Page 29 of Raise Up, Heart
You’re not sure what you think of the rest of Cole’s plan. It sounds risky from what little Cole tells you when the sweat is once more cooling on your bare skin. You want to work through the details together. You don’t intend to be left out of this, not if you can help it, but you can get on board right away with the condom plan. That’s a definite yes in your book.
Cole has areally hard time leaving the cabin. He’s past thinking this is a dream, but he doesn’t know if that belief will hold once he can’t reach out and touch Damon any longer. He also doesn’t trust himself right now. He’s sure to give something away with his body language, and the last thing he wants is to make anyone more suspicious than they already are, or will be, if everything goes as planned.
Damon is skeptical, and Cole understands. The day before, neither of them could have imagined that today would be completely different from all the ones since Alex drove off the bridge. It’s a lesson that Cole learned when Damon died, and it’s so much easier to accept that everything has turned at a moment’s notice, because this time,this time, Damon is alive. He’salive.
And Alex is dead.
Damon walks him out to his car, and Cole stands there, unable to get in. He reaches instinctively into his coat pocket to touch the stone heart, and his other hand raises to his neck, feeling the mark that Damon left there, just barely hidden under his collar. He can still taste Damon’s come in his mouth from the blow job in the shower, and he can close his eyes and feel Damon’s hands in his hair as he’d curled over Cole’s bobbing head and come down his throat. God, it had been so good. Shockingly so after all the worried imaginings he’d put himself through during the year of their relationship and then after Damon’s loss.
He should stay. Go back inside and suck Damon off again. He’s a jumble of nerves. What if he leaves, and when he comes back Damon is gone? What if the cabin doesn’t even exist?
“I’ll be here,” Damon says, as though he can read Cole’s mind. “Even if you return with a mob of villagers carrying pitchforks and torches to destroy the monster, I’ll be right here. Not going anywhere.”
Cole nods.
“And,” Damon says. “My car’s in the Save-A-Lot parking lot. Kind of a far way to go on foot.”
“Jerk,” Cole says, feebly punching him in the arm. His heart’s racing a mile a minute, and he doesn’t know if he can actually do this. It’s too soon. He needs another ten years with Damon before he’s going to be ready to drive away from him like this.
“It’s only a few hours,” Damon says.
“Being so blasé doesn’t make me feel any better about leaving you here, you know.”
“Should I wail and cry and beg you not to go?”
Cole snorts a laugh and shakes his head slowly. “No… just, you know, act like you—”
Damon grabs his face and kisses him so hard and desperately that Cole’s knees give out, and he’s left clutching Damon’s arm and the open car door for support.
“There,” Damon says, caressing his cheek. Cole can’t stop the wounded sound that escapes him. Oh God, he can’t leave him. Not for a few hours. Not for ten minutes. What if he’s gone again?
“Cole,” Damon says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Cole nods. “And those condoms won’t buy themselves.”
Damon smiles. It’s brief and sharp, and Cole’s stomach clenches with the love of it.
“There’d be a lot fewer teen pregnancies if they did,” Damon says.
“I love you,” Cole says.
Damon’s eyes soften and he touches Cole’s chin, running his thumb over it, and he says, “You’re my heart.”
Cole grins, and he takes Damon’s hand and kisses it. “Yeah, I know. Promise me you’ll be here?”
Damon glances around. “As long as Alex doesn’t come looking for me to claim his body back, we should be good to go.”
“Not funny, Damon.”
“I’m a barrel of laughs and you know it.”
With every exchange, Cole feels less and less able to leave. He’s got to rip the Band-Aid off and do this thing. If only to get condoms, he tells himself. He could just get them and come straight back. He touches the stone in his pocket again. He pulls it out and holds it out flat in his hand.
“Evidence of an irrational bout of rampant sentimentality,” Damon says, gazing at it, his hands shoved into his pockets, and a speculative expression on his face.
Cole closes the heart in his fist and says, “You left it for me on my doorstep?”
Damon looks down and then up at Cole. Damon seems unsure in that way that makes Cole want to protect him, the way that no one else ever got to see, and so few people would even believe were true of Dr. Damon Black. He says, “You were hurting. I didn’t know what else to do.”
