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)
Or maybe this is my reply.
I don’t know what this is between us. Whatever we’ve started and can’t get enough of. What to call it. How to honor it.
Is it a kind of love?
Or are we kidding ourselves?
The love songs you’ve heard your whole life, they’re written for fools who scatter their wishes into the stars, so far away from reality you can’t even see them. Those songs don’t capture all the mess and the sweat. The twisted bed sheets and the insecurity of wanting something too much.
The touch of his “just-in-case” exchanging our hands.
The confident look he puts on his face when he’s pressed back to the bed and I crawl over him. How that look shatters when my tongue meets his nipple, then shatters worse when my teeth find his ear.
The pressure of a wet fingertip slipping inside him.
The soft moans every movement of that finger teases out.
And the breathing. All the breathing. The only sound in this room other than bed sheets crinkling against two shifting bodies—a sound no love song will ever adequately portray.
The feeling of his eyes locking on mine when my face appears over his like a shadow, his legs hooked over my shoulders, open to me in every way imaginable.
Then when I replace my fingers with something else.
And watch his beautiful face fall apart.
What chord progression can possibly depict how it feels when TJ’s arms fly around me with a gasp, clinging to my body like I’m the only man he’s ever known, when I slide inside?
What instrument can hold up against the precious moans that issue from his pretty, puckered lips as we unite?
I can’t hold back. Something in the sting of TJ’s eyes tells me he doesn’t want me to. I pick up speed. His fingers curl deeper, lips parting to show teeth, almost a grin, almost a grimace. The harder I go, the more fiery his gaze becomes, encouraging me.
TJ is so much stronger than he looks. I should’ve learned that lesson the night we met. He isn’t some fragile boy who will break underneath me. I had that shit backwards.
He’s someone who breaks me every time he meets my eyes.
Maybe somewhere between one breath and the next, we’ve decided to stop pretending we’re taking this slow. We’re so deep in this, we can’t even lie to ourselves anymore.
The noise of the world is gone. My career. His family. Both our names and their attached burdens. The world narrows down to just him. To just me. To just this.
Right here and now.
And when we come together, our breaths turn into moans and then into cries that we don’t care who can hear. We’re the noise in the world now. We’re the music in the air.
It’s over just like that—yet doesn’t feel over at all.
Collapsed next to each other, still sticky, messy, my face in his hands, his breath catching with his every gasp, we bask somehow in this space we’ve made between each other. Nothing touches us, not even thoughts. He looks so happy right now. I can’t even say when the last time was that I felt this light and free.
“You meant it, right?” I ask him, still catching my breath. “At your house. When you called yourself my secret boyfriend. That … wasn’t just a cute thing you said? That was the real thing?”
His hands slip from my face and brush down my body, and he weaves his fingers between mine. “I already put it in my pink-and-red notebook with my pink-and-red pencil.” To the look on my face, which makes him crack a smile, he elaborates: “It means yes. Yes, I meant it. I … I want to be your boyfriend.”
I kiss him again, taking him fully into my arms, stickiness and sweat and all. It’s a special kind of gift, when you experience such a night like this that’s so incredible, you cannot imagine how in a hundred lifetimes you deserved it.
And surely you’ll never know it again.
But you do.
Only this time, it’s in Birmingham, Alabama, and the room TJ gets is on the opposite end of the goddamned planet from yours. On my way to it, I’m caught by Fiona who asks me (while popping jellybeans) to drop by her room later to hear a couple of chord adjustments for “Down Bad For Him” she wants to run past me. Then I narrowly escape Naomi only to run face-first into Emmett, who reminds me about a cousin of his who’ll be at the next show, second row, house right. When I get to TJ’s floor, I have to hide on the opposite side of the vending machine for a group of laughing, phone-wielding fans I recognize from tonight’s show to walk by before I finally arrive at TJ’s room, though I can’t with confidence say no one tracked me. “How in the hell do these fans manage to book rooms at our hotel?” I ask TJ rhetorically when we’re already naked in bed, well into making out. He gives me a look and, loaded with all the sarcasm in the world, says, “Gosh, I have no idea. Better be careful or you’ll end up in bed with one.”