Crush Depth by Mia West

Author:Mia West [West, Mia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mia West

Chapter Eleven

Pete caught him making constellations.

Jay had woken in Pete’s bed—in the heavy loop of Pete’s arms—and he’d had one quicksilver moment of vertigo: the wall shouldn’t look like this, or the ceiling, and where was the door? But the calm rise and fall of Pete’s chest, the peaceful set of his eyebrows and lips, had brought Jay back to equilibrium.

He was in Pete’s bed, on the soft sheets Pete always made up more tightly than Jay did, except now they were rumpled, the covers kind of haphazard across their hips, and everything here smelled like Pete.

He had leaned close and pulled in the scent on a long drag until he felt drunk with it. He wanted to lick it, too, but that was bound to wake Pete up, and Jay wanted a few moments to take this in.

They’d crossed a line the night before. It was one he’d barely let himself imagine before then, let alone what was on the other side. Like, on a hierarchy of needs, it would have been an ornament on top of the pyramid. Having Pete as a cousin and friend had always been more important—more necessary, like water and air. And having had turned into keeping, which had taken all his focus and some of his honor.

But Pete had stayed willingly, and then kept staying, and then last night he’d taken the hand Jay had held out to him and they’d stepped over that invisible line together.

He smiled, remembering. His boy Pete was loud. Like, the-neighbors-might-give-them-funny-looks loud.

But he didn’t care. Let them. Because what Pete had shown him last night… It was like discovering an underwater cavern with crazy cool coral and never-before-seen creatures whose bodies strobed and pulsed, iridescent and electric.

That’s how Jay had felt, like Pete had lit him up. Like he could outshine the stars.

Which brought his attention this morning to Pete’s freckles. They lay within kissing distance, but Jay resisted. Instead, he touched them lightly with a fingertip, following an impromptu path across Pete’s chest, up the bridge of a collarbone to his shoulder. There were so many there they nearly blended together. They looked like a cluster of stars, like the dense, almost cloudy formations they could see if they swam out to deep water on a new-moon night. He began to trace constellations among the freckles, to bring forward this one and that one and that one too, until they made something familiar.

His drawing woke Pete up. He drew a deep breath and began to sigh it out, but when he opened his eyes and saw Jay, his whole body jerked, and he grunted. His eyes flickered around, and Jay knew he was having the same moment Jay had had on waking. Scooching forward, he laid his forehead against Pete’s.

His body relaxed then, and he drew an even bigger breath, and pulled Jay into him with it and held him there.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Okay, he could get used to this rough edge on Pete’s morning voice. Especially when it was right in his ear.

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