Page 46 of Chasing After You

The city hummed around me, but I was tuned only to him.

And when the light in his room darkened, I closed my eyes and imagined him curled up in bed, blankets bunched at his waist, skin still flushed from laughter. I imagined the smile he’d worn lingering on his lips, even in sleep.

I took a deep breath in and adjusted my now hardened cock in my pants. I’d luxuriate in a long and indulgent jerk-off session once I got home.

I deserved it.

12

Josh

The next couple of days passed in a strange sort of calm, almost like I was floating through a long dream.

I felt so… whole.

It felt like I’d been walking around with a loose thread no one else had noticed until he came back and pulled it tight. For whatever reason, I thought it’d be hard adjusting to a life with Dorian back in it.

But no, it really wasn’t. Obviously, I missed him a lot over the years, and I thought about him regularly, but I didn’t think I’d been holding space for him.

I didn’t know that he would so effortlessly slot into place by my side.

I’d catch myself smiling at random times during my shifts at Wild Roast. In the middle of making a drink, I’d remembersomething funny he’d texted me. Or I’d glance at the doorway and expect to see him there, leaning against the frame with that cocky little half-smile, hands in his pockets like he owned the world and had decided I was his favorite part of it.

And honestly, he was still really fuckingweird.Still casually mentioning things he shouldn’t have known unless he was watching me. Still a little too intense, too observant.

But I didn’t tell anyone. Not this time.

Oliver would freak out, insist that I move back into his guest room, maybe even make the twins do something scary to drive Dori away.

But… I didn’t want him to go.

I didn’t want help, protection, or whatever.

That part of me that had always been empty, longing, aching, had apparently just needed my brother back all along.

Even if I didn’t fully understand who he was now, he wasmine.My family, my past, my blanket fort builder, my first friend, my heart, my soul.

My everything.

And the way he looked at me? The way he saw me as someone worth waiting eight years for?

How could I throw that away just because he was a little—okay, alot—odd? Oliver wouldn’t understand.

We’d already made plans to hang out again Saturday night. He wanted to show me “a spot I’d love.” I didn’t ask how he knew I’d love it. I didn’t ask how he always knew.

Maybe I didn’t want to know.

Because knowing would mean admitting that I saw the red flags. And that I was choosing to ignore them.

They weren’t really even red flags. They were more… orange? Yellow?

I was embarrassed that I kind of liked his brand of crazy.

It just felt like after a lifetime of feeling inadequate, of feeling like I was more of a burden than just a person deserving of love and kindness, that someone finally wanted me—the real me. The me that was weak and pathetic, the me who cried himself to sleep, the me who surrounded himself with surface-level friendships desperately trying to feel like he mattered, the me who would rather hide than fight, the me who felt like the weight of the world was always only seconds away from crushing him.

Dorian didn’t want the me who I pretended to be.

We could’ve been apart for fifty years, and he’d still have known when I was putting on a front.