1. The Wrong Turn #3
Connor’s thighs were thick with muscle, the power through his hips and legs familiar from the ice. Even in his boxer briefs, he looked balanced. His body found its center without instruction.
Heat climbed Caleb’s neck. Connor cleared his throat.
When Caleb turned back, Connor was standing over him, patient and almost smiling.
“You gotta let me in, Caleb.”
At first he wasn’t sure what he meant. Let me in.
But when Connor gestured to the blankets, Caleb mumbled an apology and pulled back the covers.
Connor slid in next to him, shimmying his body behind Caleb, wrapping his arms and the blankets around them both.
The full length of Connor’s body pressed along his back.
In that moment, Caleb was thankful for the cold, his shiver of desire disguised by the chill.
For a while neither of them said anything.
The cold was still in Caleb’s bones, the kind that had gone below muscle and made a home there, and Connor was warm.
So warm. That was the simple fact of it: warm and solid and close, one arm wrapped around Caleb’s chest, the blankets pulled tight around them both.
Caleb’s body moved toward that warmth with an urgency that had nothing to do with thought.
It’s just to get warm, he told himself.
For a little while, that was almost true.
The cold was real. The warmth was more real.
His teeth were still chattering, though not as badly now, and his hands had started to sting with pins and needles as the feeling came back into them.
The fire was beginning to catch properly, throwing a low orange light across the cabin walls.
Connor shifted behind him, adjusting the blanket where it had slipped from Caleb’s shoulder, and Caleb felt every part of the movement.
Connor’s arm crossed his chest again, his hand settling broad and gentle, holding him in place without holding him down.
Caleb stared at the fire and tried not to notice the weight of that hand, the heat of Connor’s palm through the thin space between them, the slow rise and fall of Connor’s breathing against his back, and noticed it all anyway.
His whole life, Caleb had been taught to treat his body as a threat that had to be watched.
Managed. Corrected before it got ideas of its own.
He knew the rules without having to recite them.
Keep your eyes where they belonged. Keep your thoughts pure.
Keep your hands to yourself. Keep your desires under control so that no one else would suspect it.
But his body had nearly drowned under the ice and fought its way back to the surface. It had gasped and clawed and shivered and lived. Now it was pressed against another body because survival required it. Caleb wondered whether he had somehow cheated the rules. He did not care.
Connor shifted again, only slightly, his breath brushing warm near Caleb’s ear.
Caleb’s stomach tightened. He waited for the shame to arrive alongside his desire, quick and familiar, an old reflex conditioned into him since birth.
It came close enough that he recognized the shape of it, but it did not take hold. Not all the way.
The fire cracked softly.
Caleb leaned back into Connor without realizing he had decided to. Not much. Barely enough to count, but enough that Connor noticed. Caleb felt him go still behind him, felt the pause in his breathing, felt the moment stretch between them.
Connor did not pull him closer, but he did not move away either. His thumb shifted once against Caleb’s chest, so slight Caleb might have imagined it if his entire body had not answered, so he closed his eyes and stayed where he was.
A prayer of thanks came unbidden into his mind, a response to how close he had come to his life ending when it had only just started.
Yet this moment stood in stark contrast to the genuine devotion and he could not finish the prayer.
No matter how hard he tried, he could not bring Jesus into that part of himself.
Not here. Not with Connor’s body warm behind him and Connor’s hand still resting against his chest. The old fear reached for him anyway, familiar as breath, but for once it did not feel like God.
It felt learned. It felt like his father, put there until Caleb had mistaken it for his own conscience and the voice of God.