to enjoy his appreciation, he wasn’t fooling me.
I raised an eyebrow, and he let out a huff, turning his gaze toward the sky.
“The breeze making this morning so pleasant smells like rain.”
I mirrored his look toward the sky, which was still brightening with the sunrise. “Really? It doesn’t look like rain.”
He shook his head and repositioned his bag. “That gives us some time, but don’t expect it to last. If dark clouds roll in, we need to head back ASAP.” He started toward the trail with a light jog, and I fell in step.
“We can do that. I don’t understand why you sound so dire though.”
“Not sure what storms are like where you’re from, but around here, they're fierce, can come with tornados, have deadly lightning, and it usually floods. In short, if you don’t have to be out of the house, you aren’t. And if you are, you get your happy ass back home on the double.”
My eyes bugged out a little at the list of natural disasters one storm could bring, especially when there was barely a cloud in the sky now. “Okay then, Mother Nature isn’t fucking around on the coast.”
“Nope.” He glanced at me with a mischievous look in his hazel eyes. “How about we pick up the pace and give those long legs of yours a proper stretch?”
I snorted and didn’t waste any time hitting the gas. Marc’s indignant cry of me being a cheater dogged my heels until Marc himself was once more at my side. “What’s the matter, baby boy? Winded?” I flashed him a cheeky grin, but didn’t slow down.
“No fair on the head start. Your legs are longer than mine,” he grumbled between breaths. I laughed, and he joined me.
God, I loved this. Spending time with him was so easy, equally relaxing and exciting. He made me feel like I could do anything, but the only thing I wanted to do was make him smile and laugh.
We got lost in the steady pounding of our feet on dirt and wooden planks. The forest wrapped around us in a comforting hush that even the birds and insects didn’t seem eager to disturb.
“I still can’t believe you made me actually like running,” Marc said when he stopped for a break, then squirted a long stream of water into his mouth.
That gave me pause. “Wait, you don’t like running? Why didn’t you say anything?” I replaced my now empty bottle into the open bag hanging from his shoulder.
He waited to respond until he’d polished off his water bottle and dropped it beside mine, then cinched the bag and replaced it on his back once more. “Maybe I wanted an excuse to spend time with you.”
“Oh, yeah?” I leaned against the wooden railing of the footbridge we’d stopped on.
“And why would you want to do that?” Where I expected him to clap back with a witty retort, he simply looked at me with those expressive eyes of his, the ones that had first snared me and had me chasing him ever since. Then they dropped to my mouth.
He wet his lips. “Pretty sure it’s purely selfish by this point.”
I tilted my head to regard him. The breeze had picked up enough to combat the humidity, so neither of us was an overheated, sweaty disaster, though our hair and shirts were still damp from the exertion.
His loose shirt and shorts did a good job of obscuring the amazing body I knew lay beneath.
Finally, I brought my inspection back to his handsome face, where he was eyeing me dubiously.
“Is it still selfish if it’s what I want too? ”
His eyebrows rose in surprise, and his lips twitched with a smile. He took a step closer and plucked at my shirt. “Is that what you want, to spend time with me?”
He was making it very difficult to school my rebellious grin as he continued to invade my personal space, the breeze teasing loose tendrils of his brown hair. “I think we both know I want a hell of a lot more than that.”
There was a feral glint in his eyes as he stood close enough to tease me with a kiss, which he withheld. “Oh, I’m all in for more.” My heart surged at his words, though I doubted he meant them the way my heart wanted to interpret them. Then his mouth closed over mine.
I moaned into him as he tasted my lips and dove past to taste the rest of me.
I grabbed his waist, pulling him closer while I slipped my hands beneath his shirt to tease the band of his basketball shorts.
He gasped when I reached past the elastic to palm his ass.
I used his moment of distraction to switch our positions, moving from the railing to push him against a nearby tree.
His groan nearly destroyed me as I rocked my hardening dick against him.
“Jesus, James. You going to have me right here?” Despite the breathlessness of the question or how blatantly ill-advised it would be, he didn’t sound even remotely against the notion.
“Would you like that, baby boy?” His eyes fluttered, and I kissed my way along his jaw to whisper huskily, “Want me to bend you over this railing and show you how good you made me feel?”
“Fuck yes,” he hissed, grabbing my hair and yanking my head back so he could claim my mouth again. Abruptly, I felt him smile against my lips. “I think I just had the same thought that led to the tree-climbing crack.”
“Remember that now, do you?”
He chuckled and pulled me tighter against him. “No, just the same thought.”
I slashed my mouth over his again, aching to touch more of him. “Are you finally going to admit that you said you wanted to climb me like a tree?” I teased, nipping at his swollen lips.
“Why would I do that?” His goofy smile made my heart do veritable cartwheels. “But if it helps, the tree you currently have me pinned against is a longleaf pine. Which, in case you didn’t know, is an evergreen.” There went my heart again.
I kissed him again, pouring every ounce of that feeling into him and nearly losing my mind when he kissed me back just as intensely.
He kept one hand tangled in my hair while his other slipped beneath my shirt to scratch along my lower back.
I groaned into him, eager for more, and grateful that we hadn’t seen anyone in the lot when we arrived or on the trail the entire time we’d been out here.
“I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anyone as much as I want you,” I admitted.
“Prove it, Sarge.”
A sudden clap of thunder made both of us jump. The spell broken, I glanced around and realized that in our distraction, the dark clouds he’d hinted at earlier had rolled in. “Fuck, you weren’t kidding.”
He tilted his head back against the tree as laughter rolled out of him.
“I suppose the middle of the nature preserve is not the best place for this. Not today anyway,” he added with a mischievous wink.
Oh yeah, baby boy definitely had an exhibition streak.
An ominous rumble of thunder rolled overhead.
“Okay, yeah, we need to get out of here before the bottom falls out.”
“What?” I asked, stepping back so he could resituate the drawstring bag.
He snickered a laugh. “You’ll see. Last one to the car has to clean the wet seats!” He took off running before I could argue that the seats weren’t even wet, and I raced to catch up.