I didn’t know how long I could keep choosing it.
CHAPTER 15
ELLIOT
The thought of him didn’t come softly. It came the way pain does—without permission, without warning, without any regard for whether I could hold it. It was already there when I noticed it. Sitting behind my eyes. In my throat. In the spaces between my ribs.
Anthony. Not his face. Not his body. Hispresence. The way the room felt different when he stood in it. The way my breath adjusted around him.
The way my nervous system had quietly decided he was a place I could rest—and now refused to accept anything else. He’d taken it all from me that morning when he pushed me away with a finality so brutal it cleaved me open.
I lay on my bed staring at the faint crack in the ceiling paint, counting it like it might save me. One. Two. Three.
My hands were clenched so tightly the bones ached. My skin felt too tight. Too loud. Every nerve buzzing like it was waiting for something that never came.
I didn’twanthim. That word was too clean. Iachedfor him. Like something inside me was hollowed out in his shape. Like my body had carved a space it could only fill with him.
It felt less like desire and more like hunger. The kind that makes you lightheaded. The kind that makes you dizzy and stupid and willing to do things you swore you wouldn’t.
The kind that doesn’t ask what it costs. Whatever it was, I'd sacrifice it without a second thought.
I pressed my forearm across my eyes like I could block it out. It didn’t help. Nothing did. Because the worst part wasn’t the wanting. It was howrightit felt. How inevitable. How my body reacted like it had finally found the thing it had been built for.
That terrified me. That was what made me feel wrong. Broken. Like something essential in me had been miswired.
I curled onto my side and pressed my face into the pillow. The fabric was cool. It smelled faintly like laundry soap and dust and me. I whispered his name once. Just once. It felt like a sin and a prayer at the same time.
The journal he’d given me to stop myself cutting, lay open, my eyes were drawn toward the words by a magnetic force.
My head rolled back on my shoulders exposing the column of my throat to him. Warm lips brushed a line of open-mouthed kisses down my throat. The tip of his tongue licked along my pulse.
His large hands slowly popped open the button of my jeans and pulled the zipper down. The sound was the only thing I could hear above our laboured breaths.
“You going to let me taste you, baby boy?”
A full body shudder rolled through me as he pulled my pants and purple boxer briefs down releasing my cock.
“Yes,” I moaned as his teeth scraped over my Adam's apple and I lifted my hips so he could pull the remaining clothes off my body.
“So fucking beautiful,” he breathed and licked a path down my chest. Tongue circling my nipples before he sucked them into his mouth.
My aching cock throbbed as he wrapped his hand around it. The rough skin of his palm dragged over my heated skin. His thumb circled my slit, teasing and toying with the bead of precum there.
I blinked wide-eyed up at him as he brought it to his mouth and sucked it clean. A whimper pushed past my lips, hips flexing desperate to know what that sensation felt like on my dick.
“Please…please, Daddy. Suck me.”
Anthony chuckled. “Oh Sweetheart. I promise I will.”
He brushed a salty kiss to my lips before repositioning himself between my legs. My heart thundered in my chest. Finally, finally I’d know what it felt like to be with him. Not just a stolen kiss that made him push me away guilt ridden later. But?—
He stole the thought from my head as the wet heat of his mouth wrapped around the head of my dick. His tongueteasing that sensitive bit underneath. It was like heaven and hell all at once.
“Oh fuuuuck.” I bit my lip as waves of pleasure washed over me.
Anthony licked a path down to my balls and back again before he swallowed me whole.
My hand worked its way underneath my sweats and wrapped around my aching length. I knew it was wrong to write about him like that, but it was the only way I got to be with him. He’d shut me out of his life. He was still here but not like before. His absence was like a cancer growing stronger every day.
