Page 19

Chapter Fifteen

I 'd cleaned, okay? I just want that to be clear. I knew he was coming over, and I'd cleaned. While Dav helps himself to the kitchen cabinets, I order a pizza. It's not what we planned, but good enough is good enough.

Dav sits primly on the wonky sofa and makes the wine guy go yay. His socks today are boogying grapes. Onatah is already my new best friend and I've never even met her. I slide over until there's no space between our thighs, and Dav un-prims and slumps against me.

"Hi," I say. "You brought me wine from your cellar?"

"Yes. I hope that's okay?"

"It's fucking hot is what it is." I slide my nearest hand up the inside of his thigh, stopping just south enough that I can feel the edge of his underwear. He's a briefs man. Nice. "Look at my dragon, providing for me and shit."

Dav shudders once all over, eyelids fluttering. Well, now. That's a reaction that I last saw in a boyfriend when he was trying not to come too fast during a blowjob.

Very nice.

"Really?" I ask, delighted.

"Hush. You'll make me spill."

He does this fancy bartender thing with his wrist as he pours, and the wine leaps into the glass with a mid-air twist to aerate it and holy shit .

"Not to be horny on main," I say, holding very still so I won't jostle him. "But do that the fuck again."

Dav laughs and pours the second glass with the same sexy flourish. I want to appreciate it, I really do, but there's something else I want to appreciate more first.

"Oh my god, put that bottle down right now, come here."

I flop back, yanking him on top of me. Dav laughs joyously.

It makes his stomach bounce against mine.

He's heavy, and real, and it's wonderful.

I want to leave bruises on his hips, grab greedy handfuls of his gorgeous ass, lick all the way up his spine.

All I can reach right now is his mouth, though, so I bite it.

Dav groans and props himself up on his elbows, fingers carding through my hair, and I fist my hands in his shirt so he can't get away.

"Colin?" he moans, and I fucking love the way he says my name.

"Just kissing for now," I reassure him. I like knowing the endgame when it comes to being naked and vulnerable.

That way, I can enjoy what's happening instead of worrying myself over what may or may not be coming next.

I flatten my palms against his chest, sliding my thumbs up to trace the slutty, slutty vee of skin revealed by his collar with my thumbs.

"Hm, yes," Dav agrees, and gets to it with a fervor.

Holy shit, he has not kissed me like this before.

Like he wants to thoroughly map all the vectors of what just kissing can entail.

I'd dragged him into the cradle of my thighs, but he props his hips back, polite.

I'm already half-mast, but I can't tell if he's getting hard, and the fact that he's not making that my problem by grinding it against me makes me want to grope his polite ass even more . Goddamn.

"Unk," I manage to moan when he slides that beautiful forked tongue of his out of my mouth and up around my ear, then uses it to great effect on my neck. There's going to be a hickey high enough up for everyone to see tomorrow and I don't even care .

"Budge back," Dav says an eternity of warm, wet, soft later.

I'm too high on the taste, and feel, and smell of him to do anything but obey. Propped up against the sofa arm, Dav lifts one of the glasses to my lips.

"Drink." His voice is like smoke and fire, dark and rich, and deep. I give one of those full-body shudders of my own.

The wine is like his voice—deep and smoky. Also kind of like blackberry jam? I know a lot about growing wine, but not a lot about tasting it. But I know what I like, and this is good .

"That's amazing."

"I'm glad you think so." He kisses a spilled drop from the corner of my mouth. My brain flashes to every romance novel I've ever read where the love interest does the same. It’s much nicer in person than on the page.

"You brought me wine from your own cellar," I repeat. He offers another sip, and this is so fucking romantic my whole body is buzzing.

"I thought we could try it with this." He sets the wine down and retrieves something else from the crumpled tote bag. It's a small box with a purple ribbon that reads Laura Secord Chocolates .

"What if it was a fluke?" I sit up all the way now. "You don't want to spend all night holding my hair back."

"I would, if you wanted," Dav says, sitting back. "I thought perhaps you've never had the opportunity to experience quality chocolates before."

"I'm curious as hell, I'm not gonna lie."

He hands over the box. Inside, two small truffles nestled in purple paper grass shine like glossy stones. Then the smell hits me. It’s the scent of childhood misery and hours in the bathroom.

"I can’t do it," I say, handing it back. "I’m sorry, I hate to waste your money—"

"It is no waste." He ties the box back up. "I'll give them to Hadi."

