Love Him Desperate (On the Market #5) - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,56
even those moments were few and far between because everything Lorenzo was belonged to Wilder.
“I’m in love.” He heard his voice rising above the flowing creek, but it still sounded far off.
“Okay,” Jonas said.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to, like…make that work. Because I don’t…” He took a breath, and he knew this was another sort of coming out, and he wasn’t ashamed, but god, what if Jonas thought love would just magically create this want that didn’t exist inside him. But he had to tell someone. “I’m asexual.”
“Okay,” Jonas said.
“I don’t know how to be asexual and also be in love.” And well, that wasn’t so hard. He held his breath and waited a moment, but Jonas let the silence hang between them. “I feel like my only options are finding another asexual person to, you know, be with. But I can’t force myself to love some random person just because we share this one thing.”
“Of course not,” Jonas said, very softly. He shifted a little closer, so their knees brushed.
“But then how do I—” Dmitri asked, then stopped. His throat felt hot and tight, and he swallowed past a lump. “How does someone who isn’t like me, love me?”
Jonas was quiet a long time, and Dmitri let the silence drift between them. He turned his ear to the water, listening to it flow, the occasional break against the larger boulders. This was home—this was his home. Even when he was gone from it, Cherry Creek had always been like a touchstone. If Raphael packed up and moved on with Rian—if he never saw Dmitri ever again, Cherry Creek would still be the place that called to him.
“I don’t have a good answer for you. I don’t know your situation or how you feel about sex in general. But I can tell you what it’s like to love someone whose body doesn’t always let him be sexual.” Jonas turned toward him, but Dmitri could see he was looking out over the water. “Sometimes Ronan’s body won’t cooperate, and sometimes his brain won’t. Sometimes he’s so exhausted just getting from the sofa to the bedroom that the very idea of sex is ridiculous. Sometimes he’s angry at his situation, and he doesn’t feel attractive, no matter what Parker and I say. If Ronan came home tomorrow and told me he never wanted to have sex with me again, I wouldn’t love him less. I love what we do—I will always love what he and I do, but what we have is so much more than that.”
“But you have Parker,” Dmitri said quietly.
Jonas made a soft noise in the back of his throat. “Parker isn’t there to fill some sex quota, Dmitri. Polyamory isn’t some sort of cure for sexual dysfunction in a relationship. You either love the person, or you don’t, and if the small matter of sex is a deal-breaker, then it’s not right.”
“There are a lot of people who think it’s a deal-breaker,” Dmitri said, his voice now barely above a whisper.
Jonas reached across the space between them and took his hand, lacing their fingers together. His hand was strong, and soft, and he tried not to think about how starved he was for that easy touch. “There are,” he said, and Dmitri pretended like those words didn’t hurt. “They have every right to let sex be important to them, but they aren’t everyone. There are people who will love you exactly in the skin you’re in. I like to think those people are worth the wait.”
Dmitri bowed his head and breathed, then squeezed Jonas’ fingers before he took his hand away. “I just don’t know how to stop loving him. Because it won’t work between us ever, and I have to let him go.”
“Time,” Jonas said. “That’s all I can think of. I hadn’t really been in love before Parker and Ronan, so I can’t tell you how to move on. But I can tell you that nothing lasts forever.”
“Not even what you three have?”
Jonas laughed. “We all die, right? And it’ll end there. And it might end well before death, because I’m a pessimist with childhood trauma who still struggles to let himself have nice things. Sometimes I let myself think about a future where they decide they don’t want this anymore and ask me to leave. And I’ll survive it, and I’ll never regret it, and it’ll be nice to remember that I was worth something once.”
“Well, that’s a fucking mood,” Dmitri murmured softly,