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“Alright. Now let’s try to get some sleep before this storm clears.” Garrett kissed the top of Maxwell’s head and then eased one of Maxwell’s thighs off the armrest. “Easy now, you probably cramped up like that.”
Maxwell winced as he straightened up and closed his legs, his hips protesting the position and the movement. “Just a little.”
“You sit. I’ll grab the blankets.” Garrett lifted Maxwell off his lap and sat him on the other chair as though he weighed nothing. Maxwell’s thighs and hips were definitely tight, but the feel of the chair’s rough fabric under his bare ass spurred him into snatching his clothes up off the ground first. It had felt…oddly wonderful to be naked against Garrett’s fully clothed body—like everything they were doing was for him and only him because he was lov—
Maxwell’s heart stopped, and he yanked on the rest of his clothes before his mind could keep thinking.
How terrifyingly quickly years of self-improvement could be undone.
He rubbed his face and straightened down his mussed hair and turned to the cockpit console, looking for something, anything, productive he could distract himself with.
“There won’t be any signals from anything with the storm out there.” Garrett’s voice from behind him sounded almost apologetic. “Come on. Sleep.”
Maxwell rotated his chair around to see that Garrett had made a nest of blankets in the space in the back of the cockpit and was already kneeling in the center of it. He reached out a hand to Maxwell with one of those smiles that always short-circuited Maxwell’s decision-making process, and before Maxwell knew it, he had taken Garrett’s hand, and Garrett was pulling him gently to the floor with him.
Garrett reached out to the wall before he went all the way down and hit a button that dimmed the lights to a soothing but not absolute darkness. “There’ll be an alert when the ship makes contact with Carta again. That’ll wake us up.”
“How long until that happens?” Maxwell surprised himself by relaxing beside Garrett and even softening further when Garrett wrapped an arm around his waist and pulled his back against Garrett’s chest. Every muscle in his body should be tense to the point of snapping to be so close, he was sure. Maxwell didn’t cuddle, not anymore.
But the hormones of the recent, mind-blowing orgasm simply wouldn’t allow it. That was it. That was why Maxwell snuggled back into Garrett and closed his eyes as he laid his head on their blanket pillow. It had nothing to do with the warm solidity of Garrett’s chest, or the comforting smell of him, or the fact that with Garrett’s arm around him, Maxwell felt indescribably safe.
No, it was the hormones.
“Before you know it,” Garrett replied, and Maxwell felt him settle his head down behind Maxwell’s, close enough that Maxwell could feel the warm puffs of his breath against the back of his neck. And close enough that even as Maxwell began to drift off, he could feel that Garrett hadn’t quite relaxed. So he wasn’t surprised when Garrett drew in a breath to speak. “What does he have on you, Maxwell?”
The warmth flooded out of Maxwell’s body. Cold sweat broke out on his palms.
Goddamn Garrett and his perceptiveness.
“Just…” Maxwell licked his lips.
Just everything. From Maxwell’s isolated childhood with his distant mother to his chronic loneliness. His every desire, his every wish, his every fear, everything that had ever made him tick, and most of all, exactly what he was.
Maxwell clutched Garrett’s arm around his waist and lied, “Just our history.”
And Garrett didn’t believe him.
Maxwell could feel it in the way his body sagged, and he could hear it in the disappointed sigh he breathed against Maxwell’s neck.
“Okay.”
But how was Maxwell supposed to tell him? How was he supposed to tell Garrett that he was a worm, a parasite, a natural born liar, and a deceiver by nature and that he had lied to everyone he’d ever met his whole life and that he had lied—was lying right now—to him? To Garrett, who cared about honesty and transparency more than anything in the entire world?
How was he supposed to tell him that that was what Kurt had on him? His greatest secret.
And besides, why would he tell someone else that when that was exactly what had gotten him into this mess? Falling in love with Kurt had been Maxwell’s greatest mistake. Telling him he was a torvar had been his second. He wasn’t about to repeat either of those mistakes with Garrett.
He rolled away from Garrett’s chest. What right did he have to seek comfort in his arms?
But Garrett just pulled him back and wrapped his whole, big body around him. “It’s okay, Maxwell.” That you don’t want to tell me remained unsaid. “It’s okay.”
God damn this man. Maxwell squeezed his eyes shut and knew from experience that no matter what he felt, if he kept them shut for long enough, he’d go to sleep and leave all this behind for a while. God damn this perfect man.
* * *
Maxwell woke to the ship’s engines spinning up.
“Good morning, beautiful.”
