“Okay.”
“Can I do anything else?”
Nolan slowly reaches his hand out to tangle his fingers with my own against the cool of the pillow under my head. His fingers are so warm, so alive that my heart settles just a little at the reminder of life.
“Just be here. I’m sorry… I felt so much better…”
“It’s okay. It’s normal. You’ll have good days and bad days. Life.”
“Do you have bad days?” Nolan asks seriously.
“Probably… I just guess they’re so far and few between that I don’t notice them much. Usually, when I have a bad day, I work out or go for a hike or do something, anything to get my mind off of it.”
Nolan’s eyebrows furrow, and he moves closer, slipping his thigh over my hip. I drop my hand down to cup his thigh. His hand comes up to rest against my face, his thumb rubbing under my eye.
“I wanna tell you something very badly, but now isn’t the right time.”
“Okay,” I say softly, even though my heart could fly out of my chest.
His dark brown eyes bore into mine, and that’s when I know he doesn’t even need to say it. Just like I don’t need to say it. It’s just there, just known. I love him, and he loves me. For now, that’s enough.
“It’s okay, Nolan. I know.”
Nolan closes his eyes with a soft sigh and dips his head forward to press his forehead against mine. He rocks his head back and forth a few times, breath ghosting over my face.It’s stale and awful, but I don’t care because it’s just another reminder that he’s so very real in my arms.
“Will you eat the toast and drink the tea for me? Then maybe I can just hold you for a while, until it gets to be too much?”
Nolan answers by sitting up, my T-shirt hanging off of his thin frame, dipping to reveal his jutting collarbone. I lean over to grab his tea and toast, and when I return I press a warm kiss to that collarbone that’s always so distracting. Nolan dutifully eats and sips until he’s had enough and shoves it back into my waiting hands. Then I cuddle him back down into the bed, holding him as closely as I can. Just doing my best to let him know that I’m here and this is just where I want to be.
“Talk to me?” Nolan asks, voice soft and vulnerable.
Gently dancing my hand up and down his spine, I smile when he shivers and moves in closer against my body. “The first time I saw you in that hotel room, my heart skipped about ten beats. I thought you were the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“And then I opened my mouth,” Nolan says tiredly.
“Nah,” I quickly disagree. “You just got more beautiful. I like it when you argue with me, when you bite back, when you tell me what you want. I like giving you what you want.”
“I know, stud.” Nolan’s warm breath ghosts over my neck and his fingers dig into the small of my back. “I knew I was in trouble when I saw you. That you were different.”
God. The vulnerability in his voice still shakes me to my core. All these months and I think he’s still worried that I’ll hurt him, that he can’t trust me with his most inner thoughts.
“Well, it ended up pretty okay, right?” I bury my face in his messy hair, breathing in the still somehow smoky scent of him.
“Yeah, I think maybe it did.”
“Mmm.”
“Did you ever fuck Jackson?”
The laughter is so hard and immediate that Nolan pulls away slightly to aim his bleary dark brown eyes up at me. I can’t help but dip down to kiss him, a closed-mouth kind of kiss that echoes intimacy more than anything else. Tenderness and softness are two things I never thought I’d have with Nolan.
I press my forehead against Nolan’s. “We tried once. Didn’t work.”
“’Cause you’re both tops?”
This time, the laughter hurts. “Yeah, I guess. That and well… we’re just too similar I think. What do you call me? A golden retriever? It’s just two golden retrievers running in circles, and I piss him off, and then he riles me up… we’re better off as friends.” I pause as I run my hand through Nolan’s messy hair, thinking about Jackson and my other friends. “I kept them at a distance for a really long time. Can’t really say why. I love them, and they love me, but I think I’ve always felt like the odd one out. I never really belonged growing up… at the commune. I’ve always had trouble finding a place to belong.”
Nolan stares at me so hard, his gaze unblinking, that for one long moment I’m worried maybe this is the thing that does us in. But all Nolan does is reach up and delicately run his fingers over my cheek.
