After several beats of my heart, he relaxed into the kiss, melting for me. I licked into his mouth then. If I was only getting a kiss, I wanted to make it a good one. On the first wet slide of tongue against tongue, Graham made an achy little sound in the back of his throat.
Heaven.
Leaning in, I wrapped him in my arms. This wasn’t like the frantic, tequila-soaked mashup after the Saint B's game. This time, I could feel us both holding tightly to our control. And even though my body wouldn’t have minded an escalation, we both knew that it wasn’t going to happen. This kiss was all about heartache. It was deep and sweet and sad. My chest fluttered with disbelief that I was holding him, and kissing him. Each moist slide of his lips against mine undid me a little more.
It was possibly the best kiss I’d ever had.
But eventually, the car in front of us roared to life, its taillights bathing the truck’s cab in bright red glow. With the moment broken, Graham eased back, and I let him go. As the other car pulled away and drove off, the sound of its motor faded. We were left alone with our own silence. Graham put his elbow on the window and looked away from me, already lost inside his own head. So I cranked the engine. As I let the engine heat up, I rubbed my own lips together. They were swollen and tender from Graham’s stubble.
I began the drive home. There was a nearly full moon tonight, which lit the snowy fields outside Burlington with an otherworldly, bluish glow.
“Some of that music was pretty dubious,” Graham said eventually.
“Yeah,” I chuckled. “If you want to be queer, you have to be okay with dance tunes.”
“One point for being straight, then,” he said.
I didn’t even reply, because that was such a sad way to think.
We pulled up to Gran’s brightly lit house. Graham looked up at the house, and then over at me. In the dark, he studied me. “Rik,” he whispered. “I had fun tonight.”
“Me too, G.”
He moved then, hitching across the seat to reach me. “One more,” he breathed. “For old time’s sake.” Then he turned my face toward his, capturing my mouth in a kiss.
Stupid or not, I just went with it. If you stripped away all the confusion and the old heartaches, I’d had an almost perfect day. And this right here was pretty much all I’d ever wanted from Graham. I wanted his friendship, and then I wanted him to reach for me at the end of the night. So for those few minutes, I had everything.
The kiss got heated. Graham’s hands wandered over my chest, and I wrapped my arms around his big shoulders. The size of him was a real turn-on.Hell. Everything about him was a real turn-on. The more we kissed, the harder I got.
I let my mouth wander down his gorgeous jaw. And I’d begun tasting the skin on the side of his neck when he let out a big, frustrated sigh. Reluctantly I sat back, checking his face.
“We’d better go in,” he said. “Your grandmother is going to wonder why we didn’t come inside.”
Slowly, I passed my palm over the whiskers on his cheek. “G, if she’s not asleep, she’ll just assume we were making out in the truck. And she won’t think less of you for it.”
But we both already knew that didn’t matter to Graham. Without another word, he opened the door and got out. The idea of someone suspecting us was a barrier that he simply could not get past.
When I jumped out of the truck, I had to adjust myself inside my too-tight jeans. My body really wanted to get Graham alone. The problem was, there was no place onEarthalone enough for Graham.
—Graham
The next morning I woke up with a start, briefly confused about where I was. The sun shone through an unfamiliar window. I pulled my phone off Mrs. Rikker’s sewing table and saw that it was almost ten. That wasn’t terribly surprising, because I often slept late. More interestingly, after falling head first into the guest bed at around one in the morning, I hadn’t woken up even once. Weird. Usually I spent part of the night tracing the ceiling beams, going a few rounds with the demons in my head.
Sitting up, I shoveled my drowsy limbs into my clothes. Then I followed the voices into the kitchen.
“He lives,” Rikker said when I shuffled in. He was standing at the counter, grating cheese into a pile on a wooden cutting board.
I cleared my sleepy throat. “Sorry. I slept hard.”
On her way between the open refrigerator and the stove, his Grandmother patted me on the arm. “Nothing to be sorry for. You’re on vacation.” She set a dozen eggs on the counter and opened the carton. “Do you eat eggs, Graham?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Rikker reached over his head and fetched a mug, which he filled with coffee from a pot in front of him. This he handed back to me without comment. Then he picked up the cheese grater again.
I took a deep gulp of the coffee and began to feel almost human. “Can I do anything to help?”
“Just stand there lookin’ pretty,” Rikker drawled. Then he flashed me a wicked grin.
