Chapter 11 The Gordian Knot #2
Starting with two fingers, I work in a third, and he sits back again, taking them to the knuckles as my little finger dents his ass cheek.
It’s all so fucking sexy. So right to watch and feel.
Precum pulses from my dick at the totally overwhelming amount of arousal I’m experiencing.
He’s not leaving this room until I get my tongue in there, but I’m pretty sure I’m not leaving this bed until he gets my cock in there.
My ring finger brushes against what has to be his prostate—the texture is new and different.
The groan he lets out almost makes me come.
“Now,” I say. “Please.” My voice is shaking, but I can’t wait anymore.
He puts the next condom on me himself with surprisingly deft movements. I would have struggled with the way my entire body is shaking, but he doesn’t. I take my fingers out of him and push at his hips to make him turn around.
I manage the lube while he’s positioning his body over mine, getting the condom slick to the point of dripping. His pretty face hovers above me, and he steals a kiss—another piece of me he’s found and is keeping for himself.
At the risk of repeating myself, I’ve never felt anything like this.
I don’t even know what I’m feeling, what words there are for it.
I’m cracked open, utterly revealed, and he’s not shying away.
He’s digging inside for whatever he can find and take.
This kiss as he lowers himself onto me has no precedent or comparable equivalent.
It’s a consummation in the truest form of the sentiment.
Revelation and ascension into some other, higher, better plane of existence.
We move so slowly, I think I might burst open. As our tongues delve deeper and deeper, he sinks lower and lower, consuming my cock in his wet, tight heat.
“Oh my God,” I somehow whisper with utter awe and disbelief. We just started, and it’s the best sex I’ve ever had.
His arms wrap around my head. His hair lands in silky waves against my cheek. His breath gusts across my mouth.
We move together, a slow rocking motion, locked in the only place I ever want to be again. The murmur of his sighs and moans against my mouth has my body on fire—lit from the burning torch I hold for him. Only. Always. This man. This path. This feeling.
I can’t stop kissing him. Tugging at his lips.
Licking them with my tongue. I know we can’t physically be any closer, but the best way to describe it is I feel like there’s a piece of my soul inside him, and I can’t stop trying to draw it back into me.
When I kiss him, I connect with it again.
I don’t know how long he’s had it, or if it’s always been missing, but it lives inside him now. That much I do know.
When I come, I swear it feels like he just stole another piece.
If this is what happens when I fall for someone, I’m glad I’ve never done it before. There wouldn’t be any of me left.
Clutching him through the surges of pleasure coursing through me, I find his straining dick with my hand. One stroke, and he throbs, spilling onto my stomach and gasping something unintelligible.
I watch as the ecstasy takes his face and turns it into something beyond beautiful. Something only the greatest artists could capture. When his eyes slowly flutter open, and his gaze meets mine, I’m fucking shellshocked.
“That went well, I think,” he says quietly.
I nearly smile, then I kiss him quickly, pulling him against my body. My cock slides out of him, and he stretches his legs between mine, fitting himself against me as he draws out the kiss.
When our breath inevitably runs out, I roll us onto our sides, keeping him close. “Are you okay?” I ask. “Talk to me.”
He doesn’t hold back now any more than he ever has. “I can’t decide if that was the best or worst idea I’ve ever had. I might be freaking out.”
He’s not the only one. As the afterglow burns away faster than it should, and reality settles in again, I find myself way out of my depth.
I know what he wants to hear, but there are certain things I don’t even know how to say.
As sure as I was that he was safe with me, I’m now equally certain he deserves so much better than someone with a gaping hole inside himself.
I have no experience with anything like love. I have no memories of it.
The emotion I have inside me can’t possibly be love.
Mine is a deep craving. A clawing and scratching thing.
It’s desperation and emptiness.
It’s a grasping at something I lost a long time ago. I made myself stop missing it because missing it was pointless. Missing it didn’t bring it back. Tristan can’t bring it back, either.
Stick to the basics, I tell myself. Don’t break his heart.
I meet his worried eyes and say, “It was perfect.”
“Was it too much? I think I just wanted to be close to you. Would you have rather I stuck with hugging?”
I laugh softly. “No.”
“Really?”
I smile and take another kiss. “Really.”
“Would you maybe…wanna do it again?”
Smiling at him, I say, “Maybe give me a few minutes.”
Any awkwardness dissipates as he snuggles even closer to me. His fingertips on my back draw hearts and triple infinities in the shape of the small charm on the necklace I wear. Little Gordian knots. “I was nervous,” he says. “Completely overwhelmed…”
Meeting his sparkling eyes, I ignore the instinct I normally get—the one that tells me to shut down, don’t let this get to you.
I ignore that for the first time in my life.
Here is someone who just handed all his trust to me, and I can do that, too.
For one night, I can be who he needs me to be.
I can be his. And if he’s able to pry open my shut-down heart—even if it’s just for a few hours—then maybe it’s not really broken.
Maybe it’s just unfinished.
The sun rises. Morning comes and goes. My knee throbs and swells. Tristan’s phone vibrates constantly.
