Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 101168 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 506(@200wpm)___ 405(@250wpm)___ 337(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 101168 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 506(@200wpm)___ 405(@250wpm)___ 337(@300wpm)
Edgar flushed. He knew that working the delivery job over the last year had strengthened his muscles. He’d noticed his shirts fitting tighter. But Jamie was looking at him with heat, appreciation.
Desire.
An answering heat flushed down his throat and across his chest, and suddenly the absence of anything between them but the scratchy towel felt like a liability.
Flustered now by his body as well as his mind, Edgar felt utterly overwhelmed.
Jamie cupped his cheek. The cool of their palm grounded him. Edgar let his eyes flutter shut, hiding.
“Too much?” Jamie asked quietly.
God, no, Edgar groaned internally. I’m scared of fucking everything up, but you make me feel brave.
He shook his head. When he managed to open his eyes, Jamie was biting their lip, eyelids heavy. They made a low sound in their throat. Edgar’s heart hammered. He wanted Jamie to crush him safe against this wall and do whatever the hell they wanted to him. It was an almost overwhelming urge. Edgar swallowed hard, his dick swelling at the thought.
“Will you be okay out here if I take a quick shower?” Jamie asked, voice thick.
Edgar made himself nod, even though the idea of Jamie leaving him was physically painful. They gave him one last heated look, then walked into the bathroom.
“Oh fuck.” Edgar slumped against the wall.
He’d never responded to anyone this way before. His knees were shaking, he was trembling, and his heart was racing. It was a set of sensations that Edgar usually associated with the aftermath of seeing a ghost. If you didn’t pay attention to the erection straining the front of Edgar’s towel, that is. But he was paying a lot of attention to it.
What was happening to him? Did he have an I-just-confessed-to-the-person-I’m-falling-for-that-I-can-see-ghosts kink?
More like a Jamie Wendon-Dale kink.
12
Jamie
Jamie’s mind was reeling. Edgar was intensely hot and saw ghosts.
The ghost part explained a lot: Edgar’s haunted hypervigilance, his impulse to guard his secret, his terror at the ghost tour––god, Jamie could kick themself for that one. And honestly, after some of the, er, creative possibilities that Jamie’s brain had spat out late at night, this explanation was a relief.
But even though Jamie was desperately curious to hear everything about ghosts, it was the intensely hot part that currently occupied them. Edgar was gorgeous, yeah, but it was how he responded to Jamie that made them burn for him. Desire, vulnerability, need.
He’d practically come undone at the touch of Jamie’s hand on his cheek. They couldn’t wait to see what touching him elsewhere might do.
Turning off the shower, Jamie wrapped a towel gone stiff with bleach around their hips. Even two years after top surgery, twenty years of thinking of their chest as something to hide, twenty years of it being sexualized, made the act of casually going without their shirt feel like breaking the rules. But this was what they’d had to do: practice until the feeling receded. Until they could deny indoctrination by sheer stubborn habit.
Breathing in through their nose and out through their mouth, Jamie took control. After a minute, their posture relaxed, and their shoulders settled. A few more minutes after that, and breathing was once more automatic.
Jamie pretended they were onstage at the Never Lounge, controlling the crowd with confidence and power. Power was a mindset, and Jamie breathed into it with their whole body. Only when they were full up with it did they walk out of the bathroom and back to Edgar.
He was hovering around the food, the old tube television tuned to a nature program.
Outside, the storm still lashed, but inside room 3A, they were comfortable and dry.
“I’m glad I don’t have to spend my whole life constantly terrified of predators,” Jamie mused as the camera closed in on the terrified liquid eyes of an ibex while a puma burst from the scrubby brush.
Edgar mumbled something noncommittal as he selected a piece of fried chicken, but he wouldn’t meet Jamie’s eyes.
“Do you feel like that?” they asked him.
Edgar appeared to shrink into himself at the question, all his physical strength and size useless in the face of a noncorporeal threat.
Suddenly Jamie wanted to jump on him, to tip his chin up and look directly into his eyes. They wanted the real Edgar. The Edgar that wasn’t trying not to scare them away.
Jamie insinuated their knees around Edgar’s and leaned in. “Tell me,” they said softly but with command. “I want…I really fucking want to know you, Edgar. Tell me?”
“Yes.” Edgar was looking at Jamie’s palms on his thighs. “I feel like I’m always at the watering hole just waiting for a fucking tiger to appear and rip me to pieces.”
He said it in a rush and then squeezed his eyes shut.
Jamie moved slowly but deliberately. They straddled Edgar’s knees and wound their arms around his neck. They were the same height like this, and Jamie could feel the shuddering breath that Edgar took. But he didn’t push them away. He rested one hand gently at Jamie’s lower back, keeping them there. With the other hand, Edgar pinched the bridge of his nose like he had a headache.