Chapter Eleven #3
“But you don’t—”
“So what!” The word cracked coming out, and with it he realized Trenton was just as close to crying as he was.
“So what if I don’t! Will you punish me for that?
For being born without that kind of drive?
I could drown in you. I am fucking obsessed with you.
My every thought—every moment—is thinking of how to show you, how to be with you, how to make it so that you can’t live without me as much as I can’t be without you.
I’m repulsed? I’m pretending? Hilary, if you asked me to cut off my hand to prove it belonged to you, do you think I would hesitate? Stop fucking around!”
Hilary’s head rang, or maybe it was the space around him that was dissolving, like being underwater or outside of his skin.
His hands closed in something. Trenton’s shirt, though that wasn’t what he needed.
If the universe was fair, if it listened to any wishes at all, it would take his heart and put it inside that chest, broader than his, stronger than his, to nestle up against the only other heart that could beat in tandem with his own.
The sound coming from his throat was like the wailing of an animal. He reached, and Trenton caught him, was already lifting, taking him up as he had always meant to, into the space reserved for him since the very beginning. “You wanted to be friends. I know it was important—I tried—I wanted to—”
“And you did.” Trenton’s mouth was up against his temple, speaking the words into his skin as if they might be absorbed through the layers of tissue there. “What could it be other than friendship? What else could be this powerful?”
“But I fucked it up. I started to want—”
“What we want is the same. To be close. To be so close. To breathe you into my soul and house you there for all of forever. It’s so frustrating that we can’t, forced to be separate. You in your body and me in mine.”
It did sound the same when Trenton put it like that.
The yearning to push in, to merge in and meld.
If he had to be Hilary, he wanted only to be that part of Hilary that was inside Trenton already.
That was the better part. All that Trenton loved was better, and whatever was left over was not even worth thinking about. “Then let’s do it. I want to do it.”
“Sex?”
Hilary nodded, the motion sharp. He realized he was short of breath, like he’d been sprinting forward—toward this and him and always Trenton his whole life.
Trenton smiled again, so soft it made his vision blur a little.
“Goose. In that way, you’re like me. You won’t enjoy that kind of thing.”
“I might. If it were you. Nothing could be bad with you.”
“Ah.” Trenton’s face dropped to his shoulder, the weight of it entirely welcome. “I’ll become addicted to this. I won’t let you get away with being stingy anymore.”
Hilary’s face was burning again. “I’m not stingy.”
“You are. Holding out on me when you’ve had these kinds of words inside you all this time. Give me your poetry, your sweet courtship. Look at you, how powerful you are. I’m hopeless against you.”
Hilary was beginning to tremble, all the air that wasn’t Trenton unbearably cold against his skin. “Make love to me.”
He’d never said that phrase before. Never so much as thought it. Voicing it aloud should have had him decomposing in embarrassment.
"I do,” Trenton said, voice hoarse with meaning it. “I never stop. What’s any of this but making love?”
Hilary got his hands up beneath that shirt, the trembling like a palsy now. “Take it off. Please, I need—”
Trenton had it off in a moment. The boy wouldn’t refuse him. Trenton never refused him anything. And then he was in those arms, their burning warmth.
“You’re shaking,” Trenton said.
“I’m cold.” It came out like a whine, an overtired toddler. “Hold me.”
“I have you.”
But he wanted more. It was like Trenton had said; the distance between them was unbearable.
Trenton clicked his tongue. "Look at you. Would something hot to drink help?”
Hilary didn’t know how someone so smart could be so frighteningly stupid.
“It’s you. I don’t want anything else. Please—”
"You have me. You've always had me, Hil. Even before you wanted me, you had me.”
Trenton stood, but Hilary’s panic was unnecessary.
The boy was holding him up, just as close and just as tight.
Still, he wrapped his legs around that waist to make sure he remained properly secured.
Thankfully, Trenton didn’t seem to find anything strange about that, making his way to the bathroom easily, holding Hilary up with a single arm as he tested the shower water.
“Told you the muscle was triple,” Hilary muttered.
