Waiting for the Flood (Spires, #2)

by Alexis Hall

Sex wasn’t the answer to whatever I was asking. Sometimes I wasn’t sure I even knew what the question was anymore.

Everybody else I know is so used to me. I don’t think I bore them—at least, I hope I don’t—but I’m everyday, and in some very small way he was making me feel like Sunday best.

And I was half-drunk on his smiling and the power of saying things that made him smile.

imagined his big hands cradling a cup of tea—he’d like it hot and strong and sweet—and he wouldn’t be mocking exactly, only gently bewildered:

I tripped hard over adorable and couldn’t think how to answer.

his thoughts slipped into my hands like a chocolate bar in the playground.

Would his hands place me if I allowed them?

It was enough to make me shiver like a virgin.

I watched his naked back,

remembering how it had bent for me last night.

watched the patterns of brightness the sun cast across the ice, like shadows in reverse.

“I’m a lot more attractive when I’m not known.”

Electric tendrils shivered down my arms. “Don’t like me, Leo. I hurt people when they like me.”

And we lay there, mirrored, mingling breath and heat in the spaces between us.

it likely wasn’t good for us to be kissing either. Not like this anyway—slowly, endlessly, falling into each other, deep, then deeper, and deeper again, drowning your soul in someone else’s mouth until it felt, for

We kissed like we didn’t know better. Like we’d never known fear or hurt or self-destruction.

absolutely no hardship whatsoever to be the one holding the showerhead. It was like some personalised pornographic fantasy

He tasted of nothing but clean, just water and skin, and I was an animal, wanting to lick his salt from my fingers, put my teeth to his throat. He came quickly in a jet of heat, with a sweet, piercing cry, his head falling back and his trapped wrist straining against my grip like his body had arched under mine when I’d fucked him a few nights back.

Pleasure snatched from friction and proximity, the strange intimacy of his come on my cock.

“Relax your grip. Small adjustments are all you need. She’ll take a moment or two to respond, and that’s okay. You’ll always have plenty of time.”

“You’ve still got my love. You’ll always have my love. It’s just now you get to have someone else’s love as well. Someone you can actually live with and spend your life with.”

“Love has nothing to do with worth,” he declared. “But you are worth loving. And you have to b-believe me.”