Love Him Desperate (On the Market #5) - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,15
“that’s like TMI, right?”
“I’m not judging you if that’s what you’re worried about. And I promise I’m not such an old man that I’ve moved on past sex.” He offered a small wink that made Dmitri laugh, and it felt like a triumph in that moment.
“You’re not old.”
“My bones feel old,” Raphael argued. “But we’re not talking about my body.”
“Right.” Dmitri dragged a hand down his face. “I’d never had a blow job, so I got in the car with him, but uh…I couldn’t…” He stopped and cleared his throat, glancing away. “He got weird about it and asked me if I was impotent, so I told him I thought I was asexual. He got kind of pissed off at me for not telling him before we went out there, like I was trying to trick him or something.”
Raphael felt his brow furrow, and he hoped he didn’t look angry at Dmitri because it wasn’t his face he wanted to put his fist into. “Of course you didn’t say that on a first date. He was a stranger.”
Dmitri’s laugh was high and nervous. “Well, it wasn’t a date. He just kind of tagged along on my pathetic take-out night. But I didn’t even fucking understand what I was at the time. I mean, I talked to my therapist about it later, and we both agree I’m definitely on the ace spectrum. You know what that is, right?”
Raphael rolled his eyes. “I live in a house, not a cave.”
“Sorry just… I didn’t know,” Dmitri confessed, looking even more embarrassed. “Owen said—” And then he stopped, and Raphael didn’t blame him. He hadn’t known Owen at all either, but he knew about the events surrounding the lake and Antoine, and Owen’s subsequent departure from the town. He wasn’t sure anyone but Fitz and Gwen missed the boy, which made him grieve a little because everyone deserved to be missed when they were gone. “He gave me some really wrong information and made me feel stupid.”
Raphael let out a sigh, wanting to offer some words of comfort because he understood—intimately—what it was like to be talked down to and made to feel less.
But he had no real words of comfort for the man in front of him, because he had not yet found words to comfort himself. Apart from accepting that most people were cruel—whether intentional or not—he had no fight against them. He could be like others, sink into the endless climb of activism, but he was getting old. And he was tired. And when he looked at Dmitri, he could already see those same fatigue lines in the young man’s face.
It wasn’t fair, and Raphael felt a sudden burst of hatred for the world.
“I know that look,” Dmitri said before Raphael could offer him anything. “It’s not…it’s not like I was heartbroken or anything. I was just angry and a little bit sad. And I definitely don’t want to spend my birthday with some random stranger again.”
Raphael laughed and shook his head. “Good advice for anyone, I think. I’ve made some questionable birthday choices myself over the years. But,” he started, then stopped because maybe he was in the wrong for assuming at all. But Dmitri’s eyes looked almost hungry for him to continue, so he did. “But I’m not a total stranger.”
Dmitri blinked, then the right corner of his mouth lifted. “I guess not.”
“What do you do? When you eat your take-out?”
Dmitri’s grin widened, and he leaned against the desk. “Do people compliment your accent a lot?”
“No,” Raphael blinked at the sudden change in subject, but it made him smile. “It’s not romantic like the Italians or the French. It’s rough. My language doesn’t have sweet nothings that fall of the tongue and make Americans swoon.”
Dmitri shook his head. “I think we just established a minute ago that people are terrible. I like it.”
“Is this your way of avoiding my question?” he asked, lifting a brow, and he saw the way Dmitri’s cheeks went a little darker. He liked the feeling of teasing him, of it being easy. He liked that there was a comfort here because Dmitri had been around almost as long as him, and they were both insiders and outsiders of Cherry Creek and always would be. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“There’s a field,” Dmitri answered after a pause. “It’s down the hill, outside of the city. I get sweet and sour chicken from Lotus Garden, and I sit on the hood of my car and