“Not another word, darling, or I’ll kiss you again.”
“What kind of threat—”
The kiss was wet. They’d just stepped under the water. In a minute, his underwear was sagging with it. “Trent.”
“Here. You can step out of them.”
“Yours too.”
It was overwhelming, both expected and unexpected. When he gasped, Trenton told him to be quiet. No—begged it of him. “Don’t. I can’t love you anymore than this. I won’t function.”
So he made the sound again, hoping it was true, that he really did have the power to make Trenton as helpless as he felt already.
It was different to kiss beneath the water with the spray hitting his face and running into his throat.
Trenton’s mouth also felt different, but not so much that he couldn’t still recognize it.
They stayed there, in that crumbling tub, until the shaking stopped.
There were no towels, so Trenton sacrificed his shirt to dry him before dressing him back in his clothes. But Hilary didn’t want to dress.
“We have the blanket in the car,” Trenton tried to say.
“No.” Hilary was still trying to kiss him. He didn’t see why he should stop just because his ogre was being unreasonable. “Stay like this and bite me. Take a bite.”
Trenton laughed—the surprised laugh. “And swallow you down?”
“Yes.”
Trenton’s smile was in their kiss. “I can’t. I’d miss you too much.”
It was a good point. A real conundrum.
“I’m scared.”
“Because it’s new?”
“Because it could end.”
“It can’t,” Trenton promised. “That’s what makes it friendship.”
“We could die.”
“Would you stop loving me then?”
“No.” Maybe that was irrational, but it seemed impossible that anything could stop that.
Trenton eventually broke the kiss. “It’s getting late. You’ll get even colder as you get hungry.”
Hilary didn’t have much of an argument for that, but he tried anyway. “I don’t want to.”
“Do you think it’s this place that’s magic?” Trenton challenged. “It isn’t. I’ve felt this way for you the whole time, and you for me.”
“But what if—” Already, just the thought of leaving, was bringing back the embarrassment. “I could become a coward again.”
"I won't let you,” Trenton promised.
“I might anyway. I'm such a weenie.”
“You aren’t.”
Hilary let his eyes do the challenging. Trenton answered with a kiss. “Then we’ll come back here. We’ll come as much as you like. Mrs. Parson said I was free to do whatever I wanted with the apartment.”
Mrs. Parson was the owner of the bookshop. And also, it seemed, this hovel of an apartment.
"When we live together, will it be like this?" Hilary asked.
Maybe he really was becoming braver. If he could bring up the future like that. It seemed easy suddenly. Like there had never been a reason to be afraid.
"It’ll be better than this. You'll choose everything in our home, and all the things inside it will make you happy.”
“Then it will only need you.”
Trenton sighed. “I’m serious, Hil. If you don't cut it out, you'll regret it. I'll hold you to this standard every day."
But Hilary was too empty-headed to care, a fool in love. “We still haven't had sex.”
"We'll have sex later. Come put your shoes on.”
"Promise it then. You're not saying it like you mean it.”
"Because you don't mean it.”
"Yes I do.”
“Says the boy who almost vomits anytime my saliva accidentally touches his mouth. You're not managing sex.”
"I do not vomit. And sex doesn't have to be with saliva.”
"Sex is nothing but saliva."
But Hilary wouldn’t be budged. "I can do it.” When Trenton laughed, he only shouted it louder, “I can do it!”
Trenton lifted him off the ground to give him a spin before pulling him down into a kiss that was too much like appeasement. "If you really want to, we can try. But you're going to flail around like you did the time you had that slimy cantaloupe."
"I won’t.”
“You know I’ll cry if you stop kissing me because you get skeeved out. Are you prepared for that?"
“I wouldn’t do that.”
"You would. You could only eat dry foods for a week after the cantaloupe. Remember?”
Hilary was becoming properly pissed off again. What was he, a baby? But Trenton wouldn’t stop smiling, and that was harder to argue with.
“Asshole,” but Hilary could only mutter it, unable to put any real feeling into the insult.
“Says the one who fell for me.”
"I didn't fall for that part of you.”
"Liar.”