“Don’t worry.” I pressed a kiss to his skin. “I’m not going anywhere.”
12
Holden
The air was chilly when I woke up, but I felt warm.
I didn’t open my eyes immediately. I just wanted to enjoy the strange but wonderful feeling of cold air on my face and warmth at my core, my arms wrapped around someone. I must have left the doors to the balcony open last night. My room wasn’t normally this cold. Or maybe the heating had shut off.
I burrowed my head down deeper on the pillow, not wanting to think about broken furnaces or anything yet. I’d slept so well—I felt better rested than I had in a long time—and I didn’t want the day to start yet. My nose nuzzled into someone’s hair and I inhaled, breathing in campfire and starlight.
I wrapped my arms tighter. This was perfect. This was—
My eyes snapped open in panic.
I wasn’t supposed to have my arms around anyone. I hadn’t so much as kissed someone in ages, let alone woken up in the same bed with anyone, and—fuck. I glanced around, memories from last night bubbling back to the surface. I wasn’t in my room, I was in that hut on the western edge of my property, and the person in my arms wasn’t just someone.
It was Gus.
Last night, Gus and I had—Oh, fuck.
Panic flooded every cell of my body like alcohol, lighting everything it touched on fire. I felt sick with guilt. Gus and I had slept together. And slept together. Jesus, what was I thinking?
I tried to block the memories of last night out, tried closing my eyes against them, but that only made them come faster, like a flipbook of Polaroids I desperately wanted to burn but couldn’t look away from.
Gus’s body, thin and bare, washed warm in the firelight. His lips on mine, wet and open and hungry. His eyes dancing, his body writhing underneath me, his moans soft as I got him off.
Christ, I could still taste the tang of his cum, could still see myself licking it off his cock and then feeding it to him. I’d been shameless last night. Made Gus work for it. Made him beg. And it had felt good.
I was going straight to hell.
I could still smell the sex on us, salty and warm and satisfying, and I hated how it made me half-hard again. Though that might also have had something to do with Gus’s body pressing against mine, our legs interlocking, his lips an inch from my chest.
It might have had something to do with the memory of his eyes, wide and innocent, as he sank his mouth around my cock.
He looked so peaceful now, eyes closed. So beautiful.
I felt like a monster.
There was zero proof, first of all, that Gus was anything close to the twenty-five years he claimed to be. But even leaving that issue aside for the moment, I’d still taken advantage of him, because could you really consent to sex—legally or morally—if you had head trauma so bad that it had caused amnesia?
And even leaving that aside, Gus was still staying at my house. A guest with nowhere else to go. And he’d made it clear he felt bad for ‘ruining my life,’ which he absolutely hadn’t, but the point was, there was a power differential here, and how could I trust that Gus had said yes last night because he wanted to, and not because he felt like he had to?
Hell, it didn’t matter if he’d wanted to. I still should have said no. I held all the cards here, and there was no way that what I’d done was acceptable.
Are you sure you’re not just looking for more excuses to bolster the fact that you don’t believe you deserve an orgasm?
The little voice in the back of my head posing that question sounded suspiciously like Gus, but I resolved to block it out. He’d been joking when he’d said it, but the truth was, with what I’d done, I didn’t deserve that kind of happiness.
Besides, I’d toyed with Gus. Used him. It couldn’t happen again.
“Morning,” he said, his voice soft with sleep, pulling me out of my reverie. I looked down and saw his grass-green eyes blinking up at me.
I wanted to be gruff. To put a wall back up between us. To make it clear that last night was an anomaly. But looking at those eyes, I just couldn’t.
“Morning.” I didn’t even recognize the tenderness in