Page 62 of The Locker Room

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Xander gave a crooked grin.

“Sex in the morning, surfing in the afternoon?”

Chris shook his head and grinned back. “Surfing in the morning,

because once we hit the sheets, I don"t think we"re going to stop.”

And so it was. Chris didn"t push to top that night, nor the next, nor

even for the rest of the road trip. He just… explored. Used the lubricant

and tested the boundaries, stretched, stroked, made Xander come. It took

Xander a week to figure out that he"d taken Christian, possessed him,

pinned him to the mattress with a hand spanning between his shoulder

blades, or one giddy time, with Chris"s thighs over his shoulders, and

one of his inhumanly large, attenuated hands pressed at the base of

Chris"s throat, in the center of his chest, and Chris hadn"t taken him like

that yet, not completely, not at all.

It was after that moment face to face, somewhere in Oklahoma,

where the air conditioner had broken down completely, and they were

left sopping and flopping in the inhuman humidity, that Xander said

something about it.

“You don"t trust people easy, Xan. I know it. I could be the one

person in the world to ever see your face when you don"t know what"s

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on it. I could be the one person in the world you ever touch skin to skin

like this. Do you think I want to fuck this up?”

Xander was forced to, in the span of a heartbeat, reassess

everything he"d ever assumed about the nature of love.

He was hurting Christian by his lack of trust, and he thought

Christian had been hurting him by his lack of commitment. All the love,

the hand-holding, the sweet touches of lips to skin—all of it meant

nothing in the face of their insecurities. Xander blinked once, looking at

the face of his best friend, the man he would love for his entire life, and

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