“Good.” He drops a soft kiss against my lips, making my heart and my cock leap at the same moment. “Being with you is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Pressing up on one elbow, he stares into my face, eyes pinging between mine. “From the first moment I saw you, you made everything brighter, better. It was like I’d been living under these thick, dark clouds, and you were the sun that broke through them. You callmesunshine, Tris, butyouare mine.”
Oh, my fucking heart—
“I could listen to you play your music all day, and I could just sit and do literally nothing more than watch you smile. I want you to show me your paintings, and I want to know what you were thinking when you painted each of them. I want you to tease me and laugh at me and make me laugh with you, and I want to kiss you and hold you and show you that you’re right to trust me, that I’ll never hurt you.”
I’m barely choking back tears—like not just a few, but right on the edge of full-blown ugly crying. And maybe I should care, but the truth is, I really don’t give a shit. All I want is for him to keep looking at me like that.
Like I’msomethingto him. Something real.
“Can I be your boyfriend, Tris?” He lowers his mouth to mine again, sweeping his tongue between my lips, so hot and lush I can’t keep from moaning as he pulls back. “And will you be mine?”
He kisses me again, hard and deep and greedy, and there’s no way I can answer other than just nod wildly as his hands bracket my face.
Against my lips, I can feel his smile, the way he’s fuckingbeaming, and it does something to me. My heartbeat kicks up, skipping and racing so I’m sure he can feel it under his hands as they roam my chest. For a second,something—shit I definitelyhaven’tthought through—almostcomes blurting out of my mouth. That big, warm, sometimes terrifying, always beautiful feeling put into three even more terrifying words I’m not remotely fucking ready to think, let alone say.
And then he’s thrusting up against me, andohhhh yes, his cock’s as hard and ready as mine is.
How the hell is this my life now? And how exactly is it not too good to be true?
44
Jesse
“This is theirs,” I point up the street to Alex and Ellie’s pretty, two story brick house on the right. Thanks to Ellie’s love of gardening, the tidy front yard is bright with spring flowers.
Three weeks have passed since our Pike Place date, when I asked Tris to come meet them. The first week, when we had planned for dinner originally, the twins were sick with fevers and coughs. The week after that, Alex’s parents came for a long-awaited visit, which put the whole thing off until tonight. And in these three weeks, I feel like I’ve stepped into someone else’s life. Because whoever’s this is, they’re so damn lucky, I can’t quite believe it’s actually really mine.
Apart from the night two days after Pike Place, when Tris stayed up so late painting at his apartment that he didn’t want to wake me by knocking on my door to come back, he’s stayed over every night. The morning after our night apart, I had a key made for him.
Maybe it was too soon, too fast like everything between us, but I was past caring. And from the grin that spread across Tris’s face when I’d handed it to him after work that night, and the way he’d slammed into me, kissing me senseless and dizzy and breathless against the wall, it was clear he hadn’t mindedeither.
Since Tris delivered the first six of his paintings to Mitchel, five have sold. The astonished, ecstatic look on Tris’s face when he told me that someone bought the first one was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
We spend a lot of time over at his apartment, where he has his paints and easel set up, me working on my at last successfully progressing dissertation, him working on a new piece to bring to Mitchel. He paints alone sometimes too, often late at night after I’ve gone back to my apartment, too tired to keep thinking, let alone writing.
Though I love falling asleep with him, I can’t deny that I also love halfway waking in the hours past midnight to feel him slipping into bed with me. Sometimes, he just cuddles against me, and I fall back to sleep so quickly I’m not sure I didn’t just dream it until I wake with him in my arms. Other nights though, he pushes the blankets back and kisses his way along my body to suck me into his mouth, guiding my hips to thrust down his throat as I sleepily lick and swallow around his length until we both fall over the edge together.
With an absolutely heroic effort, I force myself to shove down everything to do with that particular line of thought. Now is most certainly not the time for it. Totally inappropriate.
Not to mention the cringeworthy degree of shit Alex would give me if he were to catch me showing up to his house for dinner with a raging hard-on.
As we start up the driveway, stepping over sidewalk chalk scribbles I make a mental note to tell the twins I noticed and loved, Tris’s hand tightens around mine. He’s been on edge the entire walk here, an eager, anxiously determined sort ofedginess that couldn’t be more different from the shutdown fear I saw in him the night he broke my laptop.
Before we reach the front porch, I step in front of him, catching his jaw in my hand that’s not holding his to tip his face up toward mine. “They’re going to love you.”
BecauseIlove you.
And just like that, my world tilts. Inevitable and effortless as the tilting of the Earth toward the summer sun.
For weeks, I’ve struggled against the admission harder and more desperately with each day that’s passed. An ever-losing battle that now, in this unexpected moment, is finally over.
IloveTris. I aminlove with him. And I have been for some time.
With the sudden clarity of this sweet, surprisingly painless defeat, I can see so plainly now that, in a way, I have loved him since the first time I saw him behind the counter at Upshot.
Or, Jesus, wasn’t it before that even? That first night I heard him playing his keyboard through our shared wall, didn’t his music steal a piece of my heart?
