Chapter 18
CLUEOPOLY
Morning, afternoon, and night, Oscar and Aaron fell into bed with each other for the rest of the week.
While Oscar sat in on his classes and took down notes, Aaron looked for jobs and sent out resumés and applications.
In between, they undressed and crawled beneath the covers, laughing and murmuring sweetnesses every time they broke contact.
For the most part, lips found lips, crawled down chests, trailed love over hip bones, licked and tasted.
One night, when all the lectures were done and all the jobs applied to, after they’d had their dinner and Aaron had watched Oscar get through two hours of beta testing with Luigi supervising his progress, their hands slid into each other as they had on every night before, and they slipped into the darkness of Oscar’s room, shutting out the warm light of the living room, trading yellow for cool blue and swathes of green where the moonlight hit Oscar’s sheets.
“I want to try something else,” Aaron murmured, nibbling on Oscar’s earlobe.
His voice, to any other person, would have sounded smooth and steady as ever.
But Oscar knew its music now, knew it better than the pattern of his own heart, and he could taste the nervousness when he leaned in and kissed him.
“Anything,” he whispered, brushing reassurance over Aaron’s cheek.
So Aaron blushed a little less when he wore the strap-on and eased when Oscar wrapped his legs around his waist and pulled him in closer, when Oscar’s peak had him crying out. Flushed and breathless, Oscar wanted more, wanted him, wanted Aaron everywhere.
“Do you want to…” Oscar bit down on his lip, sitting up to kiss him. It was a rare and beautiful thing to find his eyes in the heat of their shared desire, for Oscar’s fingers to crawl up Aaron’s chest like spider legs, to feel that heart hammering away for him.
“What do you want?” Aaron asked. He kissed Oscar like he was a shrine and this was worship, light warmth pressed to his skin, hands sliding into Oscar’s wet, sweaty waves, fingertips pressing into his head. “Tell me what you want, and I will give it to you.”
“I want to have had you in every place,” Oscar replied. “In every part of me.”
“I want that, too,” Aaron said, smiling against Oscar’s mouth. “I want it so much with you.”
“Have it,” Oscar said.
“Will you turn over for me, baby? I want to make it good for you.” Aaron’s whisper sent shivers down Oscar’s spine, tightened something in his stomach that had been loose for as long as Oscar could remember.
The anticipation of being touched like that made Oscar’s skin tingle, his stomach flattening on the sheets they’d crumpled, wet with the sweat of Oscar’s exertion and the evidence of how well Aaron knew him.
A soft breath of a whimper pushed out of him as Aaron slid a hand beneath his stomach, fingers splaying on soft, warm skin, two cold wet fingers finding him, slipping in where nobody else had ever gone before.
“All good, Spikey?” Aaron whispered when the movement grew liquid and the liquid grew warm. “I’ll go nice and slow, and you tell me if it’s a lot.”
“It’s not a lot,” Oscar gasped as those fingers slid in deeper. “Aaron, please.”
“Patience,” Aaron replied, curling his fingertips gently over Oscar’s stomach. “I don’t want to hurt you, baby.”
And Aaron didn’t. He eased himself in so well, and when it was time, he moved like the water, like oxygen through air, air through lungs.
The initial discomfort was nothing to the pleasure that came with being taken face down from behind by him, the I love yous they kept mumbling to each other while Aaron pushed with his hips and Oscar received him.
After, they lay in bed beside each other, and Aaron curled Oscar’s hair around his finger.
In the morning, Oscar missed half a class because they took too long in the shower together.
Aaron proved just how good of a nurse he would be, caring for him on his knees in the cubicle, gentling away the ache that persisted.
Oscar still needed to sit on a cushion when it was time for the game night he had asked Aaron to plan the morning before everything had gone south with the temp job.
It being a Saturday meant Oscar hadn’t had class, and it had given him and Aaron an entire day to clean up and get the space looking presentable for company.
“Do I look okay?” Oscar asked, stepping out of his room in his comfortable blue jeans and a Crash Bandicoot hoodie in honor of Papa’s favorite video game from when Oscar was young.
He still remembered the night Papa had brought the PlayStation home, a grey clunky thing that a friend of his had owned for years.
There had been other models out by then, but Papa said none were like the first, and he, Oscar, and Lina had stayed up all night playing Crash in the basement, waiting for Neo Cortex to stop spinning on the screen when the disc jammed.
