14. Maddox #2
“You're allowed to have a life. You're allowed to fuck who you want. You're allowed to play hockey how you want to play it. You're allowed to eat pasta at lunch if you want pasta at lunch. You're twenty years old and you get to be a person. Not his. Yours.”
“Maddox.”
“What.”
His voice breaks.
“I don't know how.”
“I know.”
My cheek rests against his temple.
“I've never tried,” he confesses.
“I know.”
My hand spreads flat over his sternum. Holds him against me.
“I don't know how to—”
“You don't have to know. You just have to not go back in the box.”
He's crying now. Not loud. Just his face doing the thing where tears run out the corners of his eyes and he doesn't try to stop them. I wipe one off his jaw with my thumb.
“Hey.”
“I'm okay.”
I kiss the wet spot on his cheekbone.
“Yeah, you are.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Don't.”
He turns his face into my throat.
“It's just…”
“I know.”
I pull him into me. Not soft. Not hard. Just into me. His face against my throat. His whole body curling toward my chest. I hold him and I don't say anything else. I let him have a minute.
I'm apparently a man who holds people now.
The world hasn't ended.
After a few minutes of quiet, I lie down and pull him down with me. I wrap him up against my chest with the sheet bunched at our hips and I put my mouth in his hair.
“You don't have to leave yet.”
“He's going to—”
“He's going to whether you leave in ten minutes or an hour. Stay.”
He stays.
He's quiet for a while. His hand comes to rest on my chest over my heart. His breath slows. I don't know if he's sleeping. I don't check. I lie there and I let my hand stroke up and down his back and think about what I just said and whether I meant it.
I meant it.
That's the fucked-up part. I meant every word. I didn't wake up this morning expecting to say any of that out loud. To anyone. I didn't wake up this morning expecting to care whether a twenty-year-old nepotism hire gets to be a person.
I care.
I care so much I can barely look at it directly.
His hand moves on my chest. Palm flat. He kisses my sternum. Not sexual. A press of his mouth and then nothing.
“Thank you,” he says.
“Don't thank me.”
My hand keeps moving on his back.
“I want to.”
“Don't.”
My hand stills on his back.
“Why?”
“Because thanking me makes it sound like a favor.”
He lifts his chin off my chest.
“Isn't it?”
“No.”
He's quiet.
“What is it then?”
I breathe out.
I don't know how to answer that. I don't have the words. I'm not a man with words. I've got hands and I've got a stick and I've got a mouth that says cruel things to strangers in hallways. I don't have the words for what this is.
But he's waiting. His chin is lifting up so he can look at me.
“It's…” I begin, then pause to think about what I mean to say. “I'm in it.”
“In what?”
I meet his eyes. Hold them.
“This.”
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
He looks at me. His eyes are the color they are when he's about to cry or about to come. Right now, it's not either.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
And he kisses me.
It starts small. His mouth on mine. Soft.
Morning-slow. His hand still over my heart.
I keep my hand on the back of his neck where I had it.
He tastes like sleep and like me and the smallest bit of toothpaste from the travel brush he must have used last night—and I don't know why that wrecks me, but it does.
His tongue touches my lower lip. I open. He goes in.
He's the one kissing me.
That's new.
I let him push into my mouth and take it, and I let him climb over me, and I don't flip him because he's doing something and I'm going to let him finish doing it.
He settles on my hips. The sheet slips. He's naked. I'm naked. My cock is already hardening between us.
He sits back. He looks down at me. He's flushed, his hair's a mess, his mouth is wet, and the bruise on his neck is the color of a plum.
“Can I?” he says.
“Yeah.”
He bites his lip. Flushes.
He reaches for the drawer. He fumbles with the bottle. He bites his lip while he works it. His fingers are shaking. I don't help. I let him do it. He slicks his fingers and reaches behind himself. His eyes go wide and he gasps, and his cock jumps against my stomach.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah?”
His eyes squeeze shut. Open again, dark.
“It's… I'm still…”
“Open?”
His finger moves inside himself. A small jerk of his hips.
“Yeah.”
“Good boy.”
He makes a sound at that. He gets himself ready quickly. He's clumsy. I love that he's clumsy. He rolls the condom on me and it's not smooth and his fingers are shaking and he's biting his lip the entire time.
