The Waking Dark Read Online Free Page A

learned to read Nick’s face, the crinkle of concern in his pale forehead or the way he bit the inside of his cheek when he was nervous. As he did now.
    “
But
it’s going to be different, once school starts.”
    “I told you —”
    Nick held up a hand to stop him. “I meant what I said. I don’t want you to do
anything.
I’m just… sorry it’s ending.”
    “You mean summer.”
    “Yeah. Summer.”
    They had reached the fork in the road where they habitually parted, one path leading to Nick’s house at the heart of town, the other to West’s family farm on its outskirts. The narrow highway was lined with cottonwood trees, one of them thick enough to provide cover. West took a deep breath, then took Nick’s hand. They secreted themselves behind the tree. West leaned into the trunk, savoring the roughness of the bark on the back of his neck. It came to him that these were the kinds of details he would want to remember.
    When it ended.
    “We shouldn’t risk it,” Nick said, but he didn’t mean it.
    “I want to,” West said, and he did.
    Nick had never asked anything of him. Not even at the beginning, when they were near strangers to each other, just polite acquaintances sharing an exile from phys ed. Nick had his limp; West had a football injury he’d exacerbated at the start of baseball season, enough so that his season soon ended for good. Nick never pressed, never hurried. It was West who had to suggest they continue their long talks over warm beers in Nick’s backyard, their shirts in a heap beside them, the sun blazing down, the sweat pooling between their shoulder blades. For endless afternoons, they rehashed old Super Bowl plays and debated whether their math teacher’s chin mole was grosser than their Spanish teacher’s werewolf knuckles and circled around the thing neither of them was willing to name. Eventually the conversation ran out, and then there was only the two of them, and an empty house, and a soft bed of grass, and sweaty skin, and want.
    When it happened, it was West who moved first.
    The guys had understood West keeping to himself as long as he was sidelined by an injury. But his arm had healed, and in the fall, the team would be waiting. Watching. Nick believed it was the team he was worried about – and the girls who worshipped him, the almost-ran guys who wanted to be him, the teachers who turned a blind eye and passed him, the full cast of characters who’d long accepted the myth of Jeremiah West. Nick believed that West cared, and it was easier to let him.
    “You’re insatiable,” Nick said, offering his first real smile since they’d left the cornfield.
    “Perks of dating a jock,” West said, aware of the word that had slipped out, the one they’d both been conscious never to use. “Plenty of stamina.”
    “Let’s not forget conditioning.” Nick ran an appraising hand across West’s defined torso. “Also much appreciated.”
    West kissed him.
    They clung to each other, bodies mashed together, and Nick’s hands found West’s waist, his shoulders, his neck, then cradled his head, pulling him closer, and closer still. Before Nick, there had been girls, and that had been pleasant enough. But with them, West had never felt this kind of hunger, this need that consumed him now for pale, freckled skin, for wiry muscles, for hands and lips and tongue.
    It was the hunger that had, finally, been impossible to ignore.
    It was safer to emerge separately from their flimsy hiding spot, and so Nick set out first, reluctantly. “I’ll miss you,” he said, with excessive melodrama, so West wouldn’t mistake it for what it obviously was: true.
    West laughed. “You’ll see me
tomorrow.
”
    “Excellent point. I take it back – I’m sick of you.”
    “Not as sick as I am of you.” West wanted to grab him again, to drag him back behind the tree, to kiss him, to swallow him whole. But he didn’t.
    He let Nick go.
    Down the road, limping, slowly, oblivious to the black