"I just don't want to risk it. This—" I gesture between us, and he licks his lower lip, which is still kiss-bitten and that is illegal , sir, you cannot just do that in front of me. "This is too nice to fuck up with puking."

And once he's seen how gross and pathetic I am, curled up on the tile and praying for death, he won't ever want to kiss me again. That's something I absolutely can't allow.

"Understandable," he concedes.

"I've been thinking about my food intake, and nothing's different. I'm eating the same stuff, using the same condiments. Except for the lunch at the boardgame pub, and Steph's burgers are good, but I don't think they're 'cure a food allergy' good."

"I don't know of anything that can," Dav agrees, sitting back and letting only some of his weight rest on my calves. We tap our wine glasses together and sip in tandem. "It's funny, I don't recall food allergies being so severe in my youth."

"What, a thousand years ago?"

"Hush." He taps my thigh with a teasing grin. "You're wretched."

"Ouch!" I pantomime pain. "So cruel. So old, and decrepit, and cruel , and ancient— "

"I'll show you ancient, you brat." He pulls the glass out of my hands, places it on the coffee table, and pushes me back down into the flat throw pillows. "Just kissing?" he checks in as he slides his legs over mine, trapping my knees between his on the cushions.

"Roger, roger."

"Dav," he says, with that silly, eye-crinkling grin as he lowers his face. "In case you’ve forgotten."

"Yeah, no, that's not very likely."

We fall asleep like that. The slow, wet slide, the soft push-pull lures us into dreamland.

I wake up with a crick in my neck and a dragon asleep on my chest when the pizza guy rings the doorbell.

I poke Dav upright, and before he can muzzily apologize, I chivvy him toward my bed.

He's face-down in the pillow by the time I get back inside with dinner, so I stow it in the fridge and move the wine glasses to the sink.

I'm tempted to strip him down for his own comfort, but that’s one intimacy-step too far for tonight.

I wake him a little, make myself not have a heart attack over how cute he is when his face is all scrunched up in half-sleep, and leave him alone to wrestle into a spare pair of pajama pants.

When I come back from pulling on my own pajama pants in the bathroom, he's dead asleep on his back, one arm thrown up over his head.

He's also shirtless, and the pants are so tight around his hips that he didn't do up the string.

I am exhausted, but that doesn't stop my mouth from absolutely watering at the sight of his everything so casually on display.

He's got a soldier's body, lithe and conditioned power with a sweet, concave tummy, and no belly button.

I guess that's normal, dragons coming from eggs.

He still has a treasure trail though, spare and brilliantly orange, arrowing down from the sparse spread across his chest to a thin line that disappears into his waistband.

That's nice nice.

S top being a perv , I tell myself and crawl in beside him.

Sure, I could sleep on the sofa. Or even in my roommate's bed.

But there’s a snuggly dragon sleeping in mine, and to paraphrase the girl with the golden locks, he looks just right.

The alarm startles Dav so bad he shreds the pillow.

Good thing I was jetpacking, curled up against his back and lovely pert bum with my arms around his middle, or it might have meant another trip to emerg.

We have enough time before we have to be at the café to mutter apologies and tumble around one another in the bathroom.

Dav washes quickly, then I jump in the shower as he rifles my barren fridge for breakfast.

We end up munching on cold pizza. I was planning to seduce him, why don’t I have something that isn't mustard and half-finished margarine to feed my conquest in the morning? Ugh, fail. At least I have a stash of spare toothbrushes from dentist visits.

We don't talk about last night, and though it might actually make a blood vessel burst, I refrain from any jokes about having Dav in my bed. He's already sheepish about showing up to Beanevolence in yesterday's clothing. I'm not about to scare him off by being obnoxious.

As we're pulling on our shoes, I say, as casual as possible: "I'd like to see your place sometime.

" I don't want to push, but Dav's walked me home or been in my apartment nearly every night for the last three weeks, and I've never even seen his car .

Dav's face makes me add: "Sorry, is … is that something I shouldn't have asked for? "

"It's fine." His expression is doing a complicated dance between confused, and scared, and delighted. "You cannot realize how serious a request that is. It's not common for us to allow humans who are not, ah…" he scratches the back of his neck. "Not collected to be allowed into a dragon's keep."

I snort as I usher him out and lock up. "I'm not asking to marry you, bro. I just wanna see your place. You've seen mine."

