Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91635 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91635 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Soft lips quirked. “I despise your money. I don’t necessarily despise you.”
“Yeah?” Why did Vic feel such an odd surge of hope, at that? “Too bad I’m not gay. I might be able to live with that.”
“Too bad, then,” Amani answered mildly, glimmering eyes lingering on him. “You keep bringing that up. That you’re not gay. I am. Are you having a little bit of a gay panic around me, Mr. Newcomb? Little frightened flutters in the pit of your stomach that the gay is contagious?”
I’m not sure that’s what those flutters are.
“Not at all. I’m not panicked, I’m…I don’t know. I’m a little weird, huh? I know. I know. I just…” He slumped forward, hanging his head. “I’ve been acting like a complete tool since the moment I met you.”
“Oh? You mean this isn’t normal?”
Even if everything in that lyrical, silken voice mocked…Vic couldn’t help but answer sincerely. If only because he needed to clear the air; if only because he couldn’t forget Amani asking Why would you want to be so insincere?
Because that was what he was, wasn’t he. All easy, insincere smiles.
“This isn’t me,” he confessed quietly. “This person you’ve met. I keep sticking my foot in my mouth and talking out my arse and saying completely ridiculous things, and…” His hands spread, helpless. “This just isn’t me. I don’t know why I’m like this around you. I’m not around anyone else.”
Amani lingered on him, those deep eyes giving away nothing; simply considering, seeming to measure the weight of his soul. “What are you like around anyone else?”
“I don’t know. I feel like I’m…” He searched for the right words, but he could only find inadequate approximations. “Calmer. More in control. I can choose my reactions and make sure I say the appropriate things. Be pleasantly charming when I have to be, stern at other times. Sometimes I have to be that way. When people have to respect your power to make decisions, you have to have a commanding presence.”
“That sounds like living life at one remove. You’re so detached from it that it’s easy to pick and choose responses you have no real investment in,” Amani pointed out softly, yet every word was a lash flaying at Vic, peeling away his carefully constructed façade. “So why are you not so detached from me?”
“I don’t know.” He leaned back in the chair, letting his hips slouch forward, and tilted his head against the chair back, staring up at the stars through the glassy roof, a billion glittering little secrets that seemed to whisper his every failing back in tiny echoes. “You’re completely outside the realm of my experience, Amani.”
“Is it because I’m Black, because I’m poor, or because I’m not here for your bullshit?”
Definitely option three.
I just never thought I’d like it this much.
“It’s because you’re you,” he said, letting his head roll to one side, leather cool against his cheek. In the faint lamplight Amani was all burnished shades, like a sleek sculpture of copper and bronze and ebon and brass. “And there’s this magnetism you have that makes me forget who I am.”
“Do you even know who you are, Victor Newcomb?”
“Maye I don’t.”
Once more silence fell between them—a silence that seemed to have weight, have meaning, a language bridging two strangers, one of them neither understood but with time, they could learn. There was something, Vic thought, in this moment; something that trembled inside him as if everything had been emptied out save his heart to leave it alone and strange and quivering, this soft beating thing exposed and raw. No, he didn’t know who he was. He never had, and he didn’t now.
Especially not in this moment, when he could think of nothing but wanting to be devoured by the beautiful young man before him.
It was Amani who broke the quiet—Amani who ended this, cutting it as if he’d snapped it through with razor wire. “Maybe you should figure it out,” he said crisply, straightening to rise to his feet and begin packing his cello and bow away properly, strictly business, eyes on his hands. “I have homework to finish. We’re done for the day.”
Victor rocked forward, draping his arms over his thighs and watching. “You’re not going to have me play today?”
“No. There’s no point.”
“Why not? Am I that hopeless?”
A scathing look. “Until you do something about that posture, you are.” Amani snapped his cello case closed, affixed the bow tube to the side, shrugged into his coat, then picked the case up and slung it lightly over his shoulder with a stern look for Vic. “Practice your posture. If it’s better the next time I see you, I might let you play.”
“Let me?” Vic laughed.
“Let you.” A flinty up-and-down look slid over Vic, before Amani turned away with a flick of his fingers and a flare of his hair, airy strides taking him toward the elevator. “I’ll text you my PayPal,” he tossed over his shoulder.