Page 48 of Phantom Faceoff
I know that. Realistically, I know that. But right now? For this moment? The next year or so? We have each other.
I don’t need a boyfriend. I don’t need sex. I don’t need someone to submit to me in bed. All of those messy desires can wait.
“Mal. I want to fall in love,” he says with a soft, dreamy look in his eyes. “I want to explore the Little side of myself in places and in ways I know you won’t be comfortable. I want to find a Daddy who wants all of the things that I want.”
“I’m not stopping you.”
There’s a lull where Julian stares at the ground, and then it breaks with him taking a big, deep breath and getting to his feet. He crosses the room and sits beside me, taking one of my hands in his.
“I love you, Malachi. You’re like my brother. My protector.Daddy.” He says the last bit under his breath with a playfulsmile. “I will never not want you to be a part of my life. In saying that …”
He brings our hands to his face and holds them to his cheek. “I don’t want to be your whole life. I know you don’t have any other friends. That’s why I pushed you to hang out with Zander and me. So you’d open up this closed circuit you’ve decided we have.”
“I have friends.”
“You have acquaintances. But if you aren’t in class … at work … or studying … you’re here. With me. Taking care of me. Waiting on me. Or brooding alone with your headphones.”
“I wouldn’t call it ‘brooding’.”
He tugs our hands back to his lap and leans his head on my shoulder.
“You don’t see how lonely you are, but I do. Mack did a number on you, but Mal … Zander isn’t Mack.”
I know that. My brain knows that. My body knows that.
But my heart? It’s still tangled in the barbed wire and electrical fence Mack left it in. Three years and I haven’t felt ready to step into that landmine.
“I wouldn’t be mad,” he says, drawing little stars on the back of my hand with his finger. “If you two wanted to mess around.”
I lay my cheek over top of his head and sigh. “That’s a big ‘if’.”
I can’t deny that Zander makes me feel things I haven’t allowed myself to feel since the days in the group home. Since Mack and I would hide in closets, sneaking kisses behind the open refrigerator door. Crawling into each other’s beds after room check.
It was every teenagers romantic fantasy—until it wasn’t.
I’m not ready to go back there, to tackle the bits of me that never escaped that place, and I’m not sure how to move on without them.
Julian wants me to be happy. Could Zander make me happy? Even in the short run, only getting what little of me I can loan out?
I promised him rewards for winning—honestly a distraction to give me time to figure things out—but can I follow through?
And if I do, can I stop myself from falling into the quicksand that is Zander Hale?
Chapter Fourteen
Malachi
Bright and early thenext morning wasn’t what I had in mind for time to think things through.
“What in the hell are you doing here?”
Julian isn’t even up for the day, snuggled tightly in his bed without a care in the world.
“You said we could talk about the … thing.”
Sleep is still hanging onto the corners of my mind, but slowly our last conversation comes back to me in horrifying detail.
“And you thought … five-twenty in the morning was the right time for that?”
