Page 70 of The Golden Receiver

Evander swooped down and kissed me hard on the mouth. My arms went around him immediately, pulling him in closer to me. I lost myself in the way his tongue parted my lips, in the touch of his hands on my body as he tugged off the Creelin University Football shirt I’d put on after the game. I could have just let that kiss carry me away, and I would have done it gladly.

But those words came back into my head.

My human.

I pulled away. “What did you mean earlier?”

Evander furrowed his brow in confusion as he stared at me. He looked cute, all confused like that with his kiss-wet lips. I almost wanted to say fuck finding out what the words my human meant, but I knew it would just be bouncing around up there the whole time. Better to get it all out in the open, find out if it meant what I thought it did.

And if it didn’t, better to walk away with a bit of dignity.

Unfortunately, those words hadn’t seemed to have left the same impact on Evander the way they had me. “I’m not sure what you mean?”

I groaned. “When you said if they touch your human again. What the hell does your human mean?”

I saw color rise to Evander’s cheeks as he turned around and started busying himself with straightening the blankets on his bed. I wasn’t having that. I reached out and touched his shoulder, squeezing with just enough pressure to get him to turn back around. “C’mon, Evander, tell me.”

He sighed. “Just what it sounds like,” he finally said.

Well, that clarified exactly nothing.

“What does it mean?” I repeated.

Evander looked like he was in physical pain from my questioning. I almost felt guilty about it, but I needed answers. It wasn’t the kind of thing someone could say and not have to explain. “It means you’re mine,” he finally said. I grumbled because that wasn’t an answer. It was just repeating what he’d already said. “I don’t know what else to say, Kieran. It means I care about you. I like you, but you already know that.”

I must have had a strange look on my face because Evander stopped dead.

“You did know that, right?”

I laughed. “I had a feeling, but I didn’t know what kind of like it was,” I admitted. “I know we’re friends. I know we have great sex. I know⁠—”

“I don’t feel like just friends with you,” he interrupted. Evander reached out and cupped my face. “I haven’t for a long time. I…” Evander’s face somehow got redder. It made his freckles stand out even more, and he looked so adorable. “That’s what being mine means. To me, at least. It’s okay if you don’t feel the sa⁠—”

I cut him off with a hard kiss.

Of course, I felt the same. I didn’t know when the feelings had started, but I knew they were there. They were undeniable. They’d only gotten stronger after the blood moon, when he showed me the kind of care that no one else ever had. I’d told Pops about him, for crying out loud. My feelings for him had snuck up on me, but I’d never even thought of telling them to him. Not because I feared they weren’t reciprocated, but because I didn’t know how to have that conversation.

My human had unlocked all that.

My human had made it impossible not to have the conversation.

My human had warmed me up, and I knew that it was what I wanted.

I wanted to be his, and I wanted him to be mine. I pulled away from the kiss one more time, just to make sure he was aware of this fact. “I am yours,” I told him. “At least, I’ll be yours, if you promise that you’ll be mine.”

His forehead rested against mine, and I could feel the words warm on my lips. “I’ve been yours for a very long time.”

I closed the space between us, kissing him gently. I wanted him to feel everything I was feeling. I wanted to tell him how much this all meant to me. I knew there were things for us to work out, but we had all the time in the world for that. Right now, I wanted to seal our claim on each other.

I wanted to seal my claim on him.

I walked him backward toward the bed. The moment he got there, he lowered us both down onto it. The blanket he’d just straightened got wrinkled by our combined weight. Our kiss got hotter the longer it went. I might have been trying to put all kinds of emotion into the kiss, but that didn’t mean that it had to be chaste.

I didn’t want it to be chaste. I wanted to consume him, and I wanted to fill him with every emotion I wasn’t great at saying. I wanted him to know how much he meant to me, how much I wanted him, and how much I needed him. I wanted every touch of my hand on him to relay the way he’d touched me. Not just physically, but emotionally.

Evander seemed to be putting the same kind of motivation behind every single one of his touches. I felt promises in the way his tongue slipped into my mouth. I felt security in the way his arms wrapped around me. I felt desire and want and care and every other little thing I wanted to make him feel.

I reached down to the hem of his shirt and lifted it. It was the first time our lips had come apart in a while, and I took advantage of the pause to catch my breath. He used that space to get rid of our shirts. I have to say, his was the better use of time.