Chapter 9 Soucy
Lundy sat across the aisle reading a paperback with the spine cracked so hard it was two paperbacks. I pretended to sleep. Didn't.
Hotel rooms on the road all smell the same. Recycled air and industrial clean.
Lundy drops his bag on the wrong bed. The one closer to the bathroom. He looks at me like he's daring me to say something about it.
“You always take the door side,” I say.
“Not tonight.” He moves the bag to the floor. “Tonight I’m taking the one you didn’t pick.”
Small, stupid thing to do with a bag. It lands harder than it should. What he's actually saying is I rearranged my pattern for yours.
Nobody does that.
He shuts the door and leans back against it.
“You’ve been looking at me since the third,” he says.
“I always look at you. It’s a depth chart.”
“Not like that, it isn’t.”
“No.” There’s no point spending the managed version on him. We left that in a parked car a week ago. Neither of us went back for it. “Not like that.”
“It’s been eight days,” he says.
“You’re counