care about you.” His breath washed over Wes’s cheeks, his lips. “It’s okay to admit that you want this, too. I know you a little bit. I know how hard you worked for this. You wanted to be the best, and you basically are. You should be so damn proud of yourself.”
“I’m not. I’m not a good man. I broke your heart. And all I want to be good at is loving you.”
Justin sighed. Wes waited for him to say, Well, that ship has sailed, or, You weren’t, and we’re past when that matters now, or even, You’re just going to have to get over that, aren’t you? He closed his eyes. Braced his soul.
Justin’s cell phone buzzed for the eleventy billionth time. He cursed and dug it out of his back pocket. Wes’s stomach lurched as Justin swiped his phone screen on.
“Raf? I’m fine.” Wes heard Rafael shouting about where Justin had disappeared to, how frantic and upset he was, how he’d feared something had happened. “Something came up,” Justin said. “An emergency. Look, I didn’t mean for—” His lips thinned, and he closed his eyes as Rafael went off again.
“Raf, I can’t do this right now.” Justin hung up in the middle of Rafael’s tirade. He turned off his phone and shoved it back in his pocket. “There.”
“You should go find him. You are here with him.”
“Do you want me to go find him?”
Wes’s fingers curled around Justin’s biceps. He dragged Justin closer, until he could feel the shape of Justin’s ribs against his own, feel the heat from his belly and the sharp lines of his hips. “No,” he growled. “I really don’t.”
“I don’t, either.”
Wes’s gaze focused on Justin. There was so much in Justin’s tear-soaked eyes: hope and fear and shadows of doubt mingling with curls of anger. Wes leaned in—
“I’m not kissing you. You just puked.”
Wes chuffed out a tiny, broken laugh. He still leaned in but moved past Justin’s lips until his face was buried in the crook of Justin’s neck, his lips on Justin’s pulse, his nose in the curve where his shoulder and his neck met and his trapezius fluttered. He could smell Justin’s shampoo, the aftershave he’d put on earlier, the scent of his skin, clean and sharp. He breathed in, his arms sweeping up Justin’s back, palms molding to muscles he never thought he’d feel again.
“Do you want to get out of here?” Justin whispered.
“Yes.”
They ended up in Wes’s truck, screaming out of town on a two-lane country highway, passing the suburbs that had grown up around the city and the university. Past the exurbs and farther, almost an hour out, until they were in the rolling Texas hills, grassland and prairie as far as the eye could see. Wes took the next exit, a farm road disappearing into the black night, a ribbon of black undulating through the hills. As soon as he turned off the highway, the road turned to caliche, and his tires chewed gravel as he bounced a half mile into the darkness.
Justin held his hand the entire drive, both of his hands wrapped around Wes’s on the bench seat, holding so tight Wes’s knuckles were aching by the time he jerked the truck off the road and threw it in park.
Before they’d driven off, he’d gargled and rinsed his mouth out with a warm bottle of water, spitting into the gutter.
So there was nothing to stop him from sliding across the bench seat and taking Justin into his arms, nothing to stop him from sliding his big hands through Justin’s wrecked pompadour, the style ragged after Justin had run his teary fingers through the strands. He pulled Justin almost into his lap, his knee bumping the dashboard and his elbow banging the steering wheel. “You have to tell me not to kiss you,” he said. “You have to stop me if you don’t want this.”
Justin grabbed his T-shirt in both hands and yanked him closer. “You damn cowboy. I never wanted you to stop. Kiss me, damn it, and never stop.”
He seized Justin’s lips with his own, kissing him deeper than he had in Paris. Their tongues tangled, each of them seeming to try to race into the other, try to make up for the days and nights they weren’t wrapped in each other’s arms. Justin’s fingers dug into the muscles of Wes’s chest, and Wes twisted his fingers in Justin’s hair.
Justin peeled his own shirt over his head. Wes got his T-shirt down one