Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 117415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
It’s a beautiful terror, giving yourself to someone.
Remembering every betrayal you’ve felt.
Your body remembering the pain of every past breakup.
The second you kiss someone new, you risk feeling all of those debilitating poisons again. You risk heartbreak. You risk pain.
You also risk basking in paradise.
Could this finally be the set of lips you’ve been looking for? The ones that won’t abandon you? The ones you can wake up next to every morning? That will say all the right words to capture you in the sweetest prison you’ll never want to escape?
That’s what your heart asks you without words.
With every beat—Could he be the one?
Suddenly he pulls away. “Sorry. I-I know. I said it, too. Just to spend time together. This wasn’t an ambush. I didn’t mean—”
“Hey, do you see me resisting?”
Our hands are still on each other.
Our breaths, crashing out and rushing in.
His desperate eyes meet mine. “I just … don’t want to ruin this thing between us. Whatever it is. Whatever’s happening. I really like it. I … I want more of it. A lot more.”
“Me too,” I assure him.
“I don’t want this to just … vanish, y’know what I mean? And I learned quickly, I really learned, the first guys in college I dated—if I can even call them dates—the quicker the fire burns, the faster it goes out, and this is burning awfully fast—”
“Hey, I’m not goin’ anywhere.”
He catches his breath, staring at me for a while, out of words.
It’s killing me, to resist him any further, to practice any more restraint. But maybe that’s what he’s begging me to do, even if his eyes and his body and his hands are telling me something totally different. He wants me to be the bigger guy. To put on the brakes. To assure him in all the ways our horny bodies can’t.
“How about …” Jesus, this is killin’ me. “How about we … go and get settled on the beds? Separate beds. See? Two queens. And we can order room service … unless it’s closed for the night. We could eat microwave popcorn, right over there, couple of bags. Put the TV on. And just … hang out. All of our clothes on.”
He’s clenching his jaw. The restraint is killing him, too.
Now I’m wondering if I read it wrong and he actually wanted the opposite—for me to reassure him while taking his clothes off, to kiss him tenderly on his exposed body, to treasure him as I lay him on the bed, to give him one hell of an experience he and his body will never forget …
“That sounds perfect,” he decides, voice slightly choked.
Now is he lying? Or being serious? “Uh … yeah?” I ask, like a test. “Is … Is that what you want?”
“I want lots of things,” he says, again slightly choked. “But … I think I’d like that. Us. Just hanging out.” His eyes drop to my lips. Then my chest. “That … sounds perfect.”
He’s still in his head.
I’m still in my feels.
You really aren’t makin’ this easy, Timothy.
In a few minutes, we end up doing just that: chilling on our own beds, TV on something neither of us are paying attention to. After a few minutes, Timothy’s stomach growls, and we both look at each other—then laugh. I hop off the bed to make that popcorn, say something witty like, “Free or not, let’s try to keep these ones from spillin’ all over the floor.” He snorts at that and says it was totally my fault the tub spilled in the theater. The next minute, we both have our own bag, chomping down on an airy tasteless snack notorious for doing absolutely fuck-all about appetite. Then he has a thought and excuses himself from the room, only to come back a handful of minutes later with a can of soda, a bottle of Gatorade, and two packages of Oreos lumped in his arms. He dumps them on the end of my bed with a cute, “Didn’t know what you drink, but definitely knew your snack of choice,” winks at me, and I guess that becomes his excuse for abandoning his own bed and sitting next to me on mine, chomping down on Oreos.
Spending time with Timothy is effortless.
He says something simple. I pick it right up. Then I make fun of whatever’s on TV. His laughter comes easy. He says we probably reek from the bowling alley and movie theater and just haven’t noticed because we smell the same. I say something weirdly cute about liking how we smell the same, like it’s meaningful, and he finds that hilarious and laughs way too hard.
In no time, we’ve lost all the nerves and discover something disturbingly natural between us that I haven’t found in anyone my whole life. He’s like an old friend. And I don’t have old friends.