Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
Damon started sliding the wok back and forth again, tossing the food until the steak strips and vegetables mixed so they’d crisp quickly and evenly. “You that excited about stir-fry?”
“I like making things.” Rian watched raptly, holding the empty cutting board clutched in both hands like a chipmunk with a nut clutched in both paws. “It’s just the things I make usually aren’t edible.” He swayed closer—too close, his shoulder brushing against Damon’s arm, his eyes locked on the wok. “Except that time I made stained glass cookies.”
“Stained glass cookies?”
“Sugar glaze and food coloring in a frame of dough. It’s really not that much different from making real stained glass, and mixing dough’s about as easy as mixing pottery clay.” Those curious eyes shifted to him. “Do you like sugar candy, Damon?”
The scent of sugar candy, curling over his tongue and begging to be tasted, every time he stood too close to Rian Falwell.
Damon took a step away.
Just enough to break that contact—the warmth of Rian’s shoulder pressing into his arm, angular and lean.
“You can put that in the sink,” he said, nodding toward the cutting board. “Food’ll be done soon. There’s iced tea in the fridge, if you don’t mind putting out glasses. You can have the chair. I’ll sit on the bed or the floor.”
An odd noise drifted from his side. He couldn’t really call it anything—a sigh, a pouty mumble, he wasn’t sure. But a moment later Rian’s warmth retreated, his footsteps receding. The clink of ice in glasses. The liquid rush of pouring tea. The thud of glasses against the coffee table, followed by the squeal the recliner always made when someone settled into it, much less noisy than when Damon sank his weight against the cushions. He could feel Rian watching him, but he guessed there was nothing else to look at in his damned suite.
“May I ask you something...?” Rian asked, so low it mingled with the noise of the sizzling stir-fry—and the whirr of the range fan, as Damon reached up and flicked it on before the smoking peanut oil set off the fire alarm.
And he tried not to go stiff as he threw over his shoulder, “Depends on what it is.”
“You don’t like to keep many things around, do you?” Rian said. “Is that an old military habit?”
“Nah. I didn’t stick with the Navy long enough to pick up more than a few scars overseas. Wasn’t enough of my thing to form habits.” He pressed his lips together, working his jaw, staring down at the pan as the bright colors of the crisping vegetables mixed with the glistening, richly brown-seared meat. “I just...”
Did he want to answer that?
But this, right now, felt like an uneasy truce.
And he didn’t want to break it.
Not when he didn’t think he had it in him to fight with Rian again tonight.
“I don’t remember my birth family at all,” he murmured, as he flicked the heat off on the burner, then pulled the cabinet overhead open to draw down plates. “But I know I lost them. I’ve always known that, even if I don’t know the why or the how. So I guess I just always thought...” He struggled to articulate, struggled to find the words to encapsulate this when no one had ever asked, and filled the silence with the scrape of a spatula and the muffled pattering of food heaping onto a plate. He should’ve put on rice or noodles to go with this, but Rian had thrown him for enough of a loop that plain stir-fry would have to do. “Maybe...maybe it’s better if I don’t hold on to things too much. If I don’t hold on, it won’t bother me when it’s taken away.”
No response.
Nothing at all.
Damon grit his teeth. Why had he opened his damned mouth?
Why the hell was he pouring out all these small private insecurities to this little rich boy who was so damned spoiled he’d had his own personal chef and couldn’t even figure out how to clean bell peppers?
Because you feel like you owe him.
Because you were a fucking ass to him last night, and you hurt him pretty fucking deep, so now you feel like you’ve gotta cut yourself open and give him a wound to poke his fingers into, too.
So he braced himself—for the sting of fingers against raw nerves; for the razor edge of Rian’s tongue. For withering, cutting looks, too, as Damon turned to face him with plates piled high, forks laid on the sides.
Only to find Rian perched on the raised footrest of the recliner like it was a faerie toadstool, one knee pulled up to his chest, watching Damon with his brows wrinkled into soft furrows of distress, his eyes as damp-gleaming as they had been last night, watching Damon as if...as if...