“I have to go,” he says after an hour of ignoring it. An hour where he lets me do what I’d wanted to do when I first came face to ass with him. He made me come with his mouth, and I made him come with my tongue and a few strokes of my hand. Neither of us has had a second of sleep.
But time is relentless. And it’s running out.
He lies sideways against the pillows, and I rest beside him, my hand always managing to be touching some part of him.
Right now, it’s on his waist, and I’m memorizing every inch of his torso.
He has moles, and I’m counting them. Mentally mapping them.
He keeps talking. “As much as I would love for them to, my mom and dad aren’t gonna leave without me. My dad’s big on schedules.”
“You get along with your parents?” I ask because I’m still thirsting for anything I can know about him. Anything to bind us.
“Yeah. They’re great. Very liberal. Very affectionate. Very nosy.”
“Are they proud of you?”
“I don’t know,” he says, softer. “I think so. I hope so. I’m kind of a lot.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, Archer, I wish I had time to explain, but it’s kinda like I said—I gotta go.”
“Ugh. I know. Let me ride with you to your house.”
“Your knee, though.”
“I feel like I just need to wrap it or something. I’m sure it’s fine.”
He gives me a dubious look. He’s right to. I’m pretty sure my kneecap is broken.
“I’ll go to the doctor after I drop you off,” I tell him.
“You should. I’ll get them to send up an Ace bandage or something.”
“I can just use a towel.”
For that, I get a full eye roll. He climbs over me to call the front desk, saying things like, “right away,” and “it’s extremely urgent.” I can barely stand it—the way I still feel about him. If anything, it’s stronger and more pervasive than it was when he first kissed me.
I’m self-aware enough to know that sex is usually my endgame. It’s where my desire for someone either stabilizes or tapers off. As initially feared, that hasn’t happened here.
Five minutes later, with the bandage delivered, Tristan’s in the center of the bed, wrapping my knee, making bending it almost impossible, which helps. He tries to get me to take the Advil, but I don’t want to end up hunched over the toilet again.
“I pictured you a lot of ways, you know?” he says, picking my jeans up off the floor as he starts getting ready to leave.
“No…”
“When someone disappears, it’s normal, I guess…to imagine them. You’re not what I expected.”
“Santa Cruz surfboard painter?”
“I mean how you are. I didn’t expect you to be like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like…normal and…lovely.”
The words make me think about my childhood.
What he knows about it. What he’s heard from Connor, or even from my mother herself.
It’s not what I want to be thinking about right now, but here I am anyway, reminded of all the articles and books I’ve read about kids like me and wondering how the hell I could ever come across as normal or lovely, but glad for both our sakes I’m pulling it off.
“Not what I expected, but exactly what I hoped,” he says. “And I also hope it’s gonna be harder to forget about me this time.” He gives me a smirk as he pulls on his black pajama pants.
I can’t smirk back. I can’t even manage a smile. This is killing me.
Getting up, I struggle into my shorts and shirt. I find my phone and wallet before stepping into my shoes.
He waits by the door while I limp through the room, looking to see if anything fell under the bed—if I’m leaving something behind besides my heart, bleeding and bruised and raw.
The shine of the sun on the blankets is unforgivable.
So I shut it down. I shut down my thoughts and my stupid heart. I let Tristan walk through the door, and I follow him to the elevator. On the way down, we don’t talk because I’ve decided I had the right idea years ago. There’s no good way to say goodbye. It hurts exactly as much as predicted.
When the car pulls up in front of his house, we stare at each other for a long time before either one of us speaks. He starts. “I guess…I’ll see you later?”
I stop myself from asking for an exact date and time. “You know where to find me,” I say instead.
This is no comfort to him, it’s easy to tell. He nods and opens the door.
No, I think. Not like this.
Before he can get out, I’m pulling him back in. I take his face in my hands and kiss him because it might be the last time. When his arms wrap me up, I catch the scent of the two of us together. I inhale as much of him as I physically can before letting his lips slip away from mine.
“Wait.” I reach around my neck to take off my necklace.
I’ve only had it for a few years, but I never take it off.
I bought it at Pike Place Market one day when I was walking around Seattle.
The story that went with the charm felt ironic at the time, but less so today.
I put it on Tristan, fumbling with the clasp beneath his hair because my fingers aren’t working right.
It looks perfect on him. The charm hanging from the back silk cord nestles directly between his collarbones. He touches it and gives me a weak smile. “Does it mean something?”
Unsure if he means the gesture, or the triple infinity symbol on the necklace, I take the easy way out. “It’s a Gordian knot. Supposedly, it was a knot no one could figure out how to untie until some guy came along and cut it. It represents a seemingly impossible problem.”
“Is that why you wear it? You have a thing for impossible problems?”
“What do you think?” I ask.
“I hope not. Thank you,” he says.
“I want that back.”
“I promise. Try not to forget me this time,” he says.
“I won’t. Don’t forget me either.”
“Right. Don’t worry.” The way he says it, like he almost wishes he could, makes me question the wisdom of what we did last night. Before I have too much time to think about it, he gently kisses the cut on my cheek. Then he presses one final kiss to my mouth.
And then he gets out of the car, and he’s gone.
Long story short, it turns out I’m not stalker material.
How do I know?
Because I let him get away.