was dimpled and sweet, and it probably got him his way. A lot. “Okay, stupid question. Most people don’t come to teenage angst by a lake if they want company. Just hopeful thinking on my part.” He spoke with a vocabulary older than he looked, which meant he was either gifted in genetics or had lived a stricter life than he was pretending, but Dmitri was betting on the former.
“I was going to take a drive down the hill,” Dmitri said with a shrug. He felt oddly soft toward the guy, and he wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe the loneliness and the fact that it was his birthday was starting to get to him. “There’s a field out there, and I was thinking about getting some take-out and eating out there.”
“By yourself?” Felix asked, taking a step closer.
Dmitri nodded.
“In a field?”
“It’s not that weird,” he started to defend, but his voice trailed off when Felix reached out and touched his wrist. It was a searing hot second of skin to skin, and Dmitri pulled back before Felix could do it again.
“I don’t think it’s weird. I think it’s sweet.” Felix cocked his head to the side, and there was honesty in his words Dmitri wasn’t expecting, so he nodded and shoved his still burning hand into his pocket.
“You can come with if you want.”
“Not the screaming endorsement of my company I was looking for,” Felix said with a grin, but Dmitri wasn’t willing to give him more. Not yet.
He led the way to the dirt parking lot in front of the ranger station and unlocked the car with the click of his keys. The car was new to him, but used, and it still kind of smelled like someone else’s cologne. But it was nicer than he ever expected to get—nicer than Jayden’s car, and he wasn’t sure how to shoulder the burden of deserving something like this, because he had never done anything to earn it.
But Jayden’s face when he handed over the keys was like the sun was rising behind his eyes, and Dmitri wouldn’t rob him of that joy for anything in the world. So, he thanked him, and hugged him, and let his emotions show in the mist forming at the corners of his eyes. Then, he’d taken it for a drive and hadn’t gone home yet.
Felix climbed in beside him and said nothing—which meant he wasn’t impressed, but he didn’t look entirely disgusted either. He looked more like thrilled to be doing something that was probably against the rules his parents set.
“How old are you?” Dmitri asked as they pulled out onto the road. Panic gripped him for a second, and he eyed the turn-off to Collin’s ranch in case he needed to turn around.
Felix gave him an easy grin though. “Twenty. My birthday was in March. Why? You writing my biography?”
“It’s not a ridiculous question. You look young.”
Felix burst into a fit of laughter. “You think I look young? I had a momentary panic attack when you stared up at me, but I could tell you were legal.”
Legal. What a fucking word for it, but it wasn’t like Felix was wrong. “I’m legal.”
Felix reached over and laid his hand on Dmitri’s, and Dmitri didn’t pull away though he wanted to. He wanted more, but he wasn’t ready, and he wasn’t quite sure how to be.
He’d never been like normal kids—the few friends he had made in high school talking about how often they fapped to whatever free porn their parents couldn’t track on their laptops and whichever girl of the week had given it up. He was pretty sure those stories were fake, but the porn was easy to come by.
And Dmitri had liked it. He liked watching the gay shit, as his friends called it. He liked watching big burly men get rammed up the ass with dildos and cocks and sometimes fists. He liked the softer stuff too. He really liked when one guy held the other and kissed him as he fucked him and made his eyes go starry and soft.
His friends would mock him for the romance, but they’d probably also mock him because try as he might, Dmitri had never been able to get it up for porn. Or for anything. He got it up in the morning sometimes when his dick was hard, and he managed to come a couple of times, but he just didn’t think about it unless he was wondering what the fuck was wrong