“Okay? Come here, you foxy man.” Aaron tugged him into the living room. Oscar stumbled into his arms, leaning in to kiss him. “Hmm. I’m going to have to put a Do Not Touch sign on you before Tobe gets here.”
“Don’t they know I’m your boyfriend?” Oscar arched an eyebrow at him.
“Yes, but they will try to convince me to share.” He pressed a kiss to Oscar’s cheek. “Thank you for organizing this night for me, Spike.”
“You set everything up!” Oscar said, which wasn’t entirely true.
Aaron had invited everyone and found a time they could all make it, but Oscar had spent the entire day making sure there were snacks for each of them, stuffing his fridge with drinks and getting different kinds of hot chocolate and coffee and tea and all the non-milk milks he could find for Joe’s sibling, Riley.
Before Aaron could argue, the doorbell rang, and it sent a flurry of panic through Oscar because he knew Joe and Anna, but what if the rest of Aaron’s friends decided they didn’t like him?
After all, Tobe and Marta had known Aaron longer; they’d been in his life since he was sixteen years old. If they hated him—
“Spike, you good?” Aaron was standing at the door, the buzzer echoing throughout the building as the main door opened downstairs.
Oscar tore himself out of his spiral and found Aaron’s eyes. The world went silent. The buzzer ceased, and Oscar’s heart stopped hammering as loudly. The voices echoing in the stairwell faded away, and only Aaron remained.
“Yeah,” Oscar replied. He smiled, remembered the feeling of spring in his chest from that morning at the clinic and knew he’d always be good as long as this man existed. “I’m great, boo.”
The knock at the door was the loudest thing in the world and reminded Oscar of himself, of the clumsy kid who made a racket everywhere he went, worsening the anxiety that came with the notion of being seen.
Aaron lingered a moment longer on him, scrunching up his nose, then pulled open the door. All five of them stood there, as though they’d agreed to arrive at the same time, and maybe they had.
Tobe walked in first. Oscar recognized them by the pink hair, no longer buzzed like in those early pictures, but grown out into the coolest mullet Oscar had ever seen in his entire life.
They had piercings on both sides of their nose and across their septum, around their lower lip and eyebrow, and there were tattoos scattered all over their forearms, peeking out through their rolled-up sleeves.
“Boo bear!” Tobe said, wrapping their arms around Aaron. “Argh! I missed you, you dick.”
Marta hugged Aaron a little more quietly, her brown hair hanging loose to her collarbones, pretty brown eyes on a gorgeous face.
Joe and Anna were still waiting in the doorway, and someone else was crouching behind them, ushering Luigi back into the apartment.
When they stood up, holding Lu in their arms, Oscar knew this had to be Riley.
They had Joe’s same eyes and a mass of black curls chopped untidily around their face, similar features and the same strong, square chin.
“Come in,” Aaron said.
Anna pushed the door shut behind her as she ushered Riley in, and they were suddenly all inside Oscar’s apartment, which in all his time living there had never seen this many people all at once. Not even half the number.
“Hi!” Tobe’s eyes crinkled as they fell on Oscar, mouth splitting into a grin. “You must be the reason I’ve had to take two Ibuprofens a day these last few months. I’m Tobe.”
“Oscar,” Oscar replied, shaking Tobe’s hand. “I apologize for the headaches. I’ve tried to keep him occupied.”
Nice one, Casafuckingnova. Maybe they would all think Oscar was some jerk who thought he was the center of Aaron’s universe, an idiot who thought a little too highly of himself, who’d leave Aaron in tears at a train station and go marry someone else at the end of the book.
But Oscar had always thought he was more like Elio than Oliver, and he didn’t want to be either one of them anymore.
He didn’t want to say goodbye. He didn’t want to have a summer of love. He wanted a lifetime of it.
“And he’s good at it, too,” Joe said then, cutting into the tension. “Because we haven’t seen Aaron’s face in at least a week. I wish he was giving us headaches with all his Oscar stories. Coop misses you, Ronnie.”
Oscar eased as Marta and Tobe began to laugh, Riley grinning, still holding Luigi. Joe flashed Oscar a subtle wink and walked past Aaron and the rest, patting him on the shoulder.
“I’ve brought a concerning amount of candy. Where shall I put it?” he asked.
“On the table is fine. What’s everybody drinking?”
Half an hour later, they were all seated around the table, and Tobe was already red in the face, arguing with Marta over her luck and how nobody could possibly keep getting all the green and yellow and red lots in Monopoly without cheating, while Riley argued that Monopoly was in itself an evil game, and they should perhaps switch to something friendlier.