Page 83 of The Darkness Within

“Touch me,” Nash begs, and my heart and my conscience split in different directions, rendered in half so permanently they might never work in sync again. I’ve got to stop this, before it goes any further, but I just want to feel his hand cup me before I stop him. I want to know how well I fit in his palm.

“I’m so fucking hard for you, Brewer. Please,” he begs, destroying what little resistance I have left. “I’ll die if I have to wait another day for you, let alone forty-five of them.” My fingers skate over his hip, teasing the elastic band of his briefs. His skin is soft and warm. “Even God can’t keep me alive that long,” he whines, making me smile. “I know he doesn’t want me to suffer like this. You said so yourself.”

I can’t even kiss him because I’m laughing so hard. My shoulders shake with silent laughter, enough to interrupt the kiss. “Always trying to find a loophole, aren’t you?”

“I’m not manipulating, I’d really die. A month and a half is a long time. Forty-five mornings where I’d have to wake up hard and alone. Six weeks where I’d have to stare at your lips across the breakfast table and fight the urge to kiss you. Forty-five nights I’d have to fall asleep without you by my side. Forty-five—”

“Okay, I get the picture. It’s a long time.”

Nash kisses away my smile. “It only feels that way when you want something so much.”

My fingers slip inside his briefs, slowly walking down to the thatch of soft, short curls. He bucks his hips like an invitation, or a command, for me to touch him.

“Nash, how can you love someone else when you don’t even love yourself?”

Why are we even discussing this while my hands are in his pants? The chemistry between us works like a drug on me, driving me out of my mind with lust.

Between sweet nips and pecks on my lips, he says, “I may not love myself completely, but I love the things you love about me.” Then a longer kiss, the glide of his velvet tongue along mine, a kiss so deep it robs me of breath. Nash lifts his head and grips my chin, staring into my eyes, into my soul. “You’ve painted a picture of me through your praise that I don’t see when I look in the mirror, but I believe you see it, and I believe it’s there, somewhere, buried under all the layers of shit I’ve been through. Eventually, I’ll find that man. He’ll rise to the surface because you called him.”

Manipulative bastard. But I can’t deny his reasoning. Loving yourself is a journey that takes time. It’s a process that never ends. And it’s not just lust that’s driving me out of my mind. I wouldn’t jeopardize his recovery for lust. Nothing is worth getting my rocks off when it comes to gambling with his life. What I feel for Nash isn’t going away anytime soon, but I also don’t know if I can wait forty-five more days to express how I feel, to show him what he means to me.

Sometimes, a thought pops into my head, when I’m just going about my day, and my first thought is that I want to share it with him, and when I realize that I can’t, I feel an ache and a loneliness so deep it actually hurts. Sometimes, I catch his eyes across the room, whether it’s in our crowded kitchen or in a meeting with fifty other recovering addicts, and I feel a connection so strong it’s as if he’s standing by my side, holding my hand or in my arms.

I’m tired of waiting.

I’m frustrated with waiting.

I want his hand in mine.

I want him in my arms.

Flesh and bone, not imagination and fantasy.

I want the real deal.

I want to live the dream.

“I have condoms,” he suggests. “Do we need them?”

“No. All I need is you.”

“Did you bring it with you?”

“Did I bring what with me?” I can’t think straight with the heat from his palm searing through my cotton briefs. He’s touching me, through a layer of fabric, but he’s touching me, finally.

“The bullet. From your nightstand drawer.”

His words penetrate the fog of lust blanketing my brain, the heat I felt a moment ago gathering in my gut and in my groin now rushes to my cheeks. “You know about that?”

His eyes are twinkling, like his wicked grin. “I almost tried it out, but I was cockblocked by my kitten.” He looks back over his shoulder, checking on Valor to make sure he’s still asleep, curled up in Nash’s T-shirt on the floor, and not about to cockblock him again.

“When—how?”

“How often do you use it?”

His giant palm rubs over my cock, and I can’t think, or breathe, or— “Huh?”

“The bullet. How often do you play with it?”

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