Love Him Desperate (On the Market #5) - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,1

he also liked boys became a lot more pressing, and for all that he had never hesitated to live as himself, it left him feeling cold and terrified. His life was already under a microscope simply by existing as a proud disabled person, and the world was hardly ready for that, so adding more to who he was felt overwhelming.

It was likely why he had tripped head over heels for Chiara. Literally. A seizure had gripped him with not enough warning, and he fell into her arms before hitting the ground. Raphael’s epilepsy had been managed since he was a child, but they couldn’t erase the moments where he lost all control over his brain and body.

It felt pathetic at first, how he’d clung to her after, but the unrestrained goodness about her made the moment bearable. She’d laughed at his jokes but not when he pissed his pants, and there was no pity in her eyes as she took the brunt of his post-seizure mood. He expected her to be kind, to help him clean up and get home, but when she showed up the next day with car keys dangling from her finger and the promise of adventure on her lips, he couldn’t say no.

His mother cried, and he laughed as he pulled away from their little apartment, and he had a feeling he wouldn’t see her much after that. They’d known each other seventy-two hours before she asked him to move in, and saying yes was the first time he leapt without considering the fall.

Chiara was from Naples, but she’d been living in her apartment in Berlin, in Kreuzberg, for almost a year. Her neighbor was a small Turkish woman named Şima who adored Raphael beyond all reason and made sure his and Chiara’s little flat was always stocked with menemen, Şiş Kebap, and Çiğ Köfte. The nights when Chiara wanted to run the streets, and Raphael couldn’t keep up with her, Şima sat with his head in her lap and stroked his hair and told him stories in her stuttered, broken German.

And he loved her. God, he loved her, like the mother who didn’t make him feel like he was choking on his own breath. He never wanted that to end, he wanted to live and die right there in that little flat feeling surrounded by warmth and acceptance that didn’t come with a price.

But he was not foolish enough to think anything would last forever. Chiara came home that December and announced that her friend Axel had an apartment in Örebro for them. Just like the night she took him home, and the night she asked him to move in, he couldn’t tell her no. He had no attachments to Berlin, and he would miss his mother, but it was Şima who had given him a taste of what family was like beyond Chiara’s wild love for him, and losing her broke his heart.

The night before they left, he’d gone down to the florist in his wheelchair so he could save time, and he paid the owner’s grandson to fill her hallway with flowers and little cakes, and he didn’t say goodbye to her face because it would have been too hard. Escaping his mother’s love had already left vicious claw marks on parts of him no human could see, and he wasn’t sure he could bear more.

He knew he was starving for something, though. Familial connection and platonic love that most people were too afraid to give him because he was different. His body was his own, and he loved it, but he couldn’t change the way it held him at a distance. Chiara was one of the first that didn’t seem to mind him in spite of it. And he fucked her well enough that if she had doubted him at the start, he had long-since driven those fears off.

But there was an underlying current to their relationship, leaving spiderweb cracks in their love. He knew it would shatter. Quiet confessions deep in the night left behind a ticking clock, marking each second as the days raced toward their end.

“I want to ski,” she whispered in the dark as his fingers drew lines through the sweat pooled against the small of her back. He loved her clothed, but he adored her naked. She spread out on the sheets with her long limbs and thick dark hair, and she let his hands have access to the wide expanse of her warm skin. “I want