Page 5 of Ripe & Ready
“Yeah,” I lie.
He doesn’t push. He never does. He lets the silence stretch between us like something sacred.
After a beat, I murmur, “What if I get eaten by a gorilla?”
He snorts. “I’d film it. Monetize the footage. Make you posthumously famous.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t worry. I’d also give a really moving interview to Good Morning America.”
“Oh good. I’d hate for my untimely death to not come with a media tour.”
A low laugh slips from his lips as he shifts closer, and everything in me leans further toward the gravity of him.
The moment passes.
I could say something. Maybe I should. It’s only three tiny syllables. It should be easy. It should fall out of me like breath. But I don’t say anything. Not yet.
For now, I lie there in the dark, heart pounding, and I let myself imagine reaching for him. Just enough to know how it would feel. I let myself have his closeness and his warmth and this impossible almost.
“I really think you’re gonna love it,” Derek muses somewhere in the dark.
“Standing 10 feet from a gorilla? What’s not to love?”
He laughs quietly. “No, I mean… all of it. Being here. Doing something new. You’re good at more than you think.”
I blink up at the ceiling, or where I think the ceiling is. “That’s debatable.”
“It’s not,” he says simply. “You have to stop convincing yourself you’re not built for things like this.”
Easy for him to say. Derek was born for adventure. For leaping without looking. For throwing himself at the world and trusting it’ll catch him.
“You know I came for you, right?” I say angling my body toward him.
The silence stretches long enough that I assume he’s asleep, until he whispers, “I know.”
“You’re worth it,” I say, hoping somehow through the dark and through the quiet his eyes can still find mine.
After a pause, I feel his hand brush against mine under the blanket. Just barely. Just enough.
“Goodnight, Andy,” he says.
I lie there, buzzing with everything I won’t say. I want to be brave. I want to be honest. But I’m neither, so I murmur, “Goodnight.”
It’s not much, but I hold on to the little hope tucked away inside me, promising I’ll get there one day, and when I do, I want it to be in the light.
I don’t know when I drifted off or when Derek decided that personal space was a myth, but at some point in the night, his arm looped around me and now I’m fully spooned. Like... aggressively spooned. Every inch of him is pressed against every inch of me and I mean… Every. Single. Inch.
My eyes crack open to a world still cloaked in pre-dawn gray and the first thing I register isn’t the jungle sounds or the mosquito net brushing my shin. It’s him. The warmth of him at my back, the weight of his arm across my waist, and the very firm, very awake situation pressed right against my ass.
Good morning to me, I guess.
I remind myself that it’s early and we’re two best friends sharing a small bed in a hut in the middle of the Congo, even if his dick is saying otherwise.
Blindly fumbling I grab for my phone on the nightstand, and squint at the screen. 4:30 a.m. We don’t have to be up for another thirty minutes, but there is no universe in which I survive thirty more minutes of this.
He’s pressed up behind me like a weighted blanket that fucks. His cock is nestled perfectly between my ass cheeks and I’m doing that thing where I try not to breathe too hard, like if I stay completely still it’ll trick the universe into thinking this isn’t the best and worst moment of my entire life.
