THE REST OF the ferry ride was spent with Sebastian trying to find dolphins (he found none) and me enjoying watching his eyes light up every time he thought he saw one. We stayed wrapped up with each other, partially for warmth but mostly because I wasn't ready to let him go yet. He didn't seem to mind.
By the time we're back at the docks, we're both cold and starving but happy. Sebastian is complaining about the lack of dolphins, face extremely put out. "It's the dead middle of winter, Seb. Of course there are no dolphins."
He flushes. "You told me we might see one!"
"You just looked so excited! I didn't want to take that from you," I argue, fighting back a laugh.
Sebastian pulls me over and ruffles up my hair with his fist. "You're despicable."
"Dolphins in January," I mumble, a laugh in my voice.
We end up deciding to eat at a pizza place, sharing one pie with two different options: his being the works with pepperoni, mushrooms, olives, and peppers and mine being just plain cheese. The restaurant is warm enough that there's no need for our huge winter coats and so we shed them by the time we're done eating. As Sebastian pays the check, I'm almost completely warm.
Him losing the jacket allows me to see what Sebastian is wearing exactly. He's got on a thick dark blue and green flannel along with a white shirt underneath, one that sculpts to his body perfectly and has me staring for far longer than I should. I think about the tanned skin underneath, the parts of it that I had memorized and the parts that I still didn't know. Sebastian clears his throat and my eyes quickly dart back up to his face and I'm dismayed to see a smirk on it. "What're you thinking about?" he asks, voice teasing.
I start to make a joke or a lie but what comes out is, "I want to rip your clothes off of you."
Sebastian's eyes widen just a bit before he regains his composure. "And I want to kiss every inch of your body."
A blush warms my neck and I set my elbows on the table, glaring at him. "That's not fair to say to me," I groan, my pants tightening underneath the table.
Sebastian laughs before glancing out of the window. "No way!"
I'm focusing on readjusting my pants when Sebastian grabs both of our jackets and pulls me up to my feet. "What are you—?"
He pulls me outside and I figure out the source of his excitement. The snow. "Brayls, that's actually snow!" he shouts, lifting up his head and opening his mouth as a snowflake falls into his mouth. I grin widely at his excitement.
We'd been in there long enough for the snow to have created a nice thick layer on the sidewalk. With Sebastian's back turned, I pull on my gloves and reach into the snow, patting it into a ball in my hands. When he turns around to say something to me, I chuck it right at his stomach.
Sebastian's eyes twinkle. "You're so on, Adams."
Sebastian scoops up his own snowball and I duck behind a snow covered ball to avoid him. He gets to me anyways, hitting my back. The coolness of the snow burrows it's way down into my flannel and I shrug back into my winter jacket quickly, glaring at him. "I'm cold!"
He laughs heartily and hides behind a Toyota to dodge my next snowball. The people walking by laugh at the sight of us and I realize just how funny we looked. Two guys having a snowball fight on a sidewalk when they're clearly older than thirteen. I laugh at the irony and chuck a good ball at Sebastian's chest, hitting him square in the heart.
The game concludes when it gets to be too cold to even form a ball in our hands. Sebastian pulls me into his chest, kissing my forehead and we're off. "Where to?" he asks, sliding his cool hand underneath my jacket and down to my back. I intake a breath and silently hope he couldn't tell how much his touch affected me.
"I want to take you someplace."
My feet lead me easily, no GPS necessary. Old Port disappears behind us as we walk, turning into something darker. I can feel my heart get heavy and as if sensing it, Sebastian's grip tightens on my skin. By the time we're there I'm close to hyperventilating but I hold it together.
"This is where I lived," I say, voice cracking a considerable amount. "We stayed in my mom's car for a little while but whenever we weren't we were here."
I watch as Sebastian's eyes trail up to the rundown apartment complex, taking in the dingy brown coloring and trash cans that needed to be emptied days ago. The apartment wasn't half as daunting as I remembered it to be, but I wasn't who I was before. My eyes follow up to the only source of light, an open window where a family of three seemed to be having dinner. The woman smiles down at her child, a little boy that couldn't be over seven years old. My eyebrows furrow and I look down at my shoes instead.
A blush warms my cheeks and Sebastian touches them absentmindedly. "What's that about?"
I sigh. "Something stupid." He raises an eyebrow, silently asking me to continue. "I'm showing my childhood hell to Sebastian Grey, prince of Malibu. I just got embarrassed, I guess."
Sebastian's lips curl into a smile. "Prince of Malibu, eh?"
"I didn't make the damn nickname," I growl, thinking of the girls who penned him as that all those years ago.
Sebastian chuckles but it dies out in his throat. The shadow of the sunlight fading from view hits his skin all at once, orange turning his tanned skin into something magical. "You have a lot of bad memories here?" he asks, voice quiet.
"Mhm," I agree, running a hand through my hair.
Sebastian nods a few times, still staring at the apartment. "So let's make a good one."
I open my mouth to ask what he means when his hands are suddenly cupping my face and bringing my lips up to his. My body heats up immediately under his touch and I realize how cold I'd been all this time. Sebastian's tongue slides into my mouth easily, dancing with mine in a dance that we'd known forever and just seemed to learn right now. When I can finally get my hands working, I'm underneath his shirt, clawing at his skin and relishing in the goosebumps I'm causing across his back.
I don't know how long I stand there kissing him and it doesn't even matter. I just do. I kiss him like it was going to be our last, kiss him like it was a job I had to do to pay my bills, like it was the only thing I knew how to do. Our lips slow against each other's until he pulls away, his cheeks the same red as his lips. It takes a while for words to come out of my mouth and Sebastian smiles at my clear shakiness.
