Page 29 of Omega’s Fold

I kiss him and he is kissing me back as though he has been waiting as long as I have.

8. Julian

Wyatt kisses me.

Every thought I have is driven out my head, leaving nothing but a bright white noise behind my eyes. Everything I had been holding flat against my ribs for four days comes up all at once and I am pushing him back against the doorframe with one hand on his jaw and the other on his waist.

He is hot through the flannel and shaking. I can feel it under my hand where I am gripping him, the fine tremor running through his back.

I cannot tell if it is want or something else and right now I do not care. He makes a sound into my mouth. I make one back. I have gone hard so fast it is painful.

His hand is on my chest. I do not register it at first. It takes me a beat to understand that he is not pulling me closer, that the pressure is him pushing me away.

I step back.

The space between us opens. He is still there, against the doorframe, his chest going up and down hard. His mouth is wet and swollen. His eyes, for one unguarded second, are on my face.

And I see it.

Briggs has looked at me with annoyance and with boredom and with careful blankness since the minute I walked up his drive.

Now he is looking at me like a man who has made the worst mistake of his life.

The look in his eyes is pure panic. I have never seen it on his face and now that I have I cannot unsee it.

“Briggs —”

He moves. He ducks past me, not touching me, a sidestep that takes him out of the doorway and into the hall.

A moment later, his bedroom door slams closed.

I stand in the kitchen with my hand still half raised where it had been on his jaw.

I lower it.

I can hear my own heart. I can feel where his mouth was on mine. I can smell him on my shirt, on my hands.

I stand there for probably a minute. I make myself breathe. He pushed me off.

He kissed me and then he pushed me off. That is the fact I have to work with.

I leave the kitchen and go up the stairs. The strip of light under his door is thin and steady.

I stop outside it and knock. He doesn’t answer. I knock again.

“Wyatt?”

Nothing.

“Wyatt. Are you okay?” I am talking to a closed door in a dark hallway. I can hear how the words come out.

Nothing.

I wait. Nothing.

I go to my room and try to sleep. Around four in the morning, I give up on trying.

At some point before the sun is up I hear, through the wall, the faint creak of his bed and then the soft sound of his feet on the boards, and of him moving downstairs.