Page 32 of The Art of Drowning

God, I still carried such a torch for this man. His mouth tasted like him. Like it always had, but the stubble on his face was new and not unwelcome. I loved the way it scraped against my skin, and I wanted to feel it everywhere.

Putting my hands to Damien’s shoulders, I pushed him back, pressing his shoulders into the headboard. His eyes flashed with concern, but there was desire there too. So much that I could drown in it.

Damien’s hands slid under my shirt. Impossibly hot skin on mine. Calloused hands, smooth nails. I cataloged every little thing about him. Every change, no matter how small. The laugh lines around his eyes indicating that his life had a lot of joy in it. Despite everything, he’d found reasons to laugh and smile. I hated that those reasons didn’t include me.

Jealousy was stupid and unproductive, and I tried not to entertain the idea of Damien with anyone else, so I deepened the kiss like I could erase everyone else he’d ever met, or even looked at, with a memory of me. Of us.

Kissing Damien was like falling through clouds. He was soft and slow. Sweet. Too sweet. I needed Damien to tear me open, to tear me apart limb from limb, to flip me over and pound me through the mattress. To fuck me so hard I forgot we’d ever been apart.

“Wait,” Damien said, pulling back, but I chased his mouth.

I didn’t want him to call it off or say this was a mistake or give me literally any reason to stop kissing him. I waited anyway because he asked me to. Because enough of his choices had been taken from him. That used to be true, but I didn’t know if it still was. Like it or not, there was a lot I didn’t know about Damien anymore.

Something must have flickered across my face, some kind of alarm, because Damien leaned in close again and dusted his lips against mine until I dropped back into my body and blinked at him. When he smiled, it did meet his eyes, but that was only because both were sad.

I didn’t want to wait. I’d been waiting for years and years and years. Waiting for Sam to stop being a little bitch. Waiting until I could reach out to Damien again someday. But someday never came. It only came once Sam was gone.

“Why are we waiting?” I asked. Leaning in, I buried my face in the crook of his neck. His skin was soft, and he smelled like citrus and spice. “I don’t want to wait,” I confessed, dragging my fingers down his clavicle, tracing the slope of it. My fingers brushed against the hollow of his throat and he captured them in his other hand, then brought them to his mouth and kissed them.

“I just wanted to say that I don’t have supplies with me because I wasn’t planning on this.”

“Good,” I declared. “Because planning to hook up at a funeral is probably a huge social faux pas.”

He surprised me by howling with laughter, and then his body was wrapped around mine and he turned us both over at the same time. It was dizzying to go from being on top of him to being pinned underneath him.

All the reasons we shouldn’t do this were gone. They died with Sam. There were probably a million new reasons that would rise from the wreckage, but for now, I didn’t care. For now, I was his, and he was mine.

And nothing else mattered.

SIXTEEN

damien

NOW

God damn Sam Weeks to hell. Fuck him and his petty, vindictive bullshit. That’s what I’d been thinking up until the moment Callum’s lips touched mine. The recognition that he was kissing me unleashed a tsunami of desire and obliterated my thoughts of Sam.

I’d kissed Callum first years ago. I’d kissed him first just last night. I thought maybe he didn’t want anything to do with me, not like that, not anymore. But here he was, in my hotel room, in my lap. And then underneath me.

I wanted to pin him there. Trap him. Keep him. I wanted to worship him from head to toe. I had never gotten close to getting over him. Our relationship was a ghost that followed me everywhere. Bowie thought it was just because Callum was my first love. My first everything. But it went deeper than that. I didn’t know how to explain it to Bowie, or even to myself for that matter, but I’d never been able to stop craving him. From the moment that summer when I realized that I liked him, that the feelings I felt weren’t friendship and were something brighter. Something deeper. Something better, I’d been unable to stop them.

They’d consumed me in my youth, and as I got older without him, I shoved those feelings away and tried my best to forget about them. Sometimes I managed to for a while. Sometimes I even managed to have a relationship with someone, but eventually it would crumble. Because they weren’t Callum.

It was an impossible standard to have, but when Callum looked at me, it made my soul sing. I loved the way the sun gave him a smattering of freckles on his nose every summer. I wondered if he still got them the way he used to. I loved the way he chewed on his bottom lip when he was lost in thought or trying to solve a problem.

Callum melted underneath me, going boneless as we kissed languidly, taking our time getting to know the contours of each other’s mouths again. Relearning what the other one felt like when we were pressed together the way we were now. His hands skimmed up my back and then buried themselves in my hair. It made me wonder if he’d have liked the long hair phase I’d gone through a few years ago.

Fuck, there was so much we missed. So much time we wasted out of guilt. Out of trying to salvage relationships with a man who hated us both. The memory of Sam almost ruined the moment, but Callum was there, pulling me back in with gentle kisses to the corner of my mouth.

“Damien,” Callum breathed my name, and I stilled, suddenly desperate to hear it again. “What are we doing?” he asked, because someone had to.

“We’re doing what we want,” I told him, giving him the only answer I could think of. “We’re doing what we should have been doing all along. What we should have done a long time ago.”

I kissed him again, more fevered this time. More frantic. I felt the loss of every kiss we missed, of every day we were robbed of, of every memory we could have made together, and it made me sad. And angry. And it made me hate Sam all over again.

Callum was a fucking dream come true. He’d filled out in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Broad shoulders and a tapered waist. The ass of a man who didn’t miss leg day. His hair was darker now, the lines around his eyes giving away how many days of laughter I’d missed. There were subtle changes, but he was still my Callum.

He was mine then and be damned if I didn’t want him to be mine now. Mine forever.