Picture Perfect

Chapter Twenty-Two - Elliot

Note: Fiadh is pronounced fee-ah (like Thea with an F), Siobhan is pronounced shiv-awn. Happy 'Cam uploaded when he was supposed to' day, lord knows how this miracle occurred...

Love, Cam

♡

Chapter Twenty-Two

Elliot

Literally nothing could stop the spring in my step. Life was excellent. The weather could be as grey and miserable as it wanted to be; I had brought my own personal sunshine with me. It took much of my mental focus not to periodically break into song.

"Alright, what's up with you?" Victoria had asked me, spotting my beaming smile.

We were in the corridor at school, so I absolutely could not give her the honest answer, which was 'I'm having the best sex of my life with someone I genuinely care about, which makes it ten times better also'. I did text her that later in the day.

I had briefly worried, when Tyler was coming round to my flat during Colin and Andrew's visit, that I'd been giving myself too many expectations. That I'd been putting too much weight on having sex with someone I was romantically involved with being better than casual sex. What if it wasn't any good? What if we weren't compatible and it wrecked things?

It took about three seconds into kissing Tyler for me to realise that nope, I had been entirely right to build expectations. If I hadn't, I think the shock of how good the sex was might have genuinely killed me. As it was, it felt like a near thing. Tyler was everything. His strong arms. His shuddering breaths. His soft, thick thighs. God, those thighs should have been illegal. I'd never considered myself as having a thing for legs before, but now I was mildly obsessed. I'd told him so, while we were lying there afterwards.

"If you grab my thighs in public, it'll look weird," he told me, grinning as I grabbed hold of them, manhandling him onto his back.

"I'll live," I teased, and bit a little mark into the soft skin on the inside of his thigh. "Mine."

"Yes, dear, all yours," he humoured me, but I watched the blush creep across his cheeks anyway.

Tyler's body was, I imagined, somewhat similar to the greatest art in history, and I intended to learn everything about it and how it reacted. I couldn't keep my hands off him, and, to feed my ego, he couldn't keep his hands off me either. I was glad when Colin and Andrew left to go back to Ireland so I could start spending more time with him at his own flat, too.

Saskie was happy that I was with her dad, but would clamp her hands over her eyes any time she saw us kiss. Sorcha had, unfortunately, taught her to shout 'NOWHERE IS SAFE!' when it happened.

The only tiny little baby problem I was running into is that I hadn't called him my boyfriend. He hadn't called me his boyfriend. It was utterly ridiculous that I felt too nervous to do it. It felt like I was in school all over again, worried that I'd misjudged the closeness. I practically wanted to shout 'ARE WE FACEBOOK OFFICIAL' at the sky.

It was categorically absurd. Of course he was my boyfriend. We went on dates. We slept together. I spent time with him and his kid. He had an open invite to Board Game Night at Rowan and Adam's house.

And yet, I was still a wuss.

I considered this as I picked up an eight-pack box of doughnuts from the café near the gallery. Perhaps I should just do it casually. I was about to drop in on them as a surprise - if they were busy, I'd just hand off the doughnuts, give him a kiss, and let them enjoy their day. If they weren't so busy, I'd cheerfully say 'excellent, may I request some time with my boyfriend?' and see if he reacted well to it.