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)
Somehow, Rian didn’t think that sort of thing worked well for humans.
Giving in to the attraction of a large body to send themselves slinging off in another direction, their path defined straight and true.
There was nothing straight about his attraction to that particular large body.
But everything true about the reasons why Rian couldn’t stop thinking about Damon.
Couldn’t stop hurting with every day that passed without a single message.
Couldn’t stop the tingle in his lips every time he remembered the pressure of Damon’s, the heat of them, the way they turned just soft enough when mouth met mouth and claimed so fiercely.
Couldn’t stop how his pencil turned to the contours and steely glide of Damon’s musculature every time he let himself drift and started idly doodling in the corners of his pages.
Couldn’t stop thinking of how Damon had felt against him, as if Rian had imprinted the shape of him against his fingertips and now nothing else would flow from his hands to the canvas but Damon. Until it felt as though the tree in the painting—the tree he imagined as a man, yearning and reaching—was beginning to take on the same stark, graceful angularity as Damon, reflecting the aestheticism of his physique in how each branch curved and joined the next; in the way the trunk seemed to slouch slightly forward with the same casual arrogance as the way Damon slouched his hips forward, shoulders back, body a sinuous coil of perfection.
Settled at his desk, Rian hid his flush by burying his face into his folded forearms, just barely keeping his head lifted enough to see his last period class over the upper edge of his arm.
He had it bad.
And he didn’t want to dismiss it as just physical attraction, when that meant rendering Damon down to a lust object to satisfy his curiosity, a thing to be enjoyed and then discarded, instead of...of...
A complex, layered man Rian was only just beginning to see past the surface of.
But everything he saw just made him want to know more.
Even if that curiosity, despite how it consumed his thoughts so fully and left him constantly turning his face away so no one would notice how he couldn’t stop blushing...
...it didn’t hold a candle to the burning question of what to do about Chris.
Rian had taken that Let me think to mean Give me space. Whether space from Rian after that kiss or space to sort out what was happening with Chris and figure out what to do, he didn’t know—but although Chris had had better days over the last week, days when he’d looked more rested, more alert, actually smiling while he talked to his friends in class, actually seeming engaged when he held court in the cafeteria...
The boy still looked just so...tired.
Like there was something drawing the energy out of his very soul, and it was devouring what it could from his flagging body just to try to sustain itself.
Rian paused in flipping through the daily sketchbook a student had been working on, reviewing progress as the underclassman tried to get used to drawing in short, merging, feathery sketch lines as Rian had shown him rather than insisting on trying to do everything in a single contour line; last period would be over in a few minutes, the restless energy in the room picking up a fresh new charge as the clock counted down closer and closer to the end. It was always more tense on Fridays, that crackle of freedom for the weekend waiting breathlessly until, sometimes, Rian felt like he was standing on the other side of a very fragile fence just barely containing a herd of cattle right on the verge of a stampede.
That invisible fence broke, as the bell rang—echoing over the school with a hollow bonging that made it sound like someone was going wild up in the old locked-off belfry tower, instead of the electronic recording that had replaced it. The entire room surged up like a tidal wave of restless, boyish energy, the silence breaking into raucous noise as the boys flooded toward the door, jostling and pushing and nearly trampling each other in their hurry to escape.
If Chris hadn’t been so tall, Rian might have missed it in the chaos.
The moment when that head of dark brown hair dipped beneath the rest.
Fell.
Disappeared.
And Rian’s heart turned over like a failing, sputtering engine as Chris dropped out of the middle of the throng and collapsed to the floor.
Rian jolted out of his chair, shoving it back so hard it rocked back on two feet, and flung himself around his desk, his pulse racing and his stomach jolting and his mouth so dry it felt like the swallowed scream in his throat had sucked all the moisture out of his skin.
“Move!” he cried, pushing past the swarm of shouting, chattering boys and shouldering his way to Chris.