Chapter 25 I Think I Get it Now
twenty-five
i think i get it now
“Adorable Audrey!” Malcolm greets me with a wide grin when I show up at the door to his apartment Tuesday afternoon. “Damien’s just finishing his stream, but you can head in there and wait for him,” he adds, nodding towards the end of the hallway where it opens into the living room.
“Thanks.” I give him a small nod before slipping off my shoes and jacket.
“Elliot and Nathan are visiting family out of town this week, and I’m heading out in a minute,” he says, following me down the hall. “And I’ll be gone for several hours. Just. So you know.”
“Um.” Dammit, I think I’m blushing. “Okay.”
That’s not why I’m here, though. Damien and I have plans to go try a new restaurant that makes vegan sushi burritos—despite neither of us being vegan—that opened up near his apartment, and I said I would drop by after his stream so we could head over together.
But now that I’m here, and we’re about to be in his roommate-less apartment for several hours, and I’ve never seen inside his bedroom—
Okay, nope. Stick to the plan. Sushi burritos. Cauliflower bites. Vegan sriracha mayo. All good stuff.
When I reach the living room, I peek around the corner to see if he’s still streaming—he is—and I intend to scurry over to the couch so I won’t be visible on camera, but he notices my arrival and pauses his game to face me with a smile that makes my heart race.
“Hold on a sec,” he says to his computer before pulling off his headphones. He reaches a hand towards me. “Hey, I’ll just be a few minutes. But—”
I take his offered hand uncertainly and he drags me towards him.
With a quick glance at his monitor, he holds up his other hand to block his webcam and then pulls me close like he’s about to kiss me—but he waits for me to start it, as usual.
It’s short and sweet but already has me rethinking the whole dinner thing. Who needs food, really?
When he finally lets me go, I back away to the couch and flop down onto it, though I miscalculate where I am and end up in the Pit. I don’t bother moving.
Damien puts his headphones back on and resumes his game, but I can’t make out what’s happening on his screen from this angle. Although I can tell he’s using the new keyboard I gave him; the space bar sounds much less infuriating, and I feel vindicated.
“Come on, guys, let’s focus on the game,” he says with a nervous laugh. “… Yeah, I’m not talking about that.”
He quickly glances back at me, and I can tell by the look on his face that he’s regretting his decision now that he’s getting teased by his viewers—or so I assume.
Not that they would be able to tell who I am, but it had to be pretty obvious that Scones has a girlfriend. (LinkFarts must be having a field day.)
The stream wraps up shortly afterwards and he heads over to the couch, shaking his head. “Okay, I should have seen that coming,” he says, standing in front of me
“Probably none of them knew you’d ever interacted with a human in person before,” I say jokingly. “It must be quite a shock to them.”
“Well, the shock will wear off, soon.” He reaches out a hand. “Shall we head out?”
I let him help me out of my sunken seat, but as we’re walking down the hallway, I rubberneck at one of the open bedroom doors, hoping to get a glimpse inside.
I can immediately tell that it must be his and Malcolm’s room based on all the fabric everywhere.
I even catch a glimpse of the nefarious ironing board.
“Go snoop, if you want,” he says as he comes to a stop ahead of me, and I realize that I’ve stopped outside the open door already.
“Oh. No. I mean, it’s Malcolm’s room too, I don’t want to invade—”
“He’s a man of few secrets,” Damien says. “He won’t care.” He nods towards the door, and I hesitantly step inside.
It’s a small room, but not as small as mine. And not as small as I was expecting, given that I’d been told they had bunk beds. I assumed there wouldn’t be room for two real beds, but there would be, if it weren’t for the sewing supplies taking up three-quarters of the space.
“You’ve given Malcolm a lot of space in here,” I say as I take it all in.
He shrugs. “With my gaming stuff in the living room, I didn’t really need much space. And it’s better for the mess to be contained here, where it won’t give Nathan a heart attack.”
“I guess that explains how they can live under the same roof.”
“It’s a daily struggle,” he replies, but he’s smiling like it’s a joke. Possibly.
“So which stuff is yours?” I ask, stepping further into the room to look around.
“Basically, just that dresser.” He points at a dresser below the window, right next to the beds. “And the lower bunk. That’s about it.”
“Minimalist,” I say, and he snorts.
“One way of putting it.”
I have to curl my hands into fists to resist the urge to look through all his drawers. I don’t know why; I’m not usually this nosy. And I learned at an early age, snooping around my grandma’s room, not to look in other people’s drawers.
