Sometime in the night, my head ended up on his chest, and I watch the slow rhythm of it move up and down as he breathes. His skin is a pale gray-blue today, the same color as the walls of the house Mackenzie and I grew up in.
I’m caught by the fact that he has nipples but that there’s no disparity in the color of them compared to the rest of his body.
He shifts slightly, and I look up, admiring the jut of his chin, the length of his jawline, the curve of his ear.
“Good morning,” I say when his dark eyes open, staring up at the ceiling.
He tips his face toward me and smiles. “Good morning, Mason.”
I love the way he says my name, like a sigh, like something he breathed in and then breathed back out happily. His eyes brush over my face and fall to my mouth. I want to kiss him but I don’t want to make any assumptions. The kiss last night was just an experiment to him.
“Sorry that I got in your personal space while—” I start to say while pushing myself up off his chest, but I don’t get the sentence out before he pulls me back to him and kisses me.
I practically collapse on top of him, groaning into his mouth. He’s not shy today, not timidly trying to figure out what to do. His hands are in my hair and his tongue is pressing into my mouth. Apparently, by introducing him to the joys of kissing, I’ve created a very delicious and handsy monster.
His hands drift down my back, stopping at my hips, even though I wish he would keep going. I want his hands all over me.
But when he pushes his hips up against me, I lose track of everything else, my mouth going slack over his. He’s hard, and I’m hard, and there’s nothing but sweatpants between us, and I swear I can feel every fucking ridge of him.
I grind down against him. I couldn’t stop myself if I wanted to. Star gasps, pulling his mouth from mine for a moment. His brown eyes lock on mine as his fingers dig into my hips, holding me still so he can buck up into me.
“Oh, shit,” I breathe. “Does that feel good?”
He nods and comes for my mouth again.
None of this makes sense. I don’t even know if this isokay. If someone told me they dry-humped a tree, I would tell them they were deranged. But here I am with a guy whose skin is basically atmosphere. What the hell am I even doing?
What I’m doing is pushing my hips harder into his, my cock rubbing against his, wishing we weren’t wearing clothes. I want to feel him skin-on-skin more than I want anything.
His mouth opens on a gasp, and I hope that means what I think it means.
My hand finds its way to his hip, tugging his leg up enough to give me some leverage. I thrust hard against him, speeding up as I feel my own release coming.
He makes a garbled sound in the back of his throat, his lips no longer moving against mine as he comes, his eyes squeezed shut.
I thrust a few more times and come, my face pressed into his neck, breathing in the woody smell of his skin.
We both gasp for breath, and I finally push up on the bed to meet his eye, our wet pelvises pressed together. His hand comes up to cup my jaw, and he smiles.
“Having a body is quite fun.”
CHAPTER TEN
“Okay, I think this is about where we were,”I say, stopping on the path in the woods.“Yeah, this is it, alright.” I point to thebare tree beside me.Its trunk is still black, burned from where the lightning struck it.
I turn back to Star. For the first time, he's actually wearing clothes.I didn't manage to convince him that he needed a coat, but he has pants and a sweater on, at least.I know that if someone stumbles upon us out here in the woods that we’ll havemuch bigger issues to deal with than why he's not wearing winter clothes in the snow, butfor now, this is my biggest concern.
Someone seeing him through a window or from afarisn't going to notice the color of his skin, not when the sky is so gray.But they’ll notice if he’s going shirtless in single-digit degree weather.
“Do you feel anything?”
His eyes scan the forest and then settle on me. “Feel?” he asks. He has this sort of hopeless look on his face.I feel a tug in my stomach. I hate that he's having to do this.I hate that he has to go through any of it.But I'm not sure what else to do right now besides start at the source.
“Do you remember what you felt likewhen everything happened before?”
He looks down at the ground, eyes searching, like he's trying to pinpoint an exact emotion.
I take a step closer to himand his eyes come up to meet mine.“You said you reached for me.Can you not do that again?Just reach up?”
