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The Lost Boys. Orphaned, exiled… banding together, ready for whatever may come our way. It won’t be easy. We’re not even fucking close to okay—Mason, Shawn, or I. But we have each other. Not okay, but not alone.
All I feel is the boy in my arms—my boy. My guy. My man. The one who’s been there all along, waiting for me—and all I can do is pray that I’m not too late. Please, please, please don’t let me be too late.
“And I’d rather feel this burden of knowing and loving you than go even a second without you existing somewhere on this planet.”
“Just keep your heart beating for me, okay?”
Against my chest, the blunt edges of his nails dig into my skin, and I kind of want to tell him to just do it. Rip my heart out. It’s already his anyway.
How do I tell him that now that I know what it’s like to wake up in his arms, I don’t know how I’ll ever sleep without him again?
How do I tell him that his throat is just sitting there, begging for my lips? Like I might die just looking at him right now, because I’m too far away?
“I want to be burdened by you,” I tell him, lifting my shoulders before dropping them. “I want to be the person you burden.”
“God, you’ve ruined everything, City Boy. You’ve ruined me.” I rock my head against his, not once taking my tear-filled gaze off his. “Every time I look at you, I’m ruined.”
“Christ, man. That’s gotta be what this is, right? This feeling… like I’m being ripped apart from the inside out. Like I’m dying. Like I… like I literally can’t breathe from it.” My voice catches, breaking off like glass. “All there’s left in me is… is you, and I don’t even know if that makes sense. But it’s you. It’s always been you.”
“Hell, I’ve loved you,” I go on deeply, my voice bottoming out with a grave sort of certainty, “in some capacity, for what feels like my entire life. Before I even knew what love was, I’ve been loving you.”
Still, it’s one thing to create art. But it’s another to make people feel your art. To convey it in such a way that it burrows into the little nooks and crannies of another human’s soul, and unearths the pieces left forgotten. Pieces they might not have had the strength to face before, not until a book, a painting, or a song gave them permission to do so.
“Every day,” he whispers against my lips a second later. “I’ll prove to you every day I’m not going anywhere. Even… even if it gets to be too much sometimes, I’ll always, always find my way back to you.”
They’re my family. Blood might be thicker than water, but us? We’ve got thorns.
