Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(79)

“Also, this thing, this thing that happened between C and Lincoln, I feel like it was like, this aperture. Like you couldn’t, at first, handle too much light, you’d be too exposed, so Lincoln was a way to let in just enough, and then maybe, I hope maybe, you can take in more light, and be Jenny, with me, who was always Evan. It was always me. And my amazement is so connected to all of it, to all these tiny moving parts that added up.

“The only thing I can’t imagine is being without you. Everything else, I don’t know if it’s dark or light, but that’s okay. I think that’s okay.”

“In theory,” I say, softly, but my insides are all on alert, interested, circling around how something small, a lot of small somethings, are coming together.

“Yeah?”

I look at him, tall and bulky and graceful, his eyes squinting and blue, his eyebrows mashed together. “Theories aren’t bad. It’s just that, really, it takes a lot of data to make a theory. It takes a lot of data that piles on top of itself, and is the same data, over and over. A theory also has to bear a lot of variation and still come out the same way in the end. Close-up, all the different methods you use to start the experiment could look scattered and chaotic, but as you pull back, you can see how all those different methods are converging into the same conclusion.”

“A lot of data?”

“A lot. For a theory, you basically need all the data.”

He reaches for my face, holds it, and then he’s stepping close to me, and I’m stepping close to him.

I’m so glad to be kissing him, his snowy-mint smell just like he said, amazing. Hard to imagine it’s real because it’s something I want, so much, and that I have.

When do we ever get what we want?

Maybe we do if we’re willing to lose everything, or maybe what we want is so bound to loss, is so inevitably something we will grieve even if we manage to find and hold on to it, that to grab what you want is to accept the grief of losing it.

If I love Evan, I will lose him. If not now, inevitably.

To be willing to love him is to be willing to lose him, to grieve over him.

I have always wanted to see the world, and I have seen so much of it—the small things that make up the whole origin of the beautiful world.

I can’t imagine how it is I will see them, now.

I can’t imagine, but I will, I’m willing to lose, and lose, and lose again and again just to be able to see what it is I can in all the ways I can’t imagine, standing on my porch in the cold, kissing Evan.

“Come in,” I tell him, our breath making clouds around us.

“Okay.”

He follows me in, still kissing me, holding back my hair.

He’s backing me into the sofa, and when my knees hit, the lamp on the end table goes on.

He looks over at it, at us suddenly bathed in light in the room dark from the snowstorm.

I laugh. “I put a little motion detector on it so I wouldn’t have to remember to turn it on in low light, before it was too dark. I can turn it off.”

He looks at me, sparkling again. “No. I do not want you to turn off that light.”

“What do you want?”

“Touch yourself,” he whispers.

“I don’t—” But I can’t finish. I don’t want to? But I do, I feel heavy and tight, like everything’s bigger, open, and a pulse has started.

He runs a finger over the gusset of my pants, soft. “I want to watch you.” He looks in my face. “It’s just—I’ve imagined it.”

Oh. I know it is what he wants.

It’s what I want.

“You, too.”

He doesn’t hesitate. He sits down next to me and unbuckles his belt, opens his fly, and starts to reach inside his briefs, looking at me. When he pulls out his cock it’s so hard it seems to spring into his palm, and then his gaze falters from mine and he looks down, his ears and cheeks red.

That he’s a little shy about this, too, gives me the courage to come close, hook a leg over his, unfasten my pants.

He lets go of himself and pulls me by my nape to rest my forehead against his, then wraps his other hand around the base of his erection, letting out a desperate huff of breath.

When I slide my first and second finger over myself, I make the same sound.

“Show me,” I whisper.

I watch him drag his fingertips up and down the underside, pressing a little with his thumb right under the head. That makes him suck in air and reach to kiss my cheek.

“You, too,” he says—exchanging my words for his.

I watch his hand gripping and stroking, and I push my two fingers right through my folds, slow, just to revel a little in how good and wet and shivery it feels.

When I touch myself, he grips and strokes harder, faster.

Oh.

With my jeans mostly on, all I can manage is tight, slick circles and it’s not long before it’s unbearable. He’s already bucking into his hand, his strokes more like pulls, and his hand at my nape is tight.

He’s looking at my hand circling and rubbing under my pants, and I admit, it looks good.

It’s torture not to kiss him, but if I did, I couldn’t watch.

He’s slick, flushed, so hard, and for some reason his strip of pale stomach right over his dark curls is crazy-erotic and if I was using my mouth, I would start there, sucking pink kiss marks over that place until he was pulling my hair to get me to suck in the tip, taste him, lick down his length.