But I want to know everything. I want to know if he folds or balls his socks—or worse, tosses them all in the drawer in one scattered pile, like I do.
I want to know if he has any t-shirts I haven’t seen him wear yet.
I want to know what kind of underwear he wears, since he’s never taken off his pants around me, despite the fact that he has seen all of me already.
Not all at once, but a bit here or there.
Enough to piece together a pretty good mental image. And meanwhile I have nothing.
Generally speaking, I have no interest in naked people.
The shirtless dudes on the covers of books when I’m scrolling the library’s romance ebook collection are just awkward.
And seeing Shawn naked did nothing for me.
It was, at best, completely uninteresting.
I wasn’t even repulsed, I just…did not care. At all.
And yet I’m now wondering…
“What’s that face for?” Damien asks, taking a step closer as he scrutinizes me.
I have no idea what my face is doing. “It’s just my face.”
“You’re thinking something.”
“No, I just—” I huff an exhale, defeated. “Do you even want to have sex with me?”
His eyebrows lift. “Now?”
“Yes—No! I mean, in general,” I say, growing more flustered by the second. “Just—Whenever we…do anything…I end up half-naked and you stay fully clothed, and you never even… Is it because you know I’ll be bad at it?”
He drags a hand over his face, nudging his glasses, like he’s embarrassed. “No,” he says; an uncomfortable laugh breaks his voice. “You won’t be bad at it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you already aren’t.”
“But—We’ve only done stuff for me.” I flap an arm in his direction. “What about you? Don’t you want…anything?”
“First of all, it’s not just for you. But I—I don’t want anything that will make you uncomfortable, no,” he says, even though this whole conversation is making me uncomfortable.
“And you think that if you—You think it would make me uncomfortable?”
He shrugs, but he seems as flustered as I feel. “I don’t—I don’t want to be like your ex, okay? I don’t want to just use you, not giving a fuck about how you feel about it, or doing things that you don’t enjoy—”
“You’re not like him!” I assure him. “At all. Ever. In any way.”
“But you’re still you, aren’t you?” he says, and it feels like I’m being accused of something.
“What does that mean?” I ask, taking a step back.
“You’re the person who had sex with him even though you weren’t into it!” He quickly seems to regret his words, and he covers his face again. “Shit, I don’t mean—I don’t think you’d do that now, I swear, I just—I have this…fear.”
The Pit has relocated to my stomach. “Fear? About me?”
He walks over to his bed and sits at the edge of the mattress with his head in his hands. “I’m afraid that, even if you’re not into it, you won’t tell me to stop because you don’t want to hurt my feelings.”
“I—” I want to say that I would never do that, except he’s absolutely right that it’s what I did with my ex. And I care about Damien’s feelings a million times more than I ever did for Shawn’s. But I don’t want to do that to him. “I promise I’ll tell you.”
“Will you?”
I sigh and sit next to him, taking one of his hands between mine. “Let’s put it this way: if you trust me to tell you when it is what I want, then you can trust me to tell you when it’s not.”
“Okay…”
“And I’m telling you: it’s what I want now.”
“You mean…” He looks at me and swallows. “Like, now now?”
Well, no, I didn’t mean now now. But when he looks at me like that—hopeful and awestruck and hungry—maybe I do mean now now.
He still waits for me to kiss him, but as soon as I do, it’s like something snaps. For both of us. We’re fumbling to undress each other as we hunch under the upper bunk, though he stops once my t-shirt is in his hands and he holds it up to examine it.
“You think I can get one of these?” He holds it to his bare chest, face out, showing off the HAD ENOUGH? design.
“Yeah, Victory’s brother has one of those heat transfer press thingies,” I tell him somewhat breathlessly.
“Awesome.” He grins and then tosses the shirt to the ground before dragging me down onto the bed horizontally to kiss me some more.
It occurs to me now, as I’m helping him remove his jeans, that part of the reason he’s always stayed fully clothed when we’re together is that I made no effort to change that. I never tried to undress him or asked him to do so—I just assumed that, if he really wanted to strip down, he’d do it.
Even though he told me, right at the start, that I’d have to take the lead on everything. I’d have to be the one to make the first move.
“Oh, shit!” I sit up in a panic and bonk my head on the wooden planks above me, causing Damien to immediately start fussing over me, asking if I’m okay, but I assure him that I’m fine. “Sorry, yeah, it’s just—I just realized that I was the one being my ex, this whole time!”
He frowns in confusion. “What are you talking about?”