Dav smirks, and there's something gorgeously lecherous about the way he raises just one of his sculpted eyebrows at me. "Indeed I have."

"Hey, if it's not cool, it's not cool," I back-pedal. "I don't mind us going to mine all the time. Though I'm gonna have to get bread and eggs or something."

"Maybe one day," Dav allows, wrapping his pinkie around mine. "But it's a very big step for the present."

"I won't push. Rules Two and Three."

"Yes, what are these Rules?" Dav asks. He reaches up and flicks what turns out to be dried toothpaste out of my scruff by the corner of my mouth, and I think, suddenly, without any warning: I love you .

Oh.

Shit .

Yeah, so that's…

That's a thing that just happened.

"Colin?"

"Hm?" God, his eyes are so golden in the early-morning light.

"The Rules?" He tugs on my finger and I realize I've stopped walking.

"Ah! Yeah!" Fuck, am I blushing? I'm blushing. Shit. "It's, um… I make bad romantic choices. Not you! But, uh, I have sort of a history of having bad taste."

"I'm making an effort not to be offended," he says, but his tone is light.

"So, after like, every romantic disaster a bi dude could suffer, and trust me, dating multiple genders means there are multiple ways shit can get bad, Hadi wrote rules for me. She broke into my locker at the school and taped them to the inside of my door. They help me do gooder."

"May I know what they are?"

"Er, yeah, I—shit, it's embarrassing. I've never shared them before," I say quickly, before he can offer an out.

But being unconscious together in the same bed is physically intimate, you know?

Something like that deserves some kind of emotional intimacy to go with it.

And admitting that one is a dumbass when it comes to romance to the guy I am romancing seems only fair.

"Colin, I don't want to push you."

"No, no, I—" I love you , I think again, suddenly. I thought that just now. I looked at you and thought 'I love you'. Fuck. "So, ah, One: No assuming interest unless it's spelled out. I tend to, you know, read into shit."

"I believe I've made my interest explicit," Dav says softly, dropping into that rumble-purr from last night. It gives me a sudden sense-memory of the burst of perfectly aged pinot noir on my parched tongue.

Damn.

"Um, Two: no more charming narcissists. I have a habit of falling for charismatic people who are, you know, only charismatic and not much else."

"I wouldn't call myself a narcissist, I hope," Dav says with a frown. "And I'm certainly not charming."

"Eeeeehhhn." I make an obnoxious buzzer sound. "The judges disagree. You're charming as fuck." I pat his ass, and he flicks my cheek in retaliation. The cheek on my face, I mean. I'm laughing when I say, "Three: don't mistake lust for love."

The 'L' word makes both of us clam up. I speed through the rest. "Four: relationships are work.

So you gotta work at them. Five: not every partner has to be The One and don't stress out if they’re not.

Six: Don't give up on the idea of soulmates, but also don't hinge everything on the belief in it. And seven: I'm worthy of love."

Dav goes quiet and thoughtful. This is awkward as hell. I wish I was wearing a scarf so I could hide my face in it, but it’s July.

At length, Dav says: "Ah, I see why you enjoy the literature you do so much.

Who doesn't dream of a soulmate who believes they are worthy of the love they share?

" He is looking up at the sky, though, as he says it, throat working like he's choking back something.

The gooey-caramel hopeless romantic center of me burbles.

He lifts my hand to kiss the place where our fingers are hooked together. "I like your Rules very much."

"Technically, they're Hadi's," I crackle out.

He swoops down, right in front of Beanevolence, for a belated good-morning kiss.

It's the kind of kiss that blocks up your hearing, pins your focus on the person whose face is mashed against yours. Or at least I assume it is, because I don't hear my boss until she's close enough to speak right into my ear: "Stop making out in front of my café and open it."

Dav springs back like he's been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

I waggle my eyebrows at Hadi. "And good morning to you, too, Oscar."

"Ew," Hadi says, reaching between us to unlock the door.

As much as I don't love getting up early for work, Hadi is the worst at mornings. I have no doubt whatsoever the minute she's sure she can afford another summer employee, she'll be getting someone else to replace her. Oooh, hey, maybe that means I can get off opens, too.

I head straight to the machines, and Hadi waits until Dav has retreated to the kitchen before pressing her finger directly over the hickey on my neck.

"Nice," she says. "Rule three?"

"Rule three."

And we leave it at that.