Page 45 of One Lovely Lie

This. This is different.

This is an intense longing buried deep within me, scratching and clawing its way to the surface with every minute that we’re apart. The food tastes different, the colors aren’t as bright—fuck—lifejust isn’t doing it for me.

It’s not even the jaw-dropping, dirty, hot sex that I miss. No, I just miss him. His blue eyes that are darker around the irises. The way he smells like lemons. The little calluses on his fingers from writing too much. Even his snoring. I miss the way he snores.

I’m so caught up in my daydreaming about Daniel—his cute little nose, the freckle under his left eyebrow, the scar on his palm—that I don’t even realize that someone’s snuck up behind me.

“Hey, Magnus!”

“Fuck!” I shout, jumping off the ground as I spin around to face the last person I thought would ever approach me again. “Oh, hey, Thaxton. You scared me.”

Thaxton laughs off my shock with a wave of his hand. “Sorry about that. I just saw you out here and thought I’d come by and say hi.”

I nod awkwardly, remembering our last encounter, and wondering why he’d be approaching me after the way we left things.

“So…how’ve you been?” I ask, turning my back on him as I start climbing the goal.

“Honestly, I’ve been great,” he replies, a bright and happy smile on his delicate face. “Trying my best not to sleep with guys that’ll dump me like yesterday’s trash.”

At his honesty, I flinch, nearly slipping off the goal. “Look, I know that was an asshole move and I’m sorry, but it wouldn’t have worked out between us.”

“How so?” he questions, leaning against the post as I wonder what the chances are that he’ll shake the net. “We were together for three months. I thought we always had a good time.”

Yeah, but you’re not Daniel.

“I don’t really know how to explain it,” I say, lowering myself onto the ground once I’ve gotten my ball.

Thaxton mulls over my words and finally shrugs. “Okay. We did have some good times though, didn’t we?”

To this, I smirk. “Sure as hell did.”

Thaxton is in the past but that doesn’t mean I can’t remember the fact that he really was a cool dude to hang with. Just because I have no interest in sleeping with him doesn’t mean that I can’t admit we had fun together.

Even as I tell myself that, it feels like a slice of betrayal.

“Fuck it,” Thaxton says, inching closer to me with purpose. “For old time’s sake, why don’t we have one last go at it? I know you’ve always wanted to do it in the locker rooms.”

I suck in a sharp breath at his forwardness, moving back until I hit the post. I raise my hands in the air to try and ward him off but let out a yelp the second he grabs my dick through my shorts.

Oh, fuck.

I expect nature and biology and eighteen-year-old horniness to take its course and sprout off a meaningless erection but…

I got nothing. Not a zap. Not a jolt. Not even so much as a twitch.

“Um, no thank you,” I snap, slapping his hand away.

His face contorts into a mixture of rejection and indignation. “No thank you? I’m offering to make your jock fantasy come to life and you say no?You?”

“I’m seeing someone,” I say proudly, smiling because it feels nice to publicly claim Daniel, even if Thaxton doesn’t know it’s him. “Why is that funny?”

Thaxton continues laughing, wiping a tear away from the corner of his eye. “It’s the most hilarious thing I’ve ever heard. If you wanted to turn me down, you didn’t have to lie.”

“I’m not lying,” I insist. “I love him.”

It’s funny the way life works because it’s at this exact moment that I realize a fundamental, unbreakable, indisputable truth.

No, I don’t just love Daniel. I’min lovewith him.

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