We Only Kiss at Christmas (Con Riley's Christmas Collection) by Con Riley

Author:Con Riley [Riley, Con]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Figment Ink
Published: 2023-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

10

We make it home in forty minutes, emerging from a last station after sundown. People get out of our way, and they should. Two men running through the dark in our postcode? Nine times out of ten, that doesn’t happen for fitness reasons.

We pound down streets, our footsteps echoing, and I don’t know why this is the first time Pat looks like he belongs here where dealers lurk with blades and powder in their pockets. The only powder in Pat’s dusts those Christmas cookies, but seeing that edge on him? On someone whose soft core usually shows up on his surface? It’s really something. Or it would be if I could keep pace for long enough to keep looking.

Pat realises I’m lagging. He slows down for me. “Might want to up your cardio. I’ll have a word with your trainer.”

He’s teasing. He’s also got a point—Pat is barely out of breath while I’m doing my best not to wheeze like an asthmatic. “It’s the change in temperature,” I gasp now we’ve left underground humidity behind us and emerged into what in comparison feels like an arctic evening.

It’s dark enough already that my breath plumes a grimy yellow under the lampposts threading through our estate. Perhaps Pat mistakes those cloudy exhales as more evidence of unfitness. He slows next to our block instead of jogging straight up to our landing. Or maybe he has a different reason for coming to a halt. I guess so when he pulls me into an inky shadow. “Still no rush,” he promises.

“Says the dick who just made me set a new land speed record.”

He ignores my bitching. He also ignores me tugging us towards our stairwell, which is right there, barely twenty feet away at the most, both of our bedrooms only five floors above us.

Alarm bells ring. Not somewhere on this estate. This is an internal siren wailing, set off by him pressing pause like this instead of hurrying.

He’s having second thoughts?

Those alarm bells stop the moment his hand finds my wrist, his touch warm enough that I realise he’s taken off a glove. “What are you doing?”

“Checking your pulse,” he says as if that’s normal.

“What the fuck?” I pull free. “Why?”

He finds my wrist again. He also lifts my hand, turning it in his to kiss where my pulse hammers right here in this pool of darkness surrounded by high-density housing.

Part of me is aware that the block opposite could pass for a giant advent calendar; gold light spills from some windows while fairy lights twinkle in others. The rest of me is focused on Pat kissing that bare spot between my glove and my sleeve again. It stops my heart right here where knife crime is a much more common reason, not this. Not Pat’s lips pressing against thin skin in a nonsexual first that I don’t know what to do with.

My brain can’t deal with receiving something this small. This tender. This devastating.

I can’t think, can’t process anything but the warmth

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