Page 113

"I'm not going anywhere, Blaine."

"Again."

"I'm not going anywhere."

My bag was still sitting open on the bed behind him, half full, with one of his shirts folded on top of it.

I reached past him, picked the whole thing up, and put it on the floor.

He watched me do it and didn't say anything. But his hand came up and took hold of the front of my shirt and didn't let go, and that's how we ended up lying down.

His fingers were freezing when they got under my shirt.

He's always cold. Eleven years and that man has never once had a warm hand — the same man who keeps his office at sixty-eight degrees on purpose to make other people uncomfortable, and who sits in it all day with ice in his fingers. I'd forgotten it completely, and having it come back all at once nearly finished me.

"You're freezing," I said.

"I know."

"You've always been freezing."

"Are you going to complain?"

"No," I said. "God, no."

He got my shirt off over my head and dropped it somewhere, and then he just looked at me.

That's the part I keep going back to. He looked, and he took his time about it, and he didn't say anything clever. I sat there and let him do it.

"What?"

"Nothing." His voice wasn't working right. "I'm allowed to look at you."

"You are."

"I haven't been allowed to look at you in two years."

Then he put his hand flat over my heart and left it there, and I put mine on top of it and held it down.

We got the rest of our clothes off slowly, like we had all the time in the world. Because we did. There was nowhere either of us had to be. Nobody was coming down that hill. The sun had come all the way over the meadow and was lying across the bed in a long, bright bar, gilding Blaine’s skin until he looked like something carved from golden light itself. He was sprawled in the middle of it, naked, hard, one arm tucked behind his head as he looked up at me. The sunlight was so bright I could see the flecks of gold in his eyes, the way his pupils darkened when I moved in closer.

“You’re staring.”

“I’m going to keep staring.”

“Good,” Blaine said, and reached for me, pulling me down until I was half-lying over him, our bodies pressed together from chest to thigh.

I know Blaine Solstice Cauthorne.

I know the way his breath hitches a half-second before he surrenders. The way his hands go flat against the sheets when he’s trying not to make a sound, because that man would rather bite through his own tongue than let himself be loud. I know the exact moment his body goes loose under mine, like he’s handing me the keys to everything he is. I also know the taste of his skin—salt and something sweeter, like the first bite of a peach—and the way his pulse jumps under my mouth when I kiss the hollow of his throat.

So I took my time.

I started with the places that make him shiver. The delicate skin just behind his ear, and the dip above his collarbone, where the sunlight caught the sheen of sweat already beading there. I traced the old scar across his ribs—the one he got falling off his bike when he was twelve—with my thumb, and felt his breath catch. I kissed my way down the center of him, lingering at the soft plane of his stomach, the place he’s hated since he was twenty and has never let anyone mention. I put my mouth there and stayed, pressing slow, open-mouthed kisses into his skin until he made a sound like something breaking.

“Gregory—”

“I know.”