So I kiss him again, and I’m braver this time. I chase that cider taste on his wildfire tongue. Hunt down the thrill of his warm hands shifting around until they find the strip of bare skin under my clothes and above my waistband.
The hollow at the base of my spine.
The small of my back.
I never knew it could feel so much, but the mere graze of Galen’s fingers has me lit up like a fucking Christmas tree. The nervous arousal I started with gains traction I’m not prepared for and my body reacts on instinct.
Without thought, I tug himcloser.
Galen chuckles and nips my bottom lip. “For the record, if you’re standing there worried you’re not any good at this either, you’re as wrong as you were about your conversation skills.”
Nice of him to say, but I don’t want to talk. For as long as these magical moments last, I just want to feel. To pretend I haven’t spent ten years dragging wreckage behind me like a knackered bin lorry. Like I haven’t broken everything I’ve ever touched.
But that flicker in my brain, the wandering thoughts leading nowhere good, Galen hears those too. He brushes my lips with the softest kiss yet. Then he eases back. “Let’s walk some more.”
I don’t want to walk either, but I’m as hooked on his gentle persuasion as I am on his mouth. The way he nuzzles my cheek and moves so close our shoulders touch. It makes up for the loss of his hand on my back and without his apple pie scent bewitching me, my feet touch earth again.
We descend the other side of Figgy Mount, and whatever Galen thinks, I really am terrible at small talk these days. At least with humans as devastatingly hot as he is.
“You’re not from here,” he guesses. “You sound like a Brummie when you’re not rattling off French like a sexy poet.”
I snort. “Trust me, there’s nothing poetic about the way I speak French. I’m usually cursing, or being too fucking flaky to remember a whole sentence in either language.”
“All right. But I’m not budging on the sexy part.”
“Thanks. And you’re correct about the Brummie vibes. I grew up in Solihull.”
“Not France?”
“Nope. Never lived there. But we didn’t speak English at home until me and my brother went to school, so…”
Galen’s smiling again.
It seeps into my train of thought.
Derails it.
He has to pick up where I trail off. “So how do you come to behere?”
Here.
In Everwyld.
The whimsical town we both call home.
“I followed someone here too,” I explain. “My brother. Didn’t settle until last year, though. I was in Manchester before that.”
Galen doesn’t ask why. He gives me room to elaborate, and when I don’t, he just keeps walking, dividing his gaze between the stars and the homes we pass that have got in early with their Christmas lights.
We follow the natural path back to where we came from. Back to thestart, when I’d never kissed a man in my life, and my hands twitch. I want to grab him. Haul him against me again. I want to know for sure that what I felt up on the hill wasn’t a fluke.
You know it isn’t.
Course I do.
But there’s a devil in me that has to be sure.
“You’re not gay, Sab. You’re just a cokehead with a fried brain.”
