Series: Fever Falls Series by Riley Hart
Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 92704 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 464(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92704 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 464(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
~ Sawyer’s Journal, 18 years old.
I was losing my damn mind.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Carter…about myself…about me and Carter. About the way I’d kissed him and manhandled him and bit his ass, with his pants pulled halfway down in the back of my car, hidden by a dumpster.
I wasn’t an inexperienced virgin. I’d had a decent amount of sex in my life. I had friends who liked to talk about their adventures, and I’d walked in on everything you could think of in a bar bathroom or whatever. But I, bookish, simple Sawyer Burke, didn’t have that kind of sex. I’d never even thought about it, never craved it. I’d sure as hell never mauled a guy in the back seat the way I had with Carter, and I didn’t know how I felt about it.
I’d gone home the night before, jacked off, and come so hard thinking about Carter, I didn’t think I would ever recover.
I had. Not long later, in fact, and then jerked off again.
Then…then I’d done what I did best. I went downstairs, lost myself in a book, and pretended nothing happened.
Only now it was the next day and I was still thinking about it. Was Carter? Had he thought about me last night the way I’d thought about him? I shook those thoughts from my head. He was used to things like that. He’d probably forgotten about it right after it happened. Hell, it likely wasn’t even a big deal to him.
But it was to me, and I couldn’t sort out how I felt about it. Every time I tried, I started to feel overwhelmed. My head spun, and my palms got sweaty. Logically, I knew it was a crazy reaction, but I couldn’t help it.
Which meant I called my brother, because that’s how I rolled. It was embarrassing really, how much I depended on Cam, but he was the only person in the world I could trust with something like this.
We were meeting at Willow Brook Park, which wasn’t a far walk from my place. It was right up the street from the fire station. I knew Beau and Jace sometimes came there, and I hoped they wouldn’t today at the same time as us, so I could sort out whatever the hell was going on inside my head.
I sat at a picnic table beneath a tree, its heavy branches hanging down. It was only a few minutes later that Cam walked up, wearing a pair of faded jeans, work boots, and a T-shirt with Burke Construction on it. It was the weekend, so he was off, but these were the relaxed kind of clothes he always wore.
“Hey, Baby Burke.” He walked over and sat across from me, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I mean… I just…” I shook my head. I was too damn old to act like this. Why couldn’t I be like everyone else? Why couldn’t I put the shit with Julian behind me?
“Does this have something to do with Carter?”
My eyes snapped to him. “What makes you ask that?”
“Because I know you?” His brows pulled together. “And there’s a small hickey on your neck.”
My hand shot up to cover my throat, only I didn’t know where to cover. I couldn’t remember Carter sucking or kissing my throat. I knew I had with him… But the way Cam was looking at me, he wasn’t giving me a hard time.
“Come on. Talk to me. If you can’t talk to your own brother about shit like this, who can you talk to?”
“Isn’t it kind of weird that the only person I do talk to about shit like this is my brother?”
He frowned again. “No, because we’re more than brothers. You’re my best friend. But if you’d rather I called Rush or Beau over, I could.”
Typical Cam—coming in and trying to do whatever he could to make me comfortable. He’d been doing it our whole lives. “No, it’s fine.” And Rush would be racing now anyway.
“I’m assuming something went down that night at the chalet. Things have been different between you guys since then.”
“No.” I shook my head. “Not really. I mean, we talked, and I realized—well, I realized I can be a judgmental prick sometimes, and there’s more to Carter than I’d wanted to believe. And I…like that person? Or at least I think I could? As a friend, at the very least.” But then we already were friends, weren’t we? We’d become that quickly and fiercely. I didn’t know exactly how I felt about him outside of that, but if there was one thing I did know, it was that I considered Carter a friend now.
“And something happened last night?” Cam prompted. Fuck, I was bad at this.
“Yeah. He showed up at Fearless and helped me with the new stock, and then we went out to dinner.”