Page 52 of Try Line Hearts
Lucas let the laugh fade into quiet.
“I don’t know what my life looks like if I… go there,” he admitted. “I can’t picture it and keep the rest of it at the same time.”
“If you’re miserable… is it worth keeping?” Eli asked.
He stared at the ceiling, heartbeat steadying.
“You’re insufferable,” he murmured.
Eli smiled into the dark. “Yeah. But I’m right.”
Lucas didn’t argue.
He lay there, listening to Cardiff’s rain against the glass, feeling—breathlessly, impossibly—like the future might be made of small pieces you collected one at a time.
Not rings.
Not yet.
But maybe… something that could become them.
“Goodnight,” Lucas said finally.
“Night, Luke,” Eli replied, voice warm around the name.
And in the quiet that followed, neither of them moved away from the space between them.
Not yet.
Not anymore.
Chapter Nine: Matchday
For a full minute, Lucas had no idea where—or who—he was.
Warm was the first thing his brain processed. Not the scratchy hotel duvet or the faint hum of the aircon, but a solid, living warmth pressed along the entire front of his body. Heat under his chest. Weight in the circle of his arms. The soft drag of someone else breathing.
Someone he was holding.
That realization hit second.
The third hit harder.
He was holding Eli.
Spooning him, full-body, like it was the most natural thing in the world. One arm slotted under Eli’s pillow, the other wrapped low across his waist. Eli was tucked back against him, loose-limbed and trusting, head tipped slightly toward Lucas’s bicep, curls brushing his forearm.
And Lucas was—
Oh, fuck.
Hard.
Not just hard. Exposed.
Sometime in the night, his cock had worked itself up and over the waistband of his sleep shorts, pressed hot and unmistakable into the curve of Eli’s arse, only the thin cotton of Eli’s briefs between them.
His whole body went rigid.
