Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
“Hm?” Damon answered, absent, his gaze fixed on the windshield again.
“I...do you know why I picked this one?”
“Wondered a little.”
“...the cover’s more worn than all the others. Like you read it more.” Rian bit his lip. “The heroine... Naledi. She was in foster care.”
“...yeah.” Damon’s head angled toward him, brown eyes watching him sidelong, thoughtful. “Sometimes you see yourself and the life you lived, the things you want, in places you never expected. I saw me in her. Still do. Every time I read it.”
“Does it hurt...?”
“No.” Damon smiled, and it was a wondering, thoughtful, breathtaking thing. “Can’t think of many things that feel better. Just in seeing myself, and knowing I’m not alone.”
Rian lowered his eyes, tracing his fingertips along the letters but only half processing them. “... I feel that way around you.”
Again that stillness—charged, shivering, waiting. “Yeah?”
“When you talk about wanting to build something. Wanting to make something that’s yours, instead of taking from someone else.” Rian bit his lip. “I’ve...wanted that, too. I think that’s what I’ve wanted, all this time. To make something of my own, instead of what someone else gave me. It’s...it’s all I’ve been able to think about lately, when I’ve been painting. Wanting this thing I’m making to be mine.”
He didn’t know what he was trying to say. What he was trying to tell Damon, when even though he was painting for himself, trying to find his own heart in the washes of color on canvas...
Every stroke of heart-shade he slashed from the tip of his brush seemed to whisper Damon’s name.
Rian lifted his gaze to find Damon watching him—silently, intently, but there was something in it that drew Rian, that begged him to come closer, even as Damon leaned in subtly.
“You want to make something you can love,” Damon rumbled.
Rian could hardly feel the pages against his fingers, the weight of the book lowering into his lap. He could only feel Damon, the small space between them, and the...the...
The heaviness of wanting someone for himself.
Not something.
Wanting Damon simply for Damon’s sake, and not for anything Rian had to fix about him to make himself feel worthwhile.
When with Damon, Rian just...
Felt like enough.
His heart ran hot and fast and wild as he let the paperback fall to his thigh; as he met Damon’s heated, questioning eyes. Rian reached out tentatively, feathered his fingers against the warm fullness of Damon’s lips—and they parted for him, breath washing over his hand, before a slow kiss pressed to his skin.
“Damon,” Rian whispered—asked, pleaded, he didn’t know, but Damon caught his hand, stroked his thumb in a sensitizing, tingling caress against Rian’s palm, followed by his lips. The way he kissed Rian’s palm bordered on obscene: wet, stroking, luscious and slow, and Rian’s entire body felt like a caught breath, held tight.
“You gotta tell me, Rian,” Damon rumbled deep. “You gotta tell me what you want. I need to hear it from you.”
“You,” Rian breathed, as he swayed across the small space between them. “I just want you.”
Chapter Seventeen
I just want you.
Those words ignited under Damon’s skin, washing away every frustrated feeling until it forced him to confront something he’d been trying so, so fucking hard to ignore:
He fucking wanted Rian to want him, and goddammit, every last fucking feint and pushback between them had made him feel like that would never fucking happen.
Until those words fell past soft pale lips, I just want you, and he didn’t know if he reached for Rian or Rian reached for him but suddenly they were crashing together over the center console, Damon’s arms snared around Rian’s waist and Rian’s fingers tangled in Damon’s hair and their lips coming together like two storm fronts meeting in a lashing of lightning and chaos and thunderous need. It was always like this with Rian; they just built up and built up and built up until they exploded into a fight.
Or into desire.
And the next thing Damon knew, he was drunk on the taste of Rian as those yielding lips opened for him and Rian melted against him with a low moan.
His breaths came fast and rough, scorching like smoke inside his chest and throat as he dragged Rian against him, cursing the console in the way, the awkwardness of the front seat of the car, but he couldn’t seem to stop kissing Rian to do anything about it—seeking deep, soaking up every hint of that sugar-candy taste and searching for more. Rian’s mouth was so obscenely soft inside, the texture a plush wet thing that gripped and worked at Damon’s tongue until his cock jerked in response as if that mouth had sucked him in deep and left him drowning in heat.
A heat that was answered as, without warning, Rian climbed out of the passenger’s seat and into Damon’s lap, fitting his slender frame between Damon’s body and the close press of the steering column.