Pretty Dogs (Dirty Strays, #2)

by Riley Nash

A severe addiction to sleeping in your best friend’s bed is weird enough. That friend waking up to find you squirming around, drenched with precum, is flat out unacceptable.

“I’m a snack.” “You’re a bag of rancid prawns. You give everyone the shits.”

What hurts us will never be stronger than what we have together.

Sometimes I see a version of me whose name I will never say again, but who will always be there. She carried my soul for fifteen years, until I could set it free.

My dad would roll over in his grave to see what we’ve done to his precious car, and that thought makes me happy every single day.

We’re four parts that make a whole, no matter what.

“I’ll go with Thor, I guess. I’d lift his hammer any damn day.”

“Look at me, Dallas.” When I meet his gaze, his stubbled jaw tightens. “Who touched you?”

“Tell. Me. Who. Fucking. Touched. You,”

He smells like fear and courage and foolishness and hope. It makes me want to crowd him against the wall and sniff his neck until I understand him.

Loss comes fast and breaks hard, like a tidal wave. The grief lasts forever, an endless undertow choked with the wreckage of everything it destroyed, leaving the world behind it unrecognizable. It never stops pulling, because it knows that part of you just wants to drown.

“I just don’t understand why some people are born with the soul of one person and the body of another, and then get punished for it their whole lives.”

This is Beck’s superpower, to pull me back from the edge of anything.

I didn’t believe in soulmates–platonic or otherwise–until I met mine.

I’m not a smart guy, and I don’t know a lot, but I’ll never understand why his mom didn’t burn the entire world down to get him back. Because he’s the only perfect thing there is.

Maybe he thinks I have a stalker. I do, but I guess it’s consensual.

In moments like this, everything about our friendship feels like destiny. Like it was written into the universe that a reckless punk from the worst part of town and a spoiled kid from the suburbs would end up here together, eating ice cream in the sun.

I’ve quickly learned that ‘baby’ and ‘bitch’ are this man’s love language. If he speaks to you like a normal person, it means he doesn’t give a shit about you.

“I won’t miss you, Beck. I won’t be able to. When you die, I’ll be too ruined to feel anything ever again. Does that make you happy, you selfish dick?”

“You never fucking leave me again. Understand?”

“Pretty boy,” he murmurs. “You ever kissed someone?” “No.”

“Make it two rules, Beckham. You never fucking leave me, and you never fucking lie to me.”

I love my best friend, with his hair and his smile and the body that fits against mine. But his soul could be inside anyone or anything and I’d still need him until the day I die.

I’m never going away. When I pinkie promised not to leave him, that shit stands for eternity. The boy couldn’t get rid of me if he fucking begged on his knees, if he moved across the world and didn’t leave an address.

You’re space dust. All the colors in the universe.”

Every single person deserves to be desired, wholly and passionately, exactly as they are.

That smile, the wild head of golden hair like late summer wheat, the utterly unapologetic soul…he’s already ruined me.

I love him, desperately and utterly. I always have, even before it had a name.

This boy is my soul.

“I will never in a billion years be able to guess what shit you’re going to come up with next. But I love that about you.” “I’ll remind you of that next time I wanna build a flamethrower skateboard.”

He’s mine and only mine, exactly like it should be.

All he says is one word. “Run.”

I gather it thick on my fingers and rub it into his still-hard cock until he's slick with me. Until I'm satisfied deep down that if anyone came near him, they'd smell only me and know who he belongs to.

"The only thing I'm scared of," he murmurs, "is just how much I love you."

I kiss his neck, and he glances up at me with that startled smile, like he never expects to be loved. I’m gonna fucking change that, even if it takes me fifty years.

He always watches me like I’m his god and he’s the zealot who’s going to burn down the whole world and lay the ashes at my feet.

“The day you were born,” she says slowly, “I thought I could never love you more. But when I met my son, that love felt small by comparison. Seeing you today, everything you’ve become…I didn’t know this much love was possible.

there's no way to verbalize how much I love him right now–the kind of love that rips you open, chokes you, makes you helpless, hurts you and shelters you.

He’s mine, and I’m his.

"I love you more and more every time I breathe. And after the last breath, I'm gonna find you again and stay with you until all the planets and suns melt. When there’s nothing left, I’ll still be holding you."

"Beckham Alexander. You're the only thing in my whole life that's always felt right, from the very start. You're the reason I get out of bed in the morning and go out in the world and try my best. Everything I do is so that I can come home and see your smile again. Sometimes I think love is too small of a word for us. But I don't have a bigger one, so I love you."

We’re all different here, tied together simply by the fact that we’ve learned how to love and be loved in a way that the darkness outside can’t touch.

We love the things that shouldn’t be alive. We fight the rules of nature, because fuck whatever says that we have to stay the way we were born. The things that should poison us just make us stronger. Even though we shouldn’t be here, in a place meant for something beautiful, we find the cracks and we grow toward the light.