Sun Kissed ✓

four

"YOU coming?"

Austin peered up at him with deep, curious brown eyes. "Coming where?" He asked, his eyebrows curving into a soft frown, small lines forming between them.

"I have an hour for lunch, you have an hour for lunch," he said, sitting down in one of the two chairs at the other side of the coffee table, facing the small, blue love-seat that Austin was lounging on. "I thought you might come for a bite to eat."

His eyes were unreadable then, and Tanner wasn't sure what his response would be. This was the tough thing about Austin (well, the one of the many tough things about Austin); he never offered a path for you to follow wherever his mind was wandering and he never gave any hints of what his eyes might be trying to tell you underneath their indistinct glaze. For a second, the brief silence between them convinced him that he'd somehow managed to offend Austin.

"Sure," he said. "I could go for food."

"Don't feel like you have to," Tanner offered. It was hard talking to him sometimes, harder than it was talking to anybody else, but he supposed that good things don't come easy.

"No, no," he insisted. "Let's go find somewhere to eat."

Without thinking, Tanner offered his hand out to Austin when he stood up and, surprisingly, Austin didn't hesitate to take it.

They slipped past their coworkers and out of the store, Austin giving them a nod of acknowledgement and Tanner grinning and mouthing and laughing to them as grinned and mouthed and laughed to him. As they made their way outside, he placed a hand on the small of Austin's back, guiding him forward through the customers, and felt him tense under the touch immediately.

"Sorry," he chuckled, falling in step alongside his company and attempting to make eye contact which, for a split second, was successful.

He seemed pretty flustered; he had inhaled sharply and cleared his throat a little uneasily. "No, no," he said. "You just caught me a little off guard. Where do you wanna go?"

"There's a little diner on Pennington Road," he said. "I'll buy."

"What?" Austin near exclaimed, "No, I can't ask you to do that."

Tanner gave a little shrug and smiled playfully, "You're not asking."

"I can't just let you pay for me," he stammered, appearing to flush at his own words. "You don't pay for people unless you're, like, on a date with them or something."

"Then it's a date," he said.

"You never asked me if I was coming on a date," he pointed out. "You just asked if I was coming to spend lunch with you."

As they slipped around the corner of the street, Tanner gently tugged at Austin's wrists and pulled him beside the entrance to a small, messy bookstore, out of the way of the endless streams of people.

"Austin," he announced, dropping his wrists, "would you make me the happiest guy in the world by coming on a lunch break date with me?"

After a moment, Austin shuffled his feet against the ground and his roseate lips slipped into a sportively sheepish grin. "I'd be honoured," he said, his wonderfully raspy voice making him sound shyer still.

He looked pretty like this, quiet and nervous, but Tanner also considered that he looked pretty when he was talkative and assured. Maybe Austin was pretty all the time. His eyes were kind; an entirely dark and engulfing brown, and his hair was only a hue darker— soft, messy and smelling strongly of eucalyptus. Veins like flower stems adorned his almost feminine hands, slender fingers and a sweet, though hesitant and bashful, touch.

Lost in his observations and the meandering conversation (that was still much more him than Austin), his lips almost spilled a thought that his brain wasn't ready for him to share. Austin didn't even respond well to a forgetful touch of the back or a forward tug of the wrists, how would he respond to Tanner blurting out that he thought he was pretty?

Uncharacteristically, he kept his mouth shut. Well, sort of. He was still holding up most of the talking, but he didn't mind so much; breaking down Austin's barriers would take more than a walk home and a lunch break, but any progress was progress.

He made sure to take special note of this when their fingers brushed, ever so barely, as they sauntered, and when he dared to peer at Austin, he noticed the smile on those lovely, roseate lips.

NOTE

Hopefully, you'll find the pace of the story picking up a little more now! Thanks so much for reading xo if you enjoyed, remember to vote and comment!

NEXT UPDATE

Thursday. 05. August. 2021.