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ELEVEN

ELIO

I woke up next to him, naked again, and watched him while he slept. Sometime in the night, I had woken up to Jaxon’s body pressed hard against mine, his dick hard and his face buried in the crook of my neck, and the feeling of warmth and proximity was such that I couldn’t resist it.

As my fingers threaded down his bare arm, his cock throbbed and invited me lower. Feeling his body under the thin layers of his clothes, I stirred him awake and watched his reaction as I reached lower still to feel his dick in my hand, only his pajama bottoms in the way.

Now, in the light of day, it felt like a distant dream but a very nice one. Jaxon slept so innocently that it was hard to remind myself he was the same person who had had my finger inside his body together with my cock and the same person who begged to be choked until he came. The same boy whose nose I had broken. The same guy who had ripped the pillowcase with his teeth in the middle of the night as we rammed the bed against the wall, sending dust out of the windowsill and cracking the paint around the bed frame. He looked like an angel now, although he looked just as well when he played a demon.

I cupped his face with my hand and gazed at his long, black eyelashes, all threaded together, and that small bump on the bridge of his nose. It hurt me to see it, but it made me want to make up for it, too.

Perhaps I had a purpose in my life now. Perhaps I had a chance to make this right somewhere. I didn’t fool myself that all would be well, but if I could fix one thing that I had broken, that would have been worth any struggle it cost me.

It was a hard thing—the hardest of them all—to admit this thing to yourself. I was not a good person. I had not been wronged by everyone in my life. I had not been tricked or fooled or misled. All those things happened to me, but I couldn’t blame everyone else any longer. Because I had fooled myself. I had misled myself. I had tricked myself into thinking the world owed me the simple, easy life I was promised as a child.

The truth was more complicated than that.

I was the villain of my own life’s story and of many people’s stories. And it was up to me to fix it.

Maybe there was something precious in this world that was worth the pain of taking a good, long look in the mirror and admitting these things.

For starters, though…

I think I’m gay .

The thought passed through my mind fleetingly, like a butterfly that lived a single day, flapping its wings once for a majestic leap. But as the ripple spread through me and subsided, I found the sort of calm I’d feared I never would. Not after admitting this to myself.

To Jaxon, who had seen it beneath the surface, buried so deep that I’d hidden it from myself, I owed everything. I owed him the truth, at the very least. He had tried to bring me out of that hard shell, but the armor had been too well sealed, too unbreakable. He could never have penetrated it two years ago.

I’m gay , I thought again, firmer this time. There was no question about it. I couldn’t afford to question it. I’d been gay all my life. I’d been looking away from that fact, but that didn’t change it. I was who I was.

My thoughts drifted into the past and glossed over the girls I’d been with. Not a single one of my fleeting encounters lasted beyond sex. Sure, we’d stayed in touch for a bit, then drifted. It had always left me wondering what I’d done wrong, but the simple truth was that I hadn’t put in the effort. I’d known how pointless it would have been. Pleasure was pleasure, but a connection that ran deeper than the simple act of fucking was the spice I’d always lacked with girls. I hadn’t realized just how rich and powerful making love could be when the connection existed.

“Hey,” Jaxon said softly, blinking awake. He rubbed his eyes and rolled onto his back. “You’re watching me.”

“I am.” There was a lot to see there. From the sharpness of his cheekbones to the trimmed, high fade and a near buzz cut on top, to the honey-brown eyes and the warmth that filled them once he opened them. Those full, wonderful, magical lips that kissed like an angel and sinned like the devil. I could hardly look away from him.

“Aren’t I gorgeous when I sleep?” Jaxon asked with more than a hint of sarcasm. He pushed his head into the pillow, opened his mouth, and made a strangled snore that shook the walls.

A laugh burst out of me as Jaxon’s gag threw me back to the last summer we’d spent together. He’d always been a happy guy—minus the times when he couldn’t turn his thoughts away from Ronan—always willing to look a little foolish for a laugh. Not like me at all, who wore a calm, polite exterior that never made anyone look a little deeper.

If you were nice, you could get away with anything. The bar was so incredibly low that I never understood the people who wore their anger as a shield because that very anger invited further inspection. That never happened if you just wore a half smile and nodded when people spoke to you. It was the best weapon against the older boys who had called me all sorts of names in my childhood. When their words made me fume, they laughed. When they made me cry, they tried harder. But when I learned to shrug and smile, I became boring to them, and they moved on to more entertaining targets.

