Page 77 of Beautiful When He Breaks

“I thought I was dreaming,” he admits and glances down briefly. “At first.”

“And then?” I ask with stupid hope in my voice.

He looks back at me, and the answer is all over his face before he says it. “Then I didn’t want to stop.”

I swallow hard. “I didn’t want you to, either,” I say.

His eyes flick to my mouth again so quickly most people would miss it. I don’t. I feel that look like it’s a touch.

“Yeah?” he asks quietly.

Jesus fucking Christ. I don’t know how I’m still breathing.

“Yeah,” I say, and this time there’s no hiding what I mean.

We just look at each other for a second after that, and it somehow feels more intimate than the kiss. The kiss was instinct and heat and months, maybe years, of tension finally finding a crack in the door. This is awareness and choice. The terrifying, beautiful reality of the morning after a line finally gets crossed and neither of us immediately runs from it.

Eli’s expression shifts a little, enough that I can see thoughts starting to return in more organized layers now. I know that look, too. The overthinking is coming. I should probably say something useful before he starts climbing inside his own skull and bricking the door up behind him.

So, I say, “You kiss like a problem.”

That startles a full laugh out of him, warm and a little breathless. He ducks his head for a second, smiling helplessly, then looks back at me with that same disbelieving softness still all over his face.

“I really thought I was dreaming,” he says again.

I slide my hand slowly up the center of his back and rest it between his shoulders. “Dream about kissing me often?”

Eli huffs out a quiet, embarrassed laugh, his forehead dipping for a second like he’s trying to hide it, which is ridiculous considering he’s still half on top of me and I can feel every inch of him.

“Yeah,” he finally admits. “Yeah, I do.”

He moves slightly over me to get more comfortable, and the movement drags his thigh more firmly over mine under the blanket. The contact sends a sharp pulse of heat through me that I cannot possibly be normal about. Judging by the way his eyes flicker and his mouth parts slightly, neither can he.

We are going to need a much longer conversation than hi.

Not right this second, though. Right this second, Mila is still asleep, morning is only just starting to show itself at the curtains, and Eli is warm and real and looking at me. There’s time for fear later. Time for words. Time for all the hard things that come with turning years of wanting and weeks of tension into something neither of us can deny anymore.

So, I let my thumb brush once along the side of his back and say the simplest true thing I’ve got.

“Morning, Liefling.”

24

Eli

I’m half on top of Julian in the gray, fragile quiet before the house wakes up properly, one of my arms braced beside his shoulder, my leg still tangled with his under the blanket, my mouth still warm from his.

Mila is asleep in her bassinet a few feet away, the white noise machine humming softly, and the room carrying that strange early-morning stillness where everything feels suspended and more honest than it does in full daylight.

The old me would be having a breakdown and scrambling backward off him, apologizing, demanding we talk, trying to shove the whole thing into words before it becomes too real. That’s what the version of me raised on shame and rules and the constant pressure to name everything before I felt it would probably still be expected to do.

Instead, I’m just… here.

Warm. Awake. Breathing a little too hard, sure, but not panicking. And when I really let myself sit with that, I understand something that makes my chest feel strange and full all at once.

I don’t want to panic. I don’t want to run from this. I don’t want to stuff it back down, call it a mistake, and pretend that what just happened came out of nowhere. Maybe if I’d woken up kissing anybody else, I would’ve flinched so hard I’d leave bruises. Maybe if it had been random, or reckless, or disconnected from the rest of my life, I’d already be halfway into a spiral.

But this is Julian. My best friend. The person who has been there through every version of me, including the ones I barely wanted to know myself. The person I told I was in love with last night without planning to, without meaning to, and maybe without even realizing until the truth was already out in the room with us.