Total pages in book: 142
Estimated words: 135522 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135522 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
I watch him go. My eyes run down his tapered back, settling on the round, perfect shape of his butt through the towel, which hugs it excruciatingly well. It moves like music as he confidently struts out of the bathroom with his freshly-bandaged arm.
I peel my eyes away, my heart thrashing in my chest. Why is my heart racing again? Aren’t I comfortable around Cole by now?
These are sensations I am not used to.
Powerful sensations.
I have to acknowledge that what my body is feeling right now is totally normal and human. It’s just like when anyone touches a hot surface and shrieks out in pain. Or when someone steps into a cold room and their nipples acquire the ability to cut glass.
This is just another kind of reaction. Like seeing something beautiful, then feeling like I’m going to die.
It’s just the ups and the downs of post-orgasm chemistry.
Feeling like I’m on top of the world. Like a king. Invincible and drunk on a goblet of happiness.
And feeling strangely exposed and terrified. Like a prisoner in that same king’s cell. Small, insecure, and awaiting certain death.
I simply need to accept the fact that whatever I’m feeling is okay, relax as best as I can, and understand I have no control over what is happening to my body.
I want to enjoy my night with Cole, a guy who has proven capable of upending everything I know.
A guy who makes me not recognize my life.
And gives me immeasurable pleasure.
After giving myself time to calm down with that pep talk, I put away my toothbrush and leave the bathroom, feeling capable of facing Cole and whatever tonight brings in terms of surprises, spontaneity, and other unexpected phenomena.
Then I reach my bedroom.
And I see Cole.
Who has traded the towel for the clothes I left him.
He glances quickly at me. “Tell me, Noah,” he asks, inspecting my shelf of figurines. “Did you really never notice me back then?”
I know he asked me a question. And I know it’s normal to give a response, or at the very least acknowledge that a question was just asked. But I can’t seem to focus on anything other than the fact that Cole is wearing one of my old math club shirts from high school, and it’s a size too small for his body, and the soft heather-gray material is clinging to his toned chest and lean back in all the right places. He borrowed a pair of green gym shorts from me, too, and the bottom of my math club shirt clings exquisitely to his butt in a distracting and pleasurable way, just like the towel did. I can barely peel my eyes off of him.
Until he turns away from the shelf to face me. “Noah …?”
I snap my eyes to his. “I … I never really paid much attention to anything or anyone. It’s nothing personal. I just didn’t really have a lot of friends.”
“But you were in the math club,” he says with a note of humor as he points at his chest.
His broad, muscular chest.
With the material of my math club shirt pulled taut across his pecs, so tightly I can even see the punctuation marks of his nipples through the shirt.
“Right,” I finally answer. “I was in the math club.”
“So you had at least some friends,” he concludes.
Then, without warning, he decides to take a seat at my desk. He twists the chair around to prop his feet up on my bed and put his hands behind his head. The soft, stretchy material of the shirt even clings to his armpits somehow, drawing my eyes at once. With his arms up like that, the good one and the bandaged one, his biceps pop with extra emphasis. How am I supposed to carry on a conversation when he goes and does something as cruel as that?
It makes me wonder how I might have reacted if he was in my math club back then. If he was given one of the shirts and wore it the way he wears mine. If I would’ve gotten a single math question right with my attention so robbed by perfect pectorals.
But it’s more than his looks that are killing me right now, isn’t it? It’s how he keeps his heart open to everything. Even my weird parents. He takes a look at every part of me and accepts it wholly without compromise. I’m not sure I ever realized such openness can exist in a person with no small print attached.
Everything about Cole Harding is unapologetically genuine.
“You were the popular one,” I point out as I force my eyes off of him and come into the room to take his towel, which was left on the bed. I hang it on a hook on the back of my closet door to dry.
“‘Popular’ doesn’t necessarily equate having a lot of friends.” Cole shrugs as he insists on staying in that distracting pose of his, with his hands behind his head and feet propped up on the bed. “I wasn’t that close with many people in school. Despite having a lot of people in my life, it felt like none of them really knew me.”