“Does it hurt...?”
“No.” Damon smiled, and it was a wondering, thoughtful, breathtaking thing. “Can’t think of many things that feel better. Just in seeing myself, and knowing I’m not alone.”
Rian lowered his eyes, tracing his fingertips along the letters but only half processing them. “... I feel that way around you.”
Again that stillness—charged, shivering, waiting. “Yeah?”
“When you talk about wanting to build something. Wanting to make something that’s yours, instead of taking from someone else.” Rian bit his lip. “I’ve...wanted that, too. I think that’s what I’ve wanted, all this time. To make something of my own, instead of what someone else gave me. It’s...it’s all I’ve been able to think about lately, when I’ve been painting. Wanting this thing I’m making to be mine.”
He didn’t know what he was trying to say. What he was trying to tell Damon, when even though he was painting for himself, trying to find his own heart in the washes of color on canvas...
Every stroke of heart-shade he slashed from the tip of his brush seemed to whisper Damon’s name.
Rian lifted his gaze to find Damon watching him—silently, intently, but there was something in it that drew Rian, that begged him to come closer, even as Damon leaned in subtly.
“You want to make something you can love,” Damon rumbled.
Rian could hardly feel the pages against his fingers, the weight of the book lowering into his lap. He could only feel Damon, the small space between them, and the...the...
The heaviness of wanting someone for himself.
Not something.
Wanting Damon simply for Damon’s sake, and not for anything Rian had to fix about him to make himself feel worthwhile.
When with Damon, Rian just...
Felt like enough.
His heart ran hot and fast and wild as he let the paperback fall to his thigh; as he met Damon’s heated, questioning eyes. Rian reached out tentatively, feathered his fingers against the warm fullness of Damon’s lips—and they parted for him, breath washing over his hand, before a slow kiss pressed to his skin.
“Damon,” Rian whispered—asked, pleaded, he didn’t know, but Damon caught his hand, stroked his thumb in a sensitizing, tingling caress against Rian’s palm, followed by his lips. The way he kissed Rian’s palm bordered on obscene: wet, stroking, luscious and slow, and Rian’s entire body felt like a caught breath, held tight.
“You gotta tell me, Rian,” Damon rumbled deep. “You gotta tell me what you want. I need to hear it from you.”
“You,” Rian breathed, as he swayed across the small space between them. “I just want you.”
Chapter Seventeen
I just want you.
Those words ignited under Damon’s skin, washing away every frustrated feeling until it forced him to confront something he’d been trying so, so fucking hard to ignore:
He fucking wanted Rian to want him, and goddammit, every last fucking feint and pushback between them had made him feel like that would never fucking happen.
Until those words fell past soft pale lips, I just want you, and he didn’t know if he reached for Rian or Rian reached for him but suddenly they were crashing together over the center console, Damon’s arms snared around Rian’s waist and Rian’s fingers tangled in Damon’s hair and their lips coming together like two storm fronts meeting in a lashing of lightning and chaos and thunderous need. It was always like this with Rian; they just built up and built up and built up until they exploded into a fight.
Or into desire.
And the next thing Damon knew, he was drunk on the taste of Rian as those yielding lips opened for him and Rian melted against him with a low moan.
His breaths came fast and rough, scorching like smoke inside his chest and throat as he dragged Rian against him, cursing the console in the way, the awkwardness of the front seat of the car, but he couldn’t seem to stop kissing Rian to do anything about it—seeking deep, soaking up every hint of that sugar-candy taste and searching for more. Rian’s mouth was so obscenely soft inside, the texture a plush wet thing that gripped and worked at Damon’s tongue until his cock jerked in response as if that mouth had sucked him in deep and left him drowning in heat.
A heat that was answered as, without warning, Rian climbed out of the passenger’s seat and into Damon’s lap, fitting his slender frame between Damon’s body and the close press of the steering column.
Like this there was no mistaking the fire burning between them, the sleekness of Rian’s thighs straddling Damon’s lap, and Damon dragged his hands over those ragged scraps of denim, slipped his fingers through the rips in Rian’s jeans, held fast to smooth bare skin as he hauled Rian in closer until they pressed hips to hips, cock to cock, and Rian let out a helpless, erotic little sound as they ground together roughly, hard-dragging pressure throbbing through Damon until he couldn’t help jerking up to thrust against Rian as he tilted his head up to steal that pretty little mouth again.
“Fuck, Ri,” he whispered, before his voice was swallowed as their lips fused, mated, fit together in such a perfect lock that he couldn’t tell his breaths from Rian’s anymore.
Couldn’t tell anything but that he needed this with a desperation that gutted him with its intensity, stealing his thoughts and his everything with the craving to have Rian all to himself.
“Damon,” Rian moaned, moving against him with his tongue a slick dart caressing over Damon’s mouth, teasing at him, and Damon groaned, a full-body shudder racking him as he clutched more desperately at Rian’s thighs.
Before he could second-guess, before he could tell himself this was a bad fucking idea all over again, he fumbled a hand away from Rian and reached down to the side of the seat, catching the release. A hard jerk, and it sent the seat spilling back with choppy motions, jolting them both—but giving space for Damon to roll them together, catching Rian around the waist and holding his slim frame against Damon as Damon tumbled them to the side and through the gap between the front seats to let them into the back of the Jeep.
They hit heavily, landing on the lowered seat in the cargo area and atop the sleeping bag he’d left there, sprawling out with Rian underneath him; Damon winced as his elbows struck painfully even through the layer of padding, but managed to keep from crushing Rian underneath him. Rian blinked up at him with his eyes wide and startled, lips parted and gasping, all that gorgeous hair spraying around him until he looked like an untamed hedge witch in his flowing clothing, this bramble-child who should have his hair full of flowers and butterflies, wildness beneath that civilized exterior.
Damon lingered to just...take him in, shifting his weight to one elbow so he could trace his fingertips down Rian’s fine, fragile jaw. “You’re so goddamned beautiful.”