"I love you," seems to be the only words that are able to come out. Sebastian's eyes light up at the words and he kisses me again, just once before pulling away completely.
I suddenly realize what he'd done, as we hail a taxi and head back to the hotel. The next time I think about that apartment, I wouldn't think of the emptiness or the ever present smell of weed. I'd think of him kissing me like his life depended on it. A small smile spreads across my lips in the dark of the backseat.
The smile disappears, however, when I suddenly feel his hand on my thigh.
It's like my breath is knocked out of me immediately and I have to teach myself how to inhale and exhale again. "Sebastian," I whisper, voice warning. He ignores me, letting his hand inch up slowly until he's drawing circles on the inside of my thigh. I'm given no warning when he cups me through my pants, forgoing all teasing.
"Breathe, Braylen," he murmurs and I realize that somewhere in between him rubbing my thigh and cupping me in his obnoxiously large hands I'd forgotten to remember to breathe. I take in a huge breath as if I'd been underwater for minutes, reaching over and grabbing his wrist.
"Please," I whisper, not sure if I'm asking him to stop or to keep going. Sebastian shrugs out of my grip and slowly unbuttons my jeans and toying with the waistband of my underwear. I'm suddenly glad for the partition hiding the driver from us because I'm sure my expression gives away exactly what Sebastian is doing to me in the dark.
Sebastian's fingers trail underneath my briefs but not so far down to relieve me of any tension he's caused. "Is this okay?" he asks and the sound of his voice is enough to cause a small whimper to leave my mouth. I nod quickly but his fingers pinch my skin. "I need you to say it's okay, Brayls."
"It's okay," I repeat and then suddenly his hand is holding all of me.
It's a struggle to keep quiet in the back of the cab as Sebastian runs his long fingers up and down, touching me in ways that no guy ever had. I'm clutching onto his wrist again, guiding him in the dark as he leaves his fingerprints on me, permanently tainting my skin with the memory of his own.
Pretty soon he's kissing my neck and licking long stripes up to my ear, biting on the lobe agonizingly slow as he works. It takes all of me to keep from making any noise and I bury my face into Sebastian's shoulder. "I'm going to—" I start, but Sebastian's fingers on my skin distract me and the warning falls out from my mouth.
I finish in his hand, inhaling sharply as my eyes squeeze shut. My chest rises up and down as I glance out of the window, trying to focus on the bright lights of the city and not on the fact that I just exploded into Sebastian Grey's hand in the back of a taxi cab. Sebastian wiped his hand on the inside of his shirt before buttoning my jeans back up and returning his hand onto my thigh. I slump onto his shoulder, exhaustion hitting me squarely as I catch my breath.
"Was that okay?" he asks, drawing circles on the inside of my thigh again. He sounds fuzzy, like I'm underwater and he's trying to speak to me from above. "Braylen?" he presses.
I sigh against his shoulder. "Sorry, just let me restart my heart."
He laughs huskily. "You are so dramatic."
"Am not," I argue lamely, wrapping my arms around his torso and bringing him close to me. "It was perfect."
The drive is short after that and pretty soon we're back at the hotel. I pay the driver who seems, thankfully, oblivious to anything. Sebastian and I climb out of the car, me still clutching onto him for dear life. By the time we make it up to our room my energy is back and so is the hunger that's been growing for him ever since that night at Devin's house.
I press Sebastian up against our hotel door, my knee coming in between both of his legs as I kiss him slowly, taking my time. His hands clutch onto my waist as he pulls me closer to him and something hard presses against my stomach. I smile into the kiss, reaching down and swiping the keycard to open the hotel.
It's a whirlwind of shrugging out of our jackets and flannels and reconnecting lips as quickly as possible. We tumble onto the bed, Sebastian on top of me, and I'm taken back to that night on Christmas when we'd been in this very same position and getting ready to do this very same thing we were about to do now. I couldn't help but feel like it'd been years since that night, that the boy I'd been ready to give myself up to then was a stranger compared to the boy on top of me now. I kiss Sebastian quickly before pulling away to just look at him.
The moonlight shines over his face, making him look more like an angel than a person. "We don't have to do anything else," I say, reaching up and touching his face tenderly. "We can stop here if you're not ready. It's okay."
Sebastian seems to surprise both of us when he says, "I'm ready."
A slow smile spreads onto my face. "Are you sure?" I ask, trying not to get my hopes up.
"The one thing that I'm sure about in this life is you, Braylen Carson Adams," he murmurs with a smile. "I want you."
The smile on my face is more of a grin now. "I want you, too. Sebastian Blake Grey."
His lips are back on me before I even get the rest of his name out and he's tugging at my shirt, laughing against my lips as he struggles to get it off. Once it's halfway across the floor I start working to get him out of his shirt, and his jeans come off just as naturally. Sebastian bites my bottom lip and a low moan bursts out of me. He takes that opportunity to slide his tongue into my mouth and unbutton my pants until there's hardly anything between us.
I break apart quickly, our lips leaving each other's with a smack. "Oh crap!" I mumble, reaching over and grabbing my bag from next to the bed.
"What are you doing?" Sebastian asks, his voice deeper with desire. I have to squash down that familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach as I ruffle through the bag's contents. I find the two things I'm looking for pretty easily and relish in Sebastian's grin as he takes them in, both the small purple bottle and the black and gold box.
He chuckles as he grabs them both, reading each product over. "How did you know my condom size?"