Shatterproof by Xen Sanders

Author:Xen Sanders [Sanders, Xen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2016-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

He wasn’t supposed to taste so good.

Grey followed the highway out of the city proper, Saint’s directions taking him into the deep, low woods where the land started to hump and wrinkle into sloping, graded hills. In the silence between them, all he could hear was the overlapping cadence of breathing, and in it he remembered the way Saint’s breaths had rushed out of him and how that lissome body had gone pliant and soft against his own when Grey had twined their tongues and dared to discover just how Saint tasted.

Like everything.

He tasted like everything, like the slow-burn beat of blood in his veins, like the drugged addictive bassoon pulse that moved his heart to beat and drove his hands to paint.

And Saint wouldn’t even look at him.

Grey let it lie as the winding roadways took them off the paved highway and onto jouncing gravel roads that made the truck groan and rattle, the rusty shocks ready to give up the ghost. One day someone would have to put the old girl out to pasture, but not today. There was history in this truck, in the way the cracked leather seats smelled like pipe tobacco. He pictured his grandfather sitting behind the wheel back when the windshield hadn’t been permanently clouded and the dials on the radio weren’t falling off. In old photographs, yellowed and stained, his granpé had looked just like him: all stark angles and yellow eyes, and thick soft lips that had whispered poetry even when his grandfather hadn’t known how to read or write.

It’s in your blood, cheri mwen. Your granpé, he had the passion. He spoke the words like fire. In your paints, in your lines, in your colors, I see his words. His words were what made me love him, but his heart was what made me keep him.

He glanced sidelong at Saint. What did Saint see in his paints and lines and colors that had made him say, Yes. Yes, I want you?

By the time he found out, he might well be on his dying breath.

The gravel road turned to dirt, and dirt turned to an overgrown, beaten path with wheel ruts still sunk somewhere under the grass and blooming peonies, guiding the truck like a train on rails. Up ahead, the trees parted on a tall, rickety house, the whitewashed boards faded to milky gray, the shutters hanging off the hinges, the front windows boarded up. Wooden towers had been built to either side, their roofs peaked and conical and shingled in a color that might have once been dark green; hard to tell in the deep of night and sweep of headlights. Vines and moss overgrew the porch, the eaves, threatening to swallow the ancient, leaning plantation home back into the earth. The entire thing looked ready to fall over, and he had a feeling it would have been condemned had anyone in the city even remembered it was out here.

Grey frowned as he eased the truck to a halt. “You live here?”

Saint chuckled wanly.

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