Chapter Eleven You Tell Me What You Need #3
“Move to the floor,” Owen demands, motioning with his hand before slipping back to the couch. “Sit in front of me.” He keeps
his legs spread so that Jacob can settle right between them.
“What are you going to do?” Jacob asks him, barely glancing over his shoulders.
“Well, I can’t do anything with your split ends,” Owen tells him. Scissors were near the top of the cruise company’s contraband
list. “But I can at least get rid of some of these knots. And maybe do something about how thirsty your hair is.”
“It’s not that bad, right?” Jacob’s asks, voice charmingly innocent.
Owen shakes his head, running his fingers through Jacob’s hair to get a feel for where the worst of the knots are. “Just watch
the movie.” Owen straightens Jacob’s head, forcing him to look forward.
It’s not as if Jacob has completely neglected his hair. It’s still soft as Owen rakes his hands through the curls. Owen knows that they’re both enjoying this
way too much.
“What do you use?” Owen asks. “You switched shampoo.”
“I can’t find the brand you showed me anywhere in the UK.”
“So . . .” Owen presses. “What are you using instead?”
Owen can’t see Jacob’s face, but he does notice the way his shoulders scrunch.
“Jacob Jon Morrison . . .” Owen lectures.
“Head and Shoulders.”
Owen had spent years breaking Jacob of what everyone in their friend group labeled Jacob’s “straight-boy habits”: not putting things back where they belong, leaving kitchen cabinets open, not washing his hair down the drain when he shaved, leaving his clothes on the floor, using five-in-one products in the shower.
“I’m sorry!” Jacob cries. “I tried to find the other stuff, but it’s so expensive to get it shipped.”
“It’s fine,” Owen groans. At least Jacob won’t have a dandruff problem. “Just sit back.”
Jacob visibly relaxes under Owen’s touch, his head falling between Owen’s thighs, so dangerously comfortable as he lets Owen
wield his brush. Owen is careful, not wanting to pull at anything. He works a handful of the knots out, the more stubborn
ones requiring a bit of force that leaves Jacob hissing. By the time Superman is reversing the rotation of the Earth to save
Lois Lane, Owen’s got a small pile of Jacob’s hair laid out on the coffee table.
“What’s that?” Jacob asks as Owen reaches for a pink bottle.
“Something that’ll help prevent knots in the future,” Owen scolds. “You need a haircut.”
“I know, I know,” Jacob tells him. “I just haven’t had the time. Been busy.”
Owen hums as he moves the dropper all along Jacob’s scalp, setting the bottle aside to massage the serum into the roots. Jacob’s
head lifts, relaxing under Owen’s touch, rocking back and forth subtly enough that Owen can’t be sure if Jacob’s even aware
he’s doing it.
These sorts of nights were a common occurrence once.
Typically, it’d begin with Owen cleaning his nails in the living room while he did hair and face masks.
Eventually Jacob got curious about all the things Owen did.
It hardly took any convincing at all for Jacob to let Owen slather his face with a volcanic pore mask while doing a number on Jacob’s worn cuticles, clipping hangnails and applying oils to help smooth the skin around his nailbeds.
“How does that feel?” Owen asks him, rubbing his fingers deep into Jacob’s scalp.
“So nice . . .” He can hear the smile in Jacob’s voice as he begins to massage a touch harder, the serum long absorbed.
Now he’s just doing it for his own satisfaction.
“Hand me that.” Owen motions to the small blue tub, meant to help rehydrate. Owen and Jacob don’t have the same hair texture;
where Owen’s curls are far looser, a bit wavier, Jacob’s are tighter, unrulier, especially when grown out.
“Smells good,” Jacob says as Owen begins to apply the mask carefully, starting at Jacob’s roots before he spreads it.
“It helps me a lot with dryness.”
“And I’m guessing that’s an issue you deal with a lot?” Jacob’s tone is playful.
“All right,” Owen grumbles. “Who just spent the better part of an hour working out the pile of knots in your hair?”
“Ow! Okay, okay!” Jacob winces as Owen digs into his scalp. “How long did it take you to get that blond?”
“Almost all day,” Owen admits.
“All day?” Jacob exclaims. “You’re joking.”
“I am not,” Owen says plainly. “We tried to do it with a box kit, but it was a mess. Took them hours at the salon to fix it.”
He’d even ordered dinner for himself and the stylist.
“Hmm . . .” Jacob hums, his attention seeming to wander to the tattoos on Owen’s calf. “Is that one new?”
Owen nods. “That was the first one I got after we broke up, actually,” he says, eyeing the cowboy riding a bull that sits where Jacob stares. He tries his best to say the words calmly, like they’re normal.
“How many more have you gotten since?” Jacob asks.
Owen has to think for a moment. “Fourteen? Fifteen, maybe?” It comes out as more of a question than he means for it to.