Everything was a show; if your act was boring, the audience moved on.

“You were wonderful,” I said. “Last night was…”

“Wonderful?” he teased.

“Yeah,” I said heartily. “It really was.”

“Who would have thought? Elio Castelli in my bed.” Jaxon lifted his arms high above and stretched, his torso curving, his ribs contouring under his smooth, tanned skin. “Of course, you were here before, but I thought you’d run away like your pubes were on fire.”

“What pubes?” I asked, lifting the thin cover and letting him take a look.

“Smart, that,” Jaxon said, nodding at my dick. “No chance of catching fire.”

“Why are we talking about burning pubes?” I asked.

“We’re preparing for the worst while hoping for the best,” Jaxon said assuringly.

“I’d rather be too busy to talk,” I told him.

He moved his head away, baring his neck for me, and I moved in like a ravenous man near a buffet, pressing my lips against his skin and feeling his pulse quicken. My hand moved over his chest until it settled just above his heart, feeling its steady beating. Odd how it felt exactly like the poets said it would. It wasn’t just the rhythm of his heart but the life itself that I could feel. Such a tender thing, his heart, yet so big and powerful.

“You’re turning me on, Castelli,” Jaxon said. He only used my last name when he felt like teasing me. But a quick move of my hand found that he wasn’t joking at all.

He grabbed my hand and moved it back to his stomach.

“We should go back,” I said, catching myself in the middle of the thoughts. The brilliance of the idea made me hurry to share it. “To Still Water Cove,” I added, clearing it up. “To do all the things we should have done.”

Jaxon chuckled, then pressed the back of his finger against my chest and dragged it down the length of my torso. “All the things we should have done?”

“Mm. Clearly, I mean for us to fuck our brains out and never see the lake.” I watched as he bit his lip as my words sank in.

“I like the lake,” Jaxon said. “Picture it: sunbathing and swimming all day, then coming to our cabin for hours and hours of vigorous, summer-crazed sex.”

“If I picture it, we won’t get out of here until Monday,” I warned him.

“I don’t think I ever lasted that long,” Jaxon said. “But I’m nothing if not competitive.”

“That’s definitely a contest I’m willing to participate in,” I said.

“At an Olympic level, I’d hope,” Jaxon said.

And just then, as I opened my mouth to say, “Olympic Games would double the ratings,” I realized that I could lie here and ramble on with Jaxon for the rest of my life.

“It’s got to be gay, though,” Jaxon said.

My heart leaped. Gay. It was a word I suddenly connected with. It wasn’t a bad, scary term I shied away from, but it was a word that described me exactly as I was. “It’s got to be super gay,” I agreed.

A grin flashed on Jaxon’s face. “You’re doing well,” he said, humor replaced by a genuinely caring tone. “I mean it, El. I thought you’d freak out. I’ve seen it before.”

He’d seen me freak out before, but that wasn’t what he meant. The reminder that Jaxon had been with other guys, guys like me, made me heat up with jealousy and anger. Not at him, though. I was the one who’d let him go. I was the reason he’d been with other guys. Had I not run away that first time, I wouldn’t have set him free to be with them. Besides, if they were like me, I couldn’t fucking trust them. I was the first to hurt Jaxon, so I didn’t think anyone remotely similar to me was worth a grain of sand under Jaxon’s fingernail.

I sat up, pulling him close, and let the silence settle comfortably between us.

This felt right. Holding him in his bed, so near me, was the only way to exist. All else would have been wrong and unnatural.

He was correct. I was doing well today. And if my luck continued, I might be able to fix other things, too.

“Should we have breakfast together?” Jaxon asked. “I can bring it.”

A moment’s panic swept over me before he added the rest, and I adored him for being so considerate. “You wouldn’t mind?”

Jaxon leaned in and kissed my cheek. “Not at all.”

And as he got up, my gaze scanned him fully before letting him go. He dressed and went outside, and I wondered when I would be ready to take things further. It was one thing to worship his body in the privacy of his room—or his roof if such a thing could be private—but to eat out together and to look at him with the same hungry, devoted gaze where anyone could see was a whole new level of intimacy.

I would get there. I promised it silently to the Jaxon from two years ago. The one I’d broken. The one I owed everything to. I would get there.