“What part aren’t you getting, Bennett? I don’t want you here. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to even fucking look at you.” Xander squeezed his eyes closed for a moment before pinning me with a hard look. “You know what? Be with him. I thought maybe you deserved better, but I realized I don’t know you. Maybe I never really did. Maybe you two are perfect for each other. For all I know, you like guys like that. The one thing I am certain about is that I don’t want anything to do with you anymore, Bennett Crawford, so just leave me the hell alone.”
I stood there staring at him, knowing I’d had a strong hand in changing the sweet, quiet boy I’d known into this angry, bitter man, but I couldn’t quell the frustration that went through me, either. I felt like a raw, open wound and my self-preservation instincts kicked in.
“Fine. I’ve been turning myself inside out to talk to you and apologize for what happened the night your dad died, but if you’re so hell-bent on pushing me away, I guess that’s it then.”
I turned back toward camp before stopping and clenching my fists. As usual, I couldn’t stop it there. “Just for the record, I’m not fucking Aiden. We had a thing in college but it’s been over for years. We’re just friends.”
“Whatever,” Xander mumbled. “Like I care.”
Seriously? I whipped back around and stalked closer to him, fighting the tears of anger I could feel building. “What the hell happened to you? When did you become such a jackass?”
Xander stood back up from where he’d been squatting by the stream to fill his bottle. He took two giant strides toward me until his chest was practically pressed up against mine. His familiar cobalt eyes glinted in the dim moonlight streaking through the trees.
“The night you closed the door on me,” he said without any kind of hesitation at all.
My chin trembled and I begged the fucking tears to stay put, even if they had to cling to my eyeballs by nothing but a sheer force of will.
“I hate you,” I said. It came out as more of a sob than an accusation, and I felt myself wince at the sound of it.
“The feeling is mutual,” he rumbled. “Join the fucking club.”
I turned again to leave but he grabbed me by the elbow and spun me around, pushing my back up against a nearby tree. “Why do you keep trying to fix this?” he barked in my face, clearly frustrated.
My traitorous dick began to throb at his nearness, even though my self-preservation instinct was telling me to run. “Because… because I want…” My eyes cast downward at the ground. “I want…”
“What do you want, Benny?” It was like a whisper, a caress that I felt all the way into my gut and down into my balls. He stepped forward as he waited for my answer. His chest brushed mine and I felt his fingers stroke my neck before his entire hand came to rest on the side of my throat. I could feel him trembling as he applied just the tiniest bit of pressure. His eyes closed like he was in pain or something and I felt my own lids slide shut because I knew I was the cause of all that hurt and rage.
You, I thought. God, all I ever wanted was you.
I opened my eyes to see him staring at me and I knew, just knew that not saying the words aloud hadn’t mattered. He’d heard them just the same because the next thing I knew his mouth was crushing down on mine. It wasn’t a peck or a brush of lips, or even a kiss.
It was a claiming. An owning. An absolute possession of my mouth and my entire focus there in that clearing by the creek.
Gone were the rough scratches of the bark on my back. Gone were the night sounds of animals in the trees around us or the trickling of the water in the creek by our feet. It was just the two of us in some kind of lip fuck unlike anything I’d ever known before.
I couldn’t have even said where his mouth left off and mine began. Suddenly, my hands were everywhere— under his shirt, over the warm skin of his back, sneaking around front to find the bumpy ridges of the stomach muscles I’d felt that night in his tent.
Moans escaped his mouth as my hands moved and I suddenly realized that he was holding me up against him by my ass. His large hands squeezed my cheeks as he ground his hard cock against my stomach and pressed me back against the tree.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. I wanted to be plastered against him with nothing between us. I wanted his hands everywhere on me and mine on him. Part of me even wanted to turn and face the tree, shove my bare ass in his face and beg him to fuck me.