See, sir, now you are trying to box me in, and I’m not very good at staying in boxes.
I think we need to work on you calling my name more comfortably before we work on the Sir, pretty.
Well, that did absolutely nothing whatsoever for my sanity. I have absolutely no doubt he could get me to call him Sir, or any damn thing he wanted me to call him if I gave him enough of an in to truly assert himself. Why am I holding back?No, bad Qiang.He wants more than you can give!
I’d say you have no shame, but it’s not like you aren’t fully aware of yourself.
I’ll shamelessly tell you I want you to choose option 2 so I can become as fully aware of you as I am of myself.
Are all your conditions from this morning still on the table?
Without negotiation.
Then I’ll go with option 1.
See? I can be sensible.
If you think that’s a deterrent, I feel like I should point out that either option gives me the chance to get to know you better. See you at dinner, pretty.
For fuck’s sake.I have never met anyone so unshakeable in my life. Nothing deters him at all. I don’t know how he has the capacity to take brush-off after brush-off and keep coming back swinging. Most likely, it’s because I’ve only really meant the brush-offs in the beginning, and he did actually respect my boundaries. I’m the one who broke them down last night.
“Damn! How many years has it been since I last saw that sweetsmile?” An unwelcomingly familiar voice breathes right behind my ear.
How the hell did I not see him a minute ago when I swept the room? What the fuck is he even doing here?
Like a bucket of cold water, every good feeling I’ve ever had dissipates in frozen droplets and falls to the ground with the loud shatter of icicles breaking into a thousand pieces. A million memories flood through me at the sound of the most unexpected and unwelcome voice that has ever existed for me.
Flashback
Four and a half years ago
I’m sitting with my back against the headboard of my bed with Kingston Adair’s head on my tummy. His knees are bent with his feet flat on the bed and a textbook propped against his legs. I sift my fingers through his dark blonde hair while he reads a passage fromHamlet.
I trace the contours of his cheekbones and his thin nose before running my thumb across his eyebrows, drawing a smile and a quick glance of his sky blue eyes to me.
He kisses the heel of my palm before returning to the passage, leaving me to continue my exploration of his handsome face.
I flit my fingers along his chiseled jawline, feeling the scratchy layer of scruff that’s grown in since he shaved this morning, then trace across his thin, bow-shaped lips and tug lightly on the groove in his chin. My heart just wants to explode with happiness that this amazing guy is my boyfriend.
I don’t mean that like there’s something wrong with me, or that there’s any reason why heshouldn’twant to be my boyfriend, but I’m like the most average person out there. I have a small circle of friends, keep my head in the books, and have a few hobbies that I pursue more at home than at school. Aside from being a bit more on the androgynous side than most people at my school, I don’t stand out at all. And definitely not in a way that should have caught the attention oftheKingston Adair.
He’s like the king of the jocks. I know it’s usually the quarterback who hasthat title, but he’s a championship-winning wide receiver, with his dad as the head football coach. Kingston’s entire future is already mapped out for him, with a list of destinations and expectations that are more laid out by his father’s wishes than his own. The Adairs are elitists, and Kingston is the all-around golden child. And yet somehow, he wantsme.
Not that I really care about all of that stuff. I wasn’t interested in him at all when he first started coming around, hoping I’d tutor him because his math and literature grades were slipping. We aren’t even in the same year; he’s a junior, and I’m a senior, but one of my teachers recommended me to him for help.
It wasn’t until I finally agreed to tutor him so he’d stop pestering me to death and got to know him that I saw the cracks behind the golden-boy facade. I couldn’t help but fall for the depth, the sweetness, the way he sees the world, and the ways he hopes to change it for the better. He’s so much more beneath the surface than the person he shows to everyone else.
But of course, that golden-boy image is built on his father’s requirements and expectations of him. Kingston is expected to uphold himself in certain ways, and one of those ways is that absolutely no one, especially his father, can know that he’s bisexual, which means no one, especially his father, can know that Kingston is dating me, at least for now. Kingston says he has a plan that will let us come out as a couple later down the road, but he has to break free from his father’s thumb first.
It’s not my favorite part of our relationship at all. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt every time we go from being as lovey-dovey as we are in private to virtual strangers in public. Our individual circles of friends are not mutual at all, so it’d be weird for us to gravitate around each other.
The few friends he has who know I even exist for Kingston at all believe it’s only for tutoring. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the pain, but as soon as I see him again and am reminded of all the things I love about him, it chases the doubts away.
A heavy sigh followed by the loud thud of the book closing pulls me out of my musings. “If they wanted us to read the dictionary, I wish they’d just assign that instead of this gibberish that we have to stop every other word to look up. By the time I’m finished with a sentence, I’m so overwhelmed with definitions that I forgot the point of the sentence. If they’re gonna make usread old English dudes, can’t they assign like Sherlock Holmes or Charles Dickens? At least those books make sense,” Kingston huffs out with frustration.
I can’t help but laugh at that because I honestly couldn’t agree more.
“You’re laughing at me,” he pouts at me as he levels those baby blues on me.
