Page 50 of Grumpy Bear

Here was something I’d forgotten I’d been waiting on. Like a pain in the body you grow numb to or a worry that plays so constantly in the background you’re no longer aware you’re tuning it out.

A loneliness. A deep lifelong loneliness that had just ended. It evaporated. It left me like a contraction releasing. I only knew it was there when I observed it leaving.

For now at least.

Shit. Could it come back?

I didn’t want it to come back.

I stiffened, and Luke pulled us apart, looking up at me. Would he see the depth of emotion in my eyes and know?

Fearing he would, I took action. I shifted out of his embrace and caught his face in my hands, lifting him by his jaw and crushing my mouth against his. Hard. He breathed noisily through his nose, unable to escape me, and at the moment I thought he might pass out from lack of oxygen, I broke the kiss, grinding my beard against his scruffy chin, hairs rasping in hundreds of tiny sword fights.

Pulling his head so his throat lay flat, tendons stretched taut, I hovered my lips along the cord of muscle, breathing against his neck, as close as I could get without touching down. He gasped, anticipating some bolder contact, and I gave in to the impulse to devour him again, clamping down hard on his trapezius, right where his neck met his shoulder.

“Fuck.” His voice was soft. He held his breath and tensed against the bruising openmouthed bite. It occurred to me the teeth marks would be visible to everyone tomorrow, and suppressing an animal growl, I bit him harder.

When the noises he made bordered on pain, I released him. The kiss that followed was… somehow even more incredibly tender.

21

Luke

How could Coleman’s lips be so soft? It kept surprising me. Nothing about this man was soft, except for fleeting moments of warmth and glints of light in his brown eyes and the way he’d looked when he’d first spotted me at The Cubby Hole, with a kind of relief and quickly hidden joy.

His beard was wiry, and his chin when he ground it against my face made me think of rams with their heads and curling horns locked in battle. I wondered if unicorns clashed in a similar way.

But against all the images in my mind’s eye of hard, brutal collision, I felt weirdly delighted.

It made me feel protective of him, like the softness of his mouth against mine was a sign of some mortal vulnerability I was already worried about breeching.

I have to have some kind of connection in order to hook up.

That connection had been acknowledged in my saying it at the swimming hole.

It’s simpler to just say I don’t fuck my employees.

But this wasn’t simple.

Normally, he didn’t.

Normally, I wouldn’t.

I realized now we’d been negotiating this night all day long. Professing all the reasons why nothing was going to happen was really only admitting the exceptions we were willing to make for each other.

I was the exception to his rules, and he was the rare, unforeseen option I kept myself open for.

Most guys said they were fooling around until they encountered that exception.

I wasn’t having sex… until I met someone who was more.

He wasn’t fucking his employees… until he couldn’t help but fuck me.

As if he heard my thoughts, Coleman pushed me down on the bed. He lay over me, covering my entire body with the full weight of his in a glorious crush. It winded me and made me dizzy.

He stretched my arms above my head, pinning me further, and raked his face, his nose, his beard through my armpits.

“Fuck. That’s so good. Oh my God, I love that.”