He breathed and focused on what was real: the heartbeat against his back. The hand on his shoulder. The scratch of the woven blanket against his calves. The lavender from the window box. The—
Oh.
Oh, no.
His body was doing the thing again.
The warmth between his legs was unmistakable, not the neutral warmth of sleep but the specific, liquid,insistentwarmth that meant his body decided to do things without consulting him. The hollow ache was there too, low in his belly, that deep craving that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the feeling of Riot pressed against his back, Riot’s hand on his shoulder, Riot’s heartbeat syncing with something in Cass’s chest that pulled and pulled and pulled.
His thighs were damp. The slick was still there. His body flushed hot and then cold.
He needed to move. He needed to get to the bathroom and clean up and get this under control before Riot woke up, but moving meant leaving the warmth. Moving meant losing the hand on his shoulder and the heartbeat against his back and the single point of safety in a place that was supposed to be home and felt, for the first time in his life, like a strange place.
Cass pressed his face into the pillow and squeezed his eyes shut and told his body, firmly and clearly and with as much authority as he could manage, tostop.
His body did not stop.
It never stopped when he told it to. That was, Cass was beginning to understand, sort of the whole problem.
But something smelled good, and he was momentarily distracted from the problem between his legs. The scent was warm and herbal like chamomile, maybe, or the lemon-ginger blend that Honey kept in a tin above the stove. Faint and drifting, the kind of thing that could have been real or could have been the atmospheric adjusters cycling through one of their programmed scent rotations. The house had those, all the Springfield Gardens houses did, subtle shifts designed to promote calm or energy or spiritual receptivity, depending on the time of day. He wasn’t supposed to notice them. He was just supposed to feel slightly better about existing and attribute it to personal growth.
Cass always noticed. He’d just never told anyone, because noticing felt like a failure.
For a single breath, he felt guilt, and then it passed.
Because the thing was—the actual, honest, body-level thing was—he’d woken up next to Riot almost every day since the hotel, and every time he did, the first thing his body did when it recognized Riot’s warmth against his back was settle. It was ayesthat lived in his bones and he wasn’t sure he could wake up without Riot anymore.
Cass turned his head.
Riot’s face was close—closer than Cass usually saw it, because Riot was always lookingatthings, assessing, cataloguing, his eyes sharp with the particular alertness of someone who expected every room to try to kill him, or gold eyes that looked hungry. Asleep, all of that was gone. The lines between hiseyebrows had smoothed. His copper hair was a wreck—flattened on one side, sticking up on the other, a piece of it stuck to his cheekbone where he’d pressed his face into the pillow. His lips were parted slightly, his breathing deep and even, and the freckles scattered across his nose and cheeks looked, in the early morning light filtering through the curtains, like someone flicked gold paint at him and it had landed exactly right.
Cass kissed him.
Not urgently. Not with the heat-driven desperation. He rolled, leaned forward, careful of his shoulder, and pressed his lips against Riot’s mouth the way he would press a hand against something warm on a cold day, because Riot was asleep and beautiful and Cass wanted to be the first thing he felt when the world came back.
Riot didn’t wake up immediately. His lips moved slightly, and Cass kissed him again, lighter, and let his hand drift to Riot’s hair. The copper strands were softer than they looked after finally being clean, fine and thick at the same time, tangling around his fingers in a way that felt like the hair was trying to hold onto him. He combed through it slowly, working out a small knot near Riot’s temple and traced the line where his hair met his forehead.
Those green eyes opened, taking a full second to focus on Cass’s face, and when he did, the expression that spread across his features was the most unguarded thing Cass had ever seen on him.
A grin. Lopsided and dumb. The kind of grin that had no strategy behind it and no defense built into it just because Cass’s face was six inches from his own and Cass’s fingers were in his hair.
“Are you taking advantage of how tired I am?” Riot’s voice was barely a murmur, and the humor in it was the warm kind.
Cass kissed him high on the cheekbone, right on the cluster of freckles. “Being close to you makes me feel better.”
Riot’s grin gentled without losing its warmth. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Riot’s hand found Cass’s side and Cass felt the touch travel through his body in a way that had nothing to do with the arousal still simmering low in his belly and everything to do with the certainty that had settled into his bones: he loved Riot with all of himself. Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to feel, or too intense, or maybe he was doing it wrong, but he was already known as the dumb one. Being the dumb one for Riot felt right.
He kissed Riot again. Riot kissed back.
It felt like the flowers.
Cass didn’t know how else to think about it. It felt like the moment at Lilac’s house when Riot came back breathless with blue cornflowers and helped braid his hair. It felt like the weight of silver on his forehead, the first thing that washis,the first time someone had saidI saw this and I thought of youwithout wanting anything in return. It felt like Riot sayingI love you.
It felt like all of those things pressed together into the shape of a mouth against his mouth, and Cass’s whole body saidyesin the way his body always said things—not with words but with warmth, with leaning closer, with the place behind his ribs where something hummed and hummed and hummed whenever Riot touched him.
