10. LUCAS
LUCAS
Was it me, or was something going on with Max?
For the last few days, since we’d hooked up, he’d been withdrawn.
He still hung out with me, but he was...
quiet. Not as boisterous as usual. He hadn’t made any move to touch me in anything other than a platonic way.
I was starting to think I really had made him uncomfortable by coming on to him, no matter what he said at the time. Stupid, Lucas. Stupid.
I lay on my back in bed, my hands folded over my abdomen, and tried to work through it all in my mind.
Had there been a point where it seemed like he wasn’t really into it?
Had I overlooked something? He’d certainly come like a freight train, but it wasn’t impossible to do that while still being uncomfortable.
Should I approach him about it? Apologize? Tell him it need never happen again? But what if this all had nothing to do with the sex and I gave him the impression I hadn’t liked it? I mean, “Hey man, real sorry we had sex” wasn’t exactly a value-neutral statement.
I flipped over onto my side and punched my pillow. What was I going to do?
There came a clatter from the hallway. I recognized it as the sound of Max’s wheels rolling over the threshold of the bathroom.
He wasn’t usually a middle-of-the-night pee-er.
Or maybe I just usually wasn’t awake or around to hear him.
I wondered if something was wrong that had him up in the middle of the night. Was he not feeling well?
My anxieties got the better of me, and before I could think too much about it, I was out of bed and in the hall, leaning against the wall outside the bathroom.
The toilet flushed, the sink ran, and a second later the door opened.
Max was focused on his steering at first, but then he looked up and caught sight of what must have been an intimidatingly dark form hovering over him.
“Holy shit!” he yelped, jumping so hard his chair rolled backwards.
Then, regrouping, he shoved a hand through his hair.
“What the fuck, Lucas? You couldn’t wait until I was done? ”
“I, uh.” I nervously gathered my hair into a ponytail, realized I didn’t have a hair tie, and released it again. “I was worried something was wrong. Because you were up in the middle of the night.”
He blinked owlishly at me in the dark. “I always get up to pee around now.”
“Oh.” Now I felt like an idiot. “Sorry. I guess I usually don’t notice. So...you’re ok?”
His face softened. “I’m fine, Luc. Go back to bed.” He turned his chair around the corner as if to go, then paused and looked back at me. “Are you ok? I don’t usually hear you up during the night.”
He’d noticed my sleeping habits? I wondered how much time he spent closed in his room not sleeping, to be aware of what I didn’t do during the night.
I wondered if he’d been thinking about me.
I wondered if now was a good time to bring up the thing about him being withdrawn. Hell, I wondered a lot of things.
“Lucas?” He was peering at me worriedly now; clearly my silence had gone on too long. “Ok, what’s wrong?”
I swallowed. Were we doing this? We were doing this.
“I’ve been....worried about you,” I said tentatively.
“In general, I mean. You’ve been really quiet lately?
And I was just wondering if I’d done or said something?
To offend or worry you?” Why did everything I said come out sounding like a question?
He shook his head, still watching me closely. “No, Luc. No. You’re fine.”
“So then...what’s wrong?”
He looked down at his hands and shrugged. “It’s stupid.”
“Nothing that puts you in this subdued a headspace could possibly be stupid,” I protested. “This isn’t like you, Max.”
“It’s just...I’m…” He groaned and ran his hand through his hair again, leaving it pointing in all directions. He took a deep breath, held it, and then let it out, seeming to steel himself. “I thought things might change after we hooked up.”
Oh. It was what I’d been fearing. “Because you don’t want to do it again,” I finished for him, nodding. I wouldn’t show my disappointment, I wouldn’t. “I understand, I do. I don’t want things to be weird.”
“Wait.” He blinked at me. “What?”
“I made things weird,” I explained, though why I was having to explain this to him was beyond me.
“You were worried I was going to expect more...stuff...from you, so you were pulling back.” This had been what I was so wary of.
It hurt to know I’d actually gone and freaked him out this much.
What could I say to make things better? “But it’s totally ok.
