Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
But when one sandy-haired boy stumbled, tripping over the tires the same way Damon had...
The others slowed, stopped, and two boys doubled back to catch the sandy-haired one under the arms and help him up, clapping him on the back before giving him a push in the right direction.
Which told Rian that helping each other, to them, was more important than winning.
And was the last thing he expected to see out of a group of highly hormonal, impulsive boys engaged in an extremely aggressive competitive sport.
Rian found himself fascinated by watching them—how they helped each other through the obstacle course, compensating for each other’s shortfalls and reaching for each other’s strengths without the slightest hint of shame at needing help, or having to cooperate to overcome things such as the difficult wooden climbing wall at the end, with its slippery handholds and several areas that looked designed to be impassible without handing each other up.
Is that what Damon taught you? Rian wondered. To trust each other?
To turn to each other like family?
Maybe so. Because as the first group of six finally tumbled, breathless and dirty and covered in shreds of fresh green grass, over the finish line of the obstacle course, they collapsed into each other, laughing—and Damon was right there with them. Gently pushing and shouldering around like an overgrown boy himself, ruffling their hair, and although Rian couldn’t hear what he said from afar...the warmth and approval were apparent, as well as how the boys basked in it. So different from the cold way Damon had looked at Rian; so different from how closed and careful he seemed to be.
He thought, right now, he was seeing who Damon actually was.
Instead of the extremely frustrated man who hardly seemed to know what to do with Rian; only that Rian drove him just as sideways as Damon drove Rian himself.
Why were they at such odds, really?
They had a common cause. They both cared about Chris, and they weren’t...they weren’t that inimically different. Rian was searching for somewhere to belong.
And he thought, maybe, Damon was looking for that too.
They’d just gotten off on the wrong foot. And never really gotten back onto the right one again, with clashing personalities and quick tempers and misunderstandings.
One of them was going to have to bend.
Bend, offer an olive branch, try.
Was there any reason that person couldn’t be Rian?
Why?
What do you want from him, that you’re willing to take that step?
Nothing, he told himself.
Nothing but maybe a little less stress for both of them, until they had sorted things out and could part—if not as friends, then at least not as enemies.
That was all he was worried about.
Besides, watching Damon with the boys—the way he laughed, the easy way he talked to them, the sense of friendly camaraderie and the sort of quiet bond of trust and support that seemed to stretch visibly to link all of them together as a group, a whole...
Rian got it.
He really did.
Damon had thought Rian was doing something to hurt one of the boys he would put himself on the line to protect. One of the boys Damon cared about.
Rian didn’t blame him for reacting the way he had, before he’d known the truth.
He lingered without really thinking on the way Damon moved, as he signaled the next group of six boys to start their run. He was a figure modeler’s dream, with his proportions so tightly defined and the stark definition of his musculature; for a beginner, understanding the plays of light and shadow over each muscle group under a basic spotlight would be so blissfully simple, while for something more advanced...
Rian wondered how Damon would look, stripped down to his skin and gleaming in soft, dusky shades beneath a complex interplay of low, ever-flickering lights, his body poised to draw out the tension in every flexing stretch of sinew, only to go soft and lazy and—
“—alwell. Hey. Falwell.”
With a little lurch of his stomach and leap of his heart, Rian jerked, focusing his eyes—only to recoil sharply.
Because Damon was standing right in front of him.
Right there on the other side of the fence, no longer a distant figure but a larger than life presence filling the space around Rian with sun-burnished heat and the scent of warm, sweat-drenched male hormones mingled with the cooler scents of grass crushed and churned beneath many feet.
Rian flushed guiltily, as if Damon could follow the pattern of his thoughts and how they’d lingered on the hard, almost geometric cut of Damon’s shoulders; the extreme plunge down the curve of his biceps to his triceps; the way his obliques formed ripples like waves left in the sand, as they tapered in toward abdominals cut into hard angular blocks.
Artistic anatomy.
That’s all it was.
That, and it was too warm out here for a late September afternoon.