AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Maxwell should have expected that, and yet he still didn’t know what to do with it. Garrett rubbed his thumb up and into the muscle inside Maxwell’s calf, and Maxwell’s breath caught.
Garrett paused and then did it again, and his voice dropped lower. “Does that feel good?”
“I…” It all felt good. It all felt dizzyingly, disarmingly, dangerously good. Garrett’s heat and bulk and his firm, gentle hands. The way he looked at Maxwell, the way he touched him, the way he moved around Maxwell’s space like he belonged there.
But Maxwell had felt this sort of good before.
He swallowed down the yearning in his throat and pulled his legs out from under Garrett’s hands. He stood from his chair and stretched. “Of course it does. I’ve been on my feet all day.” Then he picked up the bowl and took it to the sink.
Without missing a beat, Garrett followed Maxwell to the sink with a chuckle, snatching the cleaning rags from the desk. “Better on your feet than crammed into a cockpit that’s too small for you.”
So amazingly casual.
It was exactly that easy acceptance of Maxwell’s consistent rejection that always made Maxwell think again. Maybe it all really didn’t mean anything to Garrett, so maybe it really wasn’t dangerous. Maybe Maxwell could have whatever Garrett was offering and it would be safe because it was just Garrett being Garrett, kind and caring and fun in the best way he knew how.
Or maybe Maxwell was just trying to logic himself into a bad decision.
He mentally shook the second guesses out of his head, then scoffed lightly at Garrett. “There are no cockpits that are too small for me.” As a man well below average height and weight, there weren’t many things that were too small for Maxwell. “But I’m surprised there are any cockpits big enough for you.”
“Honestly, I haven’t found any yet.” Garrett wet a rag and wiped down the counter. “I’ll be a hunchback by the time I finally retire out to the country.”
“I hear you’re still very good, though.” Maxwell dried his dishes and his hands and then started organizing and restocking the bandages and sutures next to one of the hospital beds.
“At what?” Garrett reached up to one of the shelves Maxwell could never reach and tossed him a couple of the bandages missing from the kit Maxwell was rearranging.
“Being in a cockpit,” Maxwell said as he moved on to the next bed and stripped the sheets. “Being a pilot.”
“And who told you that?” Garrett brought over clean linens once Maxwell had stripped the bed and went across the mattress from him to help him stretch the sheet over it.
Maxwell suppressed a smile and eyed Garrett as he told him. “Sebastian.”
As expected, Garrett rolled his eyes so hard it must have hurt. “That asshole definitely did not say anything nice about me.”
“Oh, he said plenty of mean things, too,” Maxwell laughed. “He just also said you could fly a ship as well as he could.”
“Excuse me?”
Garrett and Maxwell both started at the indignant scoff. Maxwell looked up, and Garrett twisted around to see Sebastian himself—for once still in the same body he’d been in for weeks—striding toward them.
“I said he could fly a ship almost as well as me.” Sebastian put his hand on his hips. “Not as well as me.”
Garrett crossed his arms, and even though he had his back to Maxwell, Maxwell could easily imagine how hard and cold his honey-colored eyes must have gone. “That sounds a lot more like you.”
“I’m always the same, Garrett. No matter how often you think I might surprise you.” Sebastian’s eyes glinted with a sharpness that made Maxwell sigh.
He opened his mouth to tell them both off, but Garrett spoke first.
“You’re never going to surprise me, torvar.”
And instead, he snapped it back shut.
Right.
The original reason for Garrett’s dislike and distrust of Sebastian. He was a torvar…just like Maxwell. Unlike Sebastian, who readily used his biology to swap bodies as needed and hid nothing about his reality, Maxwell had always lived in secret. But he didn’t fool himself. That Maxwell had spent his entire life in his current human body and had never once inhabited another wasn’t likely to make a difference to Garrett if he ever found out.
Yet the reminder stung.
With his back to Maxwell, Garrett couldn’t have seen the spasm of pain that Maxwell didn’t quite manage to suppress, but Sebastian definitely did. He narrowed his eyes in concern at Maxwell for a second before turning them back to Garrett.