I get it. If we could just...go back to how things were before it all happened, maybe? ”
“Lucas -”
I held up a hand to stop him. “You don’t need to give me any justifications. I was the one in the position of power, I should have put a stop to it before it went that far.”
“Would you shut up about being in a ‘position of power’?” he snapped. “We already established that that’s not a thing for us. And what the hell are you talking about, anyway? I pulled away because I was worried about you wanting more?”
“Um...yes?”
“Um, no.”
Now thoroughly confused, I furrowed my brows at him. “No?”
“Nope.” He popped the ‘p’.
I shook my head. “Ok, now I’m completely confused. You said it was because we hooked up.”
He eyed me, his head slightly to the side like he was studying me under a magnifying glass. “That’s not what I said, Lucas,” he said patiently, as if to a slightly dull schoolchild. “I said I thought things might change.”
“Right, because -”
“Not because whatever you’ve been thinking, clearly,” he interrupted me, then sighed. “Come on. I want to get back in bed.” Without waiting for me to respond, he rolled himself down the hall toward his room and turned in.
By the time I caught up with him, he’d already transferred back into bed and was lying on his side with his head propped in one hand, facing the door. “Now,” he said steadily, “we’re going to talk about this. You’re afraid you freaked me out and that’s why I pulled away?”
I could only nod.
He nodded back, then firmly shook his head. “That’s not what happened. Well, not the way you were thinking. Yes, I was—I am—freaked out, but not because we had sex.”
“So then what?” I demanded, dropping onto the edge of the bed in exasperation. “I’m so confused, Max.”
He groaned and pressed the heel of his hand into his forehead, looking for all the world like I was the one confusing him rather than the other way around.
Then he heaved out a breath and looked directly at me.
“When I said I thought things might change, I meant that I thought maybe you’d want to do it again, okay?
And if you don’t, that’s totally cool, I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, but it was just awkward because there I was hoping I’d get to kiss you again and you were completely oblivious because you weren’t interested.
And again, cool, cool. You do you. I just have to get over myself. ”
I stared at him, stunned by the intensity of the word vomit, and tried to sort through everything he’d just blurted out. He wanted to kiss me again? And he thought I wasn’t interested? And he’d felt awkward about being the only one who wanted more hookups? Which way was even up anymore?
“Luc?” he prompted when I had been staring at him for what must have been thirty seconds or more. “You ok? Did I break you?”
“You want to kiss me?” I whispered, still staring.
He flushed and dropped his eyes. “Like I said, I totally get it that you don’t -” He was cut off by my lips slamming into his as I jumped up the bed to get to him. “Mmph!”
“I -” I dropped a kiss on his lips. “Want -” Kiss. “To kiss -” Smooch. “You, too.”
He yanked his head back, forcibly separating our lips, and looked at me hard. “You do?”
I nodded and smoothed a hand over his hair, evening it out where it had been sticking up.
“But then why didn’t you…?”
“Do it?” I finished. He nodded. “I wanted to leave it up to you. Because I didn’t want you to feel pressured to do anything.”
“Fuck’s sake, Lucas,” he groaned. “We’ve been over this. I don’t respond to sexual pressure by giving in. If I’m fucking you it’s because I want to!”
Oh. Oh, that was nice to hear. I sat back on my heels and beamed at him.
“Get back here.” He beckoned me down, but I held myself teasingly out of reach. “Lucas,” he growled, and pushed up on one arm to grab my head and pull me back down. “Fucking kiss me.”
Well, when he put it like that, what was a guy to do?
So I kissed him, hovering with a hand on either side of his head.
I slowly lowered my body onto his, pressing him down into the soft bedding.
He moaned into my mouth. “This is -” I started, only to be interrupted by the shrill sound of my phone alarm going off in my bedroom. “Ah, fuck.” I sat back again.
“On duty?” he asked. He knew that if my alarm went off in the middle of the night, there could be only one reason for it.
I checked my watch. “In an hour. Four to four. Which means I need to be out of here in thirty minutes. And I need to shower.”
He groaned deeply and made to push me off the bed. “Go on, then. Shower.”
“I’m really s-”
“Go. And Luc?”
“Yeah?”
“When you get home? You’re mine.”