Chapter 14
CHAPTER 14
MARSHALL
This is so much more than a summer fling.
I can feel a tug toward Jasper and he’s just across the living room.
“So, you can cook,” Jasper says. He’s in nothing but his briefs and a too-big shirt of mine.
For some reason I can’t stop looking at his bare feet on my floors. He is looking through the built-in shelves that line the living room, oblivious to my new obsession.
The smell of sex is still in the air, tempered now by the smell of steak and mushroom ravioli I am finishing for dinner.
There is nothing left to do except wait for the steaks to rest for a few minutes, so I walk over to where he stands, enjoying the view of his long, bare legs sticking out from under my shirt.
Jasper swirls a glass of wine and smiles up at me.
“This must be you and Keith.” Jasper gestures to a picture sitting on the bookshelf of us on our wedding day on the beach. Keith looks younger in this one than the one at Black Diamond.
I like that picture, Keith says.
He always says that. That’s why it’s here. It’s his favorite.
“It was Keith’s favorite,” I tell Jasper, only to hear Keith’s quiet hum of appreciation at being acknowledged.
This is where most hookups have gotten…squirrelly, for lack of a better word.
He’s no hookup. I’m not sure if that’s me or Keith I’m hearing.
But Jasper doesn’t shy away from the fact I was married before to a man I loved. Just like he hasn’t shied away from the intensity of the cases we handle at work.
Out of the corner of my eye I see his lips rise as he watches me look at the picture of me and Keith.
“Tell me about him.”
It surprises me for a moment, but it shouldn’t. Jasper is a straightforward kind of guy.
Still, it pleases me somewhere deep when he wants to know about Keith.
I move back to the kitchen area so I can finish our dinner. If I’m being honest, I’m giving my hands something to do.
“Keith was a lot older than me. Like I said at lunch the other day, he was from Bear Valley originally. I met him when I worked for a firm in Denver.”
“You said he was a doctor here.”
“Yeah. And Keith was HIV positive,” I tell Jasper in a rush. All he shows is compassion and a look that prods me to tell more.
“He’s the reason you do what you do?” he asks, sliding onto a barstool to watch me slice up the steaks at the island counter in front of him.
“I met him when I worked on his case. I was a young lawyer, really green, but I did know a lot about employment law, and I worked at a big firm that wanted me to get experience. He chose the firm due to his friendship with Lin—Professor Rutherford. His employment discrimination case was our meet-cute. A hospital in Denver started discriminating against him because of his HIV status. At the time, he was positioned to be chief of surgery.”
Jasper takes a drink of wine, rolling his hand for me to continue.
“Keith was very involved in advocating for HIV/AIDS rights and issues. He never shied away from who he was and what he wanted. Not even in the rough last days.”
“Do you want to talk about that?”
I shake my head. “No. We had it better than most. Money wasn’t an issue. But, he missed out—just bad timing—on all the experimental stuff. He caught a respiratory infection, something that would have been nothing, and didn’t even make it halfway through the time we thought he had.”
“That’s tough.”
“It is, but he also wanted me to live on. With our age gap, that was something we had talked about well before, even before the disease was an issue. Keith always told people about my work on his case, a case I won by the way, and one thing became another.”
“It became your career.”
I smile. “It did. I’m proud of the work I do,” I pause, grating the last bit of cheese over the dish before I finish it with some Italian parsley. “When Keith died, I wondered for a while if part of my drive for this work was because of him. But, I found that it had morphed into my own sort of passion.”
“I’m glad.”
I slide over a napkin and fork for our dishes as he tops off our wine.
“Jasper.”
He blinks up at me, as if he’s a million miles away thinking.
“This looks amazing, thank you,” he says, noticing the food.
I lay a hand on his arm as I slide onto my own stool next to him.
“You should know that I told you that first night, what’s on the app, is true. Despite our years together, we were always careful. Keith was a doctor and knew the risks. Knew the limits. I get tested regularly, of course, but if I were to have contracted anything from Keith, I would well know by now. I haven’t. But, I know what most guys think about hooking up with someone who had an HIV positive lover.” I search his eyes, not wanting it to be a shock.
“And what I said that night was true. I’m on PrEP. We even used a condom that night.”
I groan. Despite how well he drained me earlier, my dick wants to rally at the thought of his blow jobs. And yeah, he rocked my world even over the dulled sensitivity of a condom. It was so good; I had even forgotten that fact. I can’t imagine what it would be like with his lips on my skin.
I knock my shoulder into his. “Dinner. The least I can do is feed you a decent meal, beautiful. Eat.”