Love Him Desperate (On the Market #5) - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,2

to climb a mountain.”

“No one is stopping you,” he murmured. But, in a way, he was. Her love for him gave her second thoughts with every decision she made, and she’d never lived with limitations like that before. She was the woman who had never stayed in one place more than a year. The woman who took strangers to bed, falling in love for moments instead of months. Instead of years. And she didn’t resent Raphael for changing those things about her, but in the same way his mother’s love had suffocated him, his own was weighing Chiara down.

And he knew that was why he woke up to find her gone, a note on her pillow that said see you soon—but read like a goodbye. He was shaking when he took the note downstairs to the salon where Axel was getting everything ready for the day, and Raphael saw the look in his eyes.

“She won’t be back.” His tone was final, and it was cemented in the way Axel shook his head and sighed. “How many like me has she dropped on your doorstep?”

At that, Axel laughed. He was an older man even then, his black hair going grey, his fingers bending more than was natural at his knuckles. He towered over Raphael, and cupped his cheeks, and smiled as he looked straight into his eyes.

“None like you, sötnos.” He kissed him on either cheek. “Never like you. Stay a while, yes?”

And he did. Raphael’s options were to stay at the salon and keep learning the art of massage at Axel’s clever hands or flee back into his mother’s arms. And if he did that, he didn’t think she’d ever let him go again.

A while in Örebro turned into a year, and then five, and then ten. He slipped quietly into his thirties and watched himself age in the mirror—new lines around his eyes and mouth, new stiffness to his legs. He was growing restless again, and he found himself glancing out the window as if maybe Chiara would appear like the forest nymph she had to have been in her former life. Every day he waited, and he worked, and every day he went to bed emptier than before.

Salvation came at the hands of a tall American with soft brown hair and an accent to his German that made Raphael smile. His name was Cody, and Raphael loved saying it, just like he loved the way Cody said his own name in that rough, back of the tongue way Americans spoke.

Cody was good at begging, at giving, at going pliant under Raphael’s hands as he pushed into him and fucked him into the mattress. Cody had a thousand questions about his body the same way Chiara had, only he was safer. He didn’t wander. He had sowed his oats and was just taking a little vacation before returning home, and it was almost a given when he begged Raphael to go back with him.

“I know it’s America, and everyone hates Americans, but I don’t want to lose you.”

It was easy to say yes, even when Raphael could see the cracks forming long before they set foot on American soil. But Raphael had never been afraid of change, and he’d never been afraid of being alone.

It wasn’t a surprise when Cody walked away after finding Raphael in the throes of his third seizure in a week. Like Chiara, he didn’t laugh when Raphael pissed his pants, but unlike her, he was shaken. He knew a Raphael who was stronger on the outside. The Raphael who didn’t need help and had soft words and a gentle tongue. He was unprepared for the moods the seizures caused and the way words fell from his lips that he didn’t mean, fueled by the wires in his brain getting crossed. He promised he understood, he promised it was okay, but Raphael could hear the lie in every breath.

Cody managed to form a pathetic, ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ before offering Raphael the number to a man opening a salon a few hours away in Cherry Creek, and then he stared at Raphael’s suitcase, like maybe it would start packing itself. It was easy enough to put one crutch in front of the other, to kneel beside the long stretch of dresser that never felt like his.

Each item packed away felt like a promise to himself that the next time this happened—if he ever let anyone close like this again, it would be different. The