Jacob lets out a low whistle. “Things got that bad, huh?” He means the words as a joke, but Owen can’t deny the sting he feels.
Then again, maybe talking about the breakup is how they find this supposed middle ground.
“This one is new too,” Jacob says, pointing to the can of sardines on Owen’s other calf, and the mozzarella stick on his knee
that he spent an hour lining up properly to get the right cheese-pulling effect when his knee is extended.
“You’ll like this one.” Owen beams proudly as he lifts his sweatshirt.
“Mechagodzilla!” Jacob exclaims as he turns to get a better look at Owen as he shows off the robotic kaiju. It’s been rendered
down to just a few inches so it can fit next to his ribs.
Jacob leans closer. “Did it hurt?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.” Owen cringes as he recalls the pain, Conor forcing several breaks during the session. The shading
of the metal and the explosion had done a number on him.
“I don’t know how you do it.” Jacob shakes his head. “My chest was bad enough.”
“I told you that we could do numbing cream,” Owen nags, sinking deeper into the couch. “But no, you had to be the big man
who didn’t need numbing cream because it’s for babies.”
“Do you want to know the truth?” Jacob asks, careful curiosity in his voice.
“The truth?” Owen asks, watching Jacob nod. “About what, exactly?”
“About why I didn’t want the numbing cream,” he says, cheeks flushed. “I, uh . . . I thought it’d impress you.”
“What?”
“I thought not doing the cream would impress you,” Jacob repeats, only further embarrassed.
Owen pauses, looking Jacob right in the eye. Then he bursts out laughing. “That’s so stupid.”
“I know . . .” Jacob hides his shame by covering his face with his hands.
“It’s there to make your experience less painful, Jacob. I literally offered it to you,” Owen tells him, like it’s not obvious.
“I know! I know!” Jacob parrots. “I just wanted you to think I was cool!”
Owen smiles so tenderly at the man who captured his heart and has refused to let go. “You’re silly.”
Jacob smiles back. “But it worked, didn’t it?”
“Not really,” Owen says, still able to recall the appointment. “You cried, remember?”
“But then you had to comfort me,” Jacob says with a satisfied smile. “So I got the attention I wanted.”
“And somehow I wasn’t completely turned off by you.” Owen chuckles.
“I like to think my winning personality and dazzling smile made up for it.”
“Your tip was pretty generous too.”
“Yeah it was!” Jacob blurts out, holding his hand out for Owen to take.
“I’m not rewarding you for that,” Owen says, unable to hide his smile at the memory of that night.
Afterward, as Owen wrestled with getting the thin layer of Saniderm off the application sheet, Jacob had looked down at him
and asked, “Do you want to go on a date with me?”
Owen had hesitated, completely caught off guard.
He’d dated before. Boyfriends, girlfriends, partners. None of Owen’s relationships lasted for long, though. Either they fizzled
out or ended up being far less serious than Owen wanted them to be. It’s not like he was desperate for a soulmate; he didn’t want to find the love
of his life at the ripe old age of twenty-five.
But . . . maybe he did?
Maybe that’s what he’d pictured when he thought of asking Jacob out. And yeah, maybe he’d spent too long romanticizing this
fictional relationship with a man he’d never worked up the courage to ask out himself. When he thought about Jacob, he thought
about laughter. He thought about warmth, about that smile. He thought about the gap between his two front teeth, and the freckles
on his shoulders that Owen noticed the first time he saw Jacob in a tank top. He thought about Jacob hunched over his laptop
as he watched some new documentary just minutes after it dropped. He thought about the dinner that Jacob tried to make for
the two of them one night, burning the chicken until it was charcoal before he offered to order off DoorDash.
He thought of care, and joy, and laughter. Of home.
And love.
“Yeah,” he’d said, smiling at Jacob. “I’d love to.”
Now Owen scoots back into the couch, situating a throw pillow behind his back so that he can lie stretched out again, keeping his leg elevated.
Only, he can’t get comfortable. The movie finally wraps up, and Jacob entertains the idea of forcing Owen to sit through a Star Wars movie but instead pulls up old episodes of Family Guy, another straight-boy habit that Owen couldn’t break him of.
At least the edible makes it a bit funnier.
“You’re feeling okay?” Jacob asks, hopping up to rejoin Owen on the couch.
“Yeah,” Owen tells him, stretching out his limbs back and forth slowly to test his range of motion, the shoulder still tender.
“You’re shuffling a lot over there,” Jacob says, eyeing Owen suspiciously.
“Yeah, the couch is . . .” Owen reaches awkwardly behind him to fluff the pillow again. “Uncomfortable.”
Jacob motions with his hands. “Move over.”
“Huh?”
“Give me the pillow.”
Owen sits up, handing Jacob the pillow as he was told and watching as Jacob sets it on his thigh. And when Owen doesn’t move