His eyes soften as they read the fear in my expression. “To the couch,” he clarifies gently. “I’m not leaving you, West. I promise.”
Something expands in my chest, when he says that with those dark eyes locked on mine. So steady. So sure. So safe.
I’m not leaving you.
Suddenly I can’t stop myself. I don’t want to stop myself. I fling my body forward and wrap my arms around his neck. The impact is hard – he jolts two inches back when we collide. I feel him freeze, uncertainty filling his every atom, but I don’t care.
My face finds that spot in the crook of his neck where muscle bunches and veins cord tautly, nestling in so we’re skin on skin. My arms twine around his back until I’m plastered so tight against him, I’m not sure where he ends and I begin. He doesn’t return my embrace, so I hug him hard enough for us both.
“West—” he starts.
“Please,” I whisper, voice breaking on the word. “Don’t push me away, Nate. Not right now.” My throat is constricted by the lump of emotion gathering there. “I just…. I need a minute of this — of you — so I know everything’s going to be okay. Then… I promise I’ll let go.”
Something shifts in the air around us, when I say that. I can’t see it, but I sense it with every single part of my being. He stops fighting — me, himself, those demons that lurk in the back of his eyes. And then, before I can process it, his arms come up around me and he’s hugging me back.
So tight my ribs ache. So hard I think he’ll never let me go.
My tears drip against his skin and his head ducks to rest on my shoulder. It’s not about sex or lust or even love. It’s pure comfort between two people who’ve always walked the line of misery. Who’ve always carried the burden of their broken pieces in total solitude.
The shattered fragments of my heart find solace against the jagged edges of his soul. We breathe each other in and exhale out everything that makes us damaged, consoling each other in the dark in a way we haven’t since we were kids.
I can’t say who moves first. I can’t define the exact moment that this stolen embrace changes from one of simple comfort to something entirely different. I can’t tell you if it’s my hands, sliding into the curling hair at the nape of his neck… or his lips, brushing the skin where my shoulder meets my neck. I can’t tell you if the thrumming in my body, the heat between my legs, or the fire in my heart are responsible for the way I shift against him, until I feel the length of him hard against my stomach.
All I can tell you is that when that shift happens — when lips hit skin and our bodies align like two lost puzzle pieces — the electricity that always crackles through him like a live wire jumps over to me.
One bolt of lightning. A single spark.
We combust into flames.
My mouth finds his, or maybe his finds mine. It doesn’t matter. As soon as they brush, we’re both lost. His tongue spears into my mouth without hesitation and then he’s kissing me. I’ve never been kissed like this before — like I’m being claimed, branded, marked as his. Every fumbling high-school boy and drunken college crush falls away in the wake of Nate’s kiss. Teeth, tongues, hands, lips. We devour each other.
I taste bourbon and blood as my lip cracks open again beneath his onslaught. A growl rattles from deep in his chest as he tastes it, but he doesn’t stop. I wouldn’t let him if he tried.
My hands work into his hair and pull him closer, deepening the kiss. His stubble scrapes my cheeks as our mouths consume each other — a decade of lust pouring out in a torrent, fueling the fire. His hands roam my back, my ass, my sides. They slip up under my borrowed t-shirt, seeking skin and heat. I moan at the sensation of his callused hands against me, writhing to get closer.
Not close enough. Never close enough.
We are the most treacherous of fault-lines, long overdue for a quake. The pressure has built and built and built between our opposing sides for years, until finally, the very earth cracks open beneath us.
We are a natural disaster.