One of Tristan’s arms is draped over my back, and against my side, his naked skin is warm and smooth. The even, slow sound of his breath tells me he’s not yet awake, and the awareness that he’s curled around me in his sleep makes my heart leap and my stomach soar.
God yes, I could get used to this. And yet, I could never take it for granted.
When I turn my head to the side and open my eyes, dim light filters through my thin curtains from outside. It’s an early, grey sort of light that matches the faint pattering sound of rain striking against the glass and makes the comfortable heat of Tris’s body pressed close against mine all the more perfect.
For a while, I just drift, halfway dreaming fantasies of a life where every morning begins this way. Then, just when I thinkthere’s nothing in the world that could possibly make me move from here, inspiration hits me, fully formed and impossible to ignore. A passage from a fifteenth century text I’ve read over once or twice flashes through my mind, connecting a string of dots I’ve been trying to force together for the last three months.
The timing is so miserable that, for a moment, I try unsuccessfully to shut off the unasked-for burst of inspiration, but ideas continue to untangle themselves in my mind, details so nuanced that I know what I have to do if I don’t want the finer points to start fading away.
With a silent groan, I slip out from under Tris’s arm. Force myself to scoot carefully away from him to sit at the edge of the bed, away from the distracting temptation of his body.
For a beat, I almost don’t let myself turn and look back. I can’t afford to get sidetracked by the fact that the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen is currently in my bed.
Naked. Jesus—
So then of course I have to look, and, as always when it comes to Tristan, looking turns to staring.
And Christ, he’s gorgeous. Fast asleep with his head pillowed on the arm he’s thrown back behind it, his face relaxed and soft with a little smile playing across his lips and his thick lashes making perfectly feathered crescents on his sculpted cheeks, he looks like a Renaissance painting of a Greek god at rest. A black-haired Eros come to life.
Though we’d fallen asleep wrapped together in the blankets, sometime over the course of the night, they’d slipped down to reveal the gorgeous expanse of Tris’s torso. As I watch him now, he rolls from his side onto his back.
I hold my breath, body tingling and dick thickening betweenmy legs as the blankets slide lower at his movement, exposing the jut of one of his hip bones and the toned, lean line of the side of one of his thighs where the sheet’s been pushed aside.
Startlingly dark against his pale skin, thick black tattoos sweep down from his collarbone on the left, across his chest, and halfway down his side; curling, sinuous lines like a wild hybrid between waves and vines and Celtic knots. They look like his music sounds, and Jesus Christ, I want to touch them. I want to run my fingers and—oh god—my tonguealong them, tracing them like a maze until I’ve mapped out every last inch of darkness marking his skin. Over and over and over again.
Swallowing hard, I let my eyes drift down to his flat stomach. With each breath he takes, the movement shows off the faint yet unmistakable outline of his abs shifting just beneath his smooth skin, and I have to force my eyes back up and away from it to stop them from catching on the thin line of hair—a few shades lighter than the purply-black hair on his head, but still so dark in contrast with his pale skin—that runs down his lower stomach, disappearing under the edge of the blanket.
Last night was a blur of need and touching before the weight of the conversation we’d had drew away all attention from anything else. Though we’d spent so much of the evening naked, there’d been nowhere nearly enough time for me to take in the beautiful perfection of Tris’s body.
Now, all I want is to slip back into bed and soak him in, and it’s only the dismal truth that I’ve written practically nothing in weeks that holds me back.
Cursing myself, my research, and the entire damn UW history department, I force myself to stand up, to creep away from the bed as silently as possible. After tucking my fartoo hopeful dick into a pair of pajama pants and throwing on a shirt, I grab my laptop and settle into my chair, turned resolutely away from the image of temptation personified currently sprawled out across my bed.
34
Jesse
I’m just getting my mind relatively focused on the nuanced differentiations between popularly accepted medieval folk superstitions, church-endorsed rituals, and the seemingly arbitrary line that divided them from practices deemed to be witchcraft, when the jarring noise of a phone sounds from the kitchen. Tristan’s, since mine is on the desk beside me.
For a moment, I wonder if I should wake him and let him know, but it’s just two buzzes of sound. Probably texts, and regardless, whatever it is can’t be worth disturbing him over, no matter how much I might wish he was awake.
Fortunately, none of my ideas seem to have been lost to my frequent slips into memories of what Tris and I did last night—or my unstoppable daydreams about all the things we haven’t yet done—and, after some significant effort to keep myself on track, I realize I’ve typed out a good two and a half pages of my thoughts. More, I have to admit, than I’ve managed to do in the last four weeks of self-reproachfully staring off into space, trying desperately to force myself to just come up withsomething.
I’ve just finished tapping out the last of my unexpected flood of ideas, breathing out a sigh that’s one part satisfaction andtwo parts relief that I’ve actually accomplished not just a little, but what I think might actually be a significant breakthrough, when I look up to see Tristan leaning his hip and shoulder against the wall across from me.
And Jesus Christ, if I thought he was devastating before while he was still asleep, nothing can describe him now. His black hair is tousled, almost curling in places, just begging for me to run my fingers through it.
Through it, and then down across his bare chest to the line of his hips, where the sweatpants he’s slipped into hang low in dangerous enticement.
It’s the look on his face though that sets my heart skipping and leaping and my stomach swooping. His eyes are fixed on me, their expression every bit as soft and easy as it was when he was asleep, and the way his lips lift in just the littlest hint of a curve makes me wonder if he even knows he’s smiling.
Until this second, I hadn’t realized that a part of me had been worried that Tris might feel uncomfortable or regretful after all he told me last night. It seems now though, going by the way he’s looking at me, that the opposite is the case. He looks lighter and more genuinely comfortable than I’ve ever seen him, and suddenly I realize that the practiced ease that had struck me when I’d first seen him was just that. Practiced.
This, what I’m seeing on his face now, feels real and…my heart leaps again…mine.
“You’re sexy when you think, sunshine. Did you know that?” The left side of Tris’s lips lifts higher, pressing his dimple into his cheek as he pushes off the wall and crosses to my chair.
His seductive grace makes my head spin, and I respond without pausing to think through the implications, “And you’re sexy when you sleep.”
