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)
No one says you have to operate on some timeline, he said. It’s not too late.
Maybe.
You okay...?
Yeah. I’m good. Still nothing bleeding.
Another selfie came through, then—this time, Damon lying down on his stomach, his head resting against the pillow he’d hooked an arm around until it bunched up in soft white mounds around his head, making the deep, shining black of his hair stand out even more starkly, fanning out over the pillowcase and drifting into his face. His eyes were half-closed, sleepy, and so...so...
Soft.
Soft, warm, the dark brown lustrous and deep and intense, and Rian’s heart skipped hard when it felt like Damon was looking right at him through the phone, unguarded and gentle and lingering with a gaze that made Rian flush all the way through, his entire body too warm.
Goodnight, Rian, Damon sent, the two words pushing the selfie up, a caption that felt like it was whispered close against Rian’s ear in that low, rumbling voice.
He didn’t want to let this go. This feeling of intimacy and closeness; this connection that seemed so tenuous, when tomorrow...tomorrow they might be all thorns all over again, or even worse...complete strangers to each other. But he didn’t want to keep Damon awake, either.
So after a few moments, he made himself send back just, Goodnight.
Before he let his phone fall to his chest, clutching it over his skipping heart with a soft sound, closing his eyes and just breathing in and letting himself melt.
There was no way he was getting to sleep now.
Not when he felt like he was about to burst out of his skin, bristling everywhere. And after a few restless moments where he couldn’t stop himself from peeking at his phone again and again, he rolled out of bed, catching up a pair of jeans from the chair in the corner and tugging them on before shoving his feet into his sandals.
He didn’t often walk the halls of Albin Academy after midnight, when it made the security guards jumpy if they caught him on their rounds—but he encountered no one as he made his way through halls lit in slivers of moonlight through tall windows, feeling like a ghost as he whispered his way along the floorboards and the stairs, until he found the private space of his art classroom. His studio, waiting for him, and...
That painting.
That painting that stood unfinished beneath the pale light of the overhead light, when Rian flicked it on—picking out the details of that lightning-split tree, the way the fork in its trunk made him think of the flexing muscles of Damon’s shoulder blades, arms spreading to either side. Rian traced his fingers over the texture of the paint that made up the base for the reaching, spidering branches, stripped bare of their bark and glowing against the dark...then picked up his palette and a fresh tube of paint.
He hadn’t finished anything since he’d come to Albin Academy. He hadn’t been sure if he wanted to, when he wasn’t certain if he gave a damn about gallery exhibitions and doubted anyone back in New York was waiting with bated breath for his next showing. Should he want to do it for anyone else, anyway?
Or just for himself?
Like Damon—searching for his place in the world by making something for himself, instead of because of what someone else expected. Could Rian do that?
Did he even know what he would make for himself, if he wanted?
Maybe not.
But the reaching fingers of that tree felt like the reaching grasp of his thoughts, searching, seeking, begging for something to want.
Begging for something for his heart to hold on to...and so Rian gave those grasping fingers color, and texture, and life, as he painted long into the night.
Painted his heart into the burning heart of the tree.
And wondered if he would ever let that heart be seen by any eyes but his own.
* * *
Damon really wondered why the hell he had made his lock screen that image of Rian with his tongue sticking out.
Because now every time he got a text, a call, even an email notification, he had to look down at that ridiculously goofy face Falwell was making, and feel that odd little twitch in his chest as he tried really fucking hard not to think just how fucking cute he was.
And how much Damon missed him.
What the hell, Louis?
He lounged in the recliner in his suite, a stack of unfinished health education performance reports taking up half his tiny coffee table, the other half supporting a steaming plate of chicken carbonara he was just waiting to cool after he’d forgotten to even cook until well after midnight, phone held overhead as he pillowed his head on one arm and scrolled through their past text history, rereading that tentative conversation that had, somewhere along the way, turned familiar and gently curious. They hadn’t said anything to each other since that sleepless Tuesday night; there’d been no reason to, when it was still radio silence from the Northcotes and with the school’s formidable nursing staff on the job, there was no way in hell Chris was escaping the infirmary, and from Nurse Hadley’s terse emails he was healing up nicely but still refusing to talk about anything.