Chapter 2
CHAPTER 2
MARSHALL
My husband always gets me in trouble.
He’s been dead five years so you would think he would quit speaking in my brain, but there it is. His voice loud and clear.
Although, sometimes I wonder if it’s him or my subconscious trying to tell me what I need to hear.
Maybe it’s both.
Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Thanks, Keith.
Some days I feel lost without him. I was twenty-four and more or less fresh out of law school when we met. He was older by fifteen years and a hell of a lot of life experience. This past May I turned the same age as he was when we started dating—thirty-nine. It was a birthday I had dreaded coming. I wracked my brain trying to determine what it meant. Was it a full-circle moment somehow?
To celebrate the occasion, my good friend and former law partner, Lincoln Rutherford, had invited me to vacation with him. He knew that birthday would be an odd one for me, so I traveled down to Lin’s place on The Wyn, a resort island off the Gulf Coast of Florida.
Lin had been the voice of reason on that birthday and had been damn right about me not spending it alone. Instead, I had spent it with Lin and his husband, Ryke. They had an age gap similar to the one Keith and I had shared. Same for their best friends who lived down there too, but somehow I never was the odd one out even with the two couples.
There was sun and beaches and attractive boys in tight shorts who set out my chair and umbrella each morning. There were drinks and five-star dining experiences and friendship with old pals. Not just pals, but former law partners. We had been through some things together.
Still, it was Keith, or his voice at least, who noticed that I was watching the young men more intently than the older ones.
We weren’t perfect, but I had loved Keith. Most people never have that much, so I never looked for anything but one night of companionship in the years after he was gone. Not even a night, really. Always with older men—what I knew. What I had been attracted to since I was eighteen and first acknowledged that it was only men, and not women, that got my engine running. Only men and the older the better.
But, that birthday trip had turned everything on its head.
I struggled in the months since my birthday with the fact I am now the older guy, and instead of being attracted to other older men as I had assumed would always be my preference, I’m now attracted to younger men.
All I got from Keith was a smug little “uh huh” in the back of my brain, like he wanted to welcome me to some club.
Until this last month, when that smug little voice started having commentary.
Yeah, definitely cute, he said of the guy stocking the produce in Trader Joe’s.
Were you checking out his ass, Marsh? I did, he said of the college kid jogging by me in the park.
So here I am, the older guy, checking out guys a decade younger with my dead husband’s voice as a guide. Perfectly normal.
And then there is last night.
Holy shit last night.
There sure was . Keith’s voice kicks in like he’s lounging in bed with a cigarette in some post-sex scene from a black and white movie.
I had used an app and found the hottest young guy I had seen in a while. He was tall but muscular, with curly light brown hair and hazel eyes.
There was a light in those eyes, a spark of something, that ensnared me from the moment he opened the door to his extended-stay hotel room. It was playful but intelligent. I wanted to ask him where he was from or what he did for a living, but those were not the kinds of questions one asked on a hookup.
He had kissed me like a desperate man, and something clicked. A need to slow it down and show him that one could be eager and still savor the moment.
After that, I was fucked because it was clear he was used to the quick and easy of hookup culture. The idea of showing the earnest young man the world of pleasure? To lead him to it? It got me off like nothing ever had before.
And we had savored everything—right through the most epic blow job of my life.
I shake my head in the present day, trying to clear it of last night’s escapades and focus on the case in front of me. That’s never a problem—I can always focus on a case. Always get the job done.
Except today, I want to remember last night.
“Yes?” I answer to the sharp rap at my door, not looking up, but moving my computer tabs back to the arrangement that suit me to work on this case.
I click out of the tab I had open for the private investigator the firm sometimes uses. Not that I would engage firm resources to track down a hookup, of course. That would be…crazy.
“Your intern is here,” Penny calls, and I can tell she dropped that bit of information for my benefit, as I had indeed forgotten he was arriving today.
Lin sent me one of his eager 3L, or last-year law students, who was working on a law review article and could both get experience from my work that specialized in his topic of AIDS and HIV advocacy as well as help me out on a big case this summer.
“Come in,” I call, straightening my typical button-down and khakis I wore for a day in the office as I stand to meet him.
Only, the guy standing awkwardly in my doorway isn’t some intern Lin had sent me, but my guy from last night.
Keith, at least, was blissfully silent.
Not even a chuckle.