Total pages in book: 168
Estimated words: 164910 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 825(@200wpm)___ 660(@250wpm)___ 550(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 164910 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 825(@200wpm)___ 660(@250wpm)___ 550(@300wpm)
Like this is all new for us.
Like we didn’t just screw yesterday.
Fuck, I can’t stop. My body hums under my skin, his hands making me feel like my heart is about to float out of my chest.
He’s never leaving this bed.
Molding my chest to his, I lean my elbows into the mattress, threading my fingers through his hair as I wrap him up in me. “I love you.”
“You got the money already.” He kisses me back, grinning. “You don’t have to sweet-talk me.”
He tips his head back, letting me at his neck.
“I want to look at you every day,” I say.
I want to look forward to you every day.
Slowing, I rise up and look down at him. His golden hair is all over the place, his lips parting and closing again, so soft.
I touch his face. “I want to look at those eyes that flatten me when they turn gray.”
He holds my gaze, and I wish I could understand everything I’m feeling. I used to think love wasn’t real. It was attraction and attachment mixed together, and I was just glad I’d never gotten deluded into thinking I was in love, but I want him to look at me, because it hurts everywhere when he does, and I like it.
“I love you,” I whisper, and it gets easier every time as I kiss him. “I love you.”
He pants, holding my head to his body, my mouth trailing over his throat to the other side of his neck and down his collarbone.
But he’s still quiet. Rising up, I narrow my eyes at him. “You’re not going to say it back?”
I’ve said it like four or five times now.
“I have said it.” He laughs under his breath. “Didn’t you ever listen to my voice message?”
His voice message?
“From five years ago?” he points out, trying to jog my memory.
Confusion sinks in. I don’t remember that.
Sitting back on my heels, I dig my phone out of my back pocket, bringing up our text history.
And there it is, just about the last communication we had all those years ago, other than a flippant, one-off taunt I sent him back when Krisjen started living with us.
My thumb hovers over play, and I’m nauseous all of a sudden. I don’t want to feel like shit about all of the time we missed.
I press play.
His heavy breaths hit the speaker. “You’re such a fucking cocksucker,” he says, his voice shaky.
I glance at Callum, his hands behind his head and a smirk on his mouth.
“But I have to thank you,” his younger self goes on. “I still want you, and I’d still say yes to you and do anything you wanted me to, and I hate myself for it.” He sniffles. “Because you don’t deserve it.”
Tears fill his throat as a lump lodges in mine.
“And even knowing that, I’d still come if you called,” he cries, but then his voice hardens. “Why do I love you?!”
I vaguely remember seeing this message come in, but I probably ignored it on purpose.
“You think I’m just a kid,” he continues, “but it won’t go away. It’ll never go away.”
I watch him watching me, the same thought probably occurring to us both. He was right. It never went away.
I was Nero, wasn’t I? Not him.
I wouldn’t listen. I wouldn’t learn.
“So I love you and fuck me and thank you very much for this,” he hisses on the phone. “Thank you for not giving me the only thing I want, because then you’ll always be able to treat me like shit and I’ll take it just so I can have you.”
It ends, and I soak in the sight of him here—with me and happy—relieved that he came back for me. In whatever way.
“I wouldn’t listen to it,” I admit. “I was afraid of what you were going to say, and I didn’t want to hear you say you hated me.”
Tossing my phone down, I lean over him again.
“I didn’t want to hear your voice.” I tell him everything I was feeling at that time, too. “It hurt like shit to not see you. To not go to you. I wanted you so fucking bad.”
He brings his arms down, holding my body.
“I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t forget you.” I shake my head. “What the hell did you do that made you so special? Until eventually, I became so addicted to the escape that it’s all I thought about.” I take his face in my hand. “My mother didn’t fuck me up half as much as falling in love with you did.”
He gives me a sad smile.
“I fell in love with you a long time ago, Callum,” I say.
I kiss his mouth, coming in again and again, moving to his forehead, his jaw, his neck…“I love you,” I whisper again.
“I love you.”
And I hear the smile in his voice when he says it.