Then he's positioning himself over me. And sinking down. Slow. An inch. Another inch. His head goes back. His mouth opens. I watch his throat work. I watch his cock bob against his stomach untouched. I put my hands on his hips and I don't grip, I don't push, I let him come down on me at his speed.
He bottoms out on me and his whole body shudders.
“Oh...”
“Yeah.”
His hand scrabbles at my sternum.
“Oh god...”
“I've got you.”
He puts his hands flat on my chest. His fingers find the scar on my ribs from a fight two years ago and they rest there. He's shaking. He's breathing through his teeth. His eyes are closed.
“Look at me,” I say.
He opens his eyes.
“There you are.”
“Yeah.”
“Move when you're ready.”
He moves.
He's slow. He's clumsy. He's finding the angle.
And then he finds it and his eyes roll back and he sinks down on me and rises and sinks again and my hands on his hips aren't guiding him anymore, they're just holding on.
He rides me. He rides me in my own bed at seven in the morning with the gray light coming in the window, his hair in his face, and the bruise I left on his neck moving in rhythm with the rest of him. I don't have words.
I sit up.
I sit up under him without breaking the angle. I wrap my arms around him and pull him in tight against my chest, and I fuck up into him from below while he rides me from above, and we meet each other in the middle, and he cries out into my shoulder.
“Mad Dog...”
“Yeah.”
I drive up harder. He cries out.
“Oh god... Mad Dog...”
“Come for me.”
I grip the back of his neck. Drag his forehead to mine.
“I can't, I can't...”
“Yes, you can. You don't even need a hand. You can, look at me, look at me...”
He looks at me.
He comes.
He comes between us with my eyes on his eyes and his cock trapped between our stomachs with my cock inside him and his fingers digging into my shoulders hard enough to bruise.
He comes and doesn't make a sound. He just opens his mouth and nothing comes out, and his whole body locks around me and I fuck him through it three, four, five, six strokes and then I lose it.
I lose it completely. I come inside him with my teeth in his shoulder over the mark I left last night, and I come, and I come, and I come.
We don't move.
His forehead is on mine.
Our breath is the same breath.
His cum is between our stomachs and my cum is inside him and the sheet's halfway off the bed and the gray light on his face is the softest thing I've ever seen.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
He huffs a laugh against my mouth.
“We should…”
“Yeah.”
His breath is still against my mouth.
“Paul.”
“Yeah.”
Neither of us moves.
I kiss him. I kiss him slow. I kiss him how he kissed me ten minutes ago, and I kiss him how he's going to need it when he walks out of this apartment and back into a house where a man is waiting to tell him who he is.
“Listen to me,” I say against his mouth.
“Yeah?”
I cup his jaw in both hands.
“You're mine.”
“Yeah.”
I tilt his chin up.
“Do you hear me?”
“Yeah.”
My thumb strokes his cheekbone. Once.
“Say it.”
“I'm yours.”
“Good.”
I ease him off me. I hold him while he comes off.
I clean him with the same care I did last night because he deserves it and because I'm apparently a man who does that now.
I get up. I find him a clean pair of boxers in my drawer that will be too big on him and I hand them over.
He puts them on. He pulls his jeans on over them.
He puts his shirt on inside out and I don't tell him because I like the look of him in my boxers with his shirt on wrong, walking around my apartment at quarter past seven in the morning like he belongs here.
He catches me watching.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He plants his hands on his hips.
“Maddox.”
“You look good in my place.”
He flushes. All the way down his throat.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
He picks up his phone off the bed. PAUL (14). He turns it over so he doesn't have to look at it.
“I have to go.”
“I know.”
He shoulders his coat.
“I'm…”
“I know.”
“If I don't come back…”
I pull him in by the front of his shirt.
“You'll come back.”
“If—”
My fist in his shirt tightens.
“Theo.”
“What?”
“You'll come back.”
He nods.
He puts his hands on my face. He kisses me one more time. Then he turns and picks up his coat and walks out of my apartment.
I stand in my kitchen.
I stand there in my underwear with his cum drying on my stomach and his mouth still on my mouth and the sound of the door click echoing in my bones.
I am in this.
I am in this all the way.
Fine. Let me be in it.
I put coffee on. I sit at the counter and watch the gray of the city go lighter and I think about the kid walking home and I think, If Paul puts a hand on him, I will break Paul's fucking hand off at the wrist.
The coffee machine beeps.
I pour a cup.
I drink it standing at the window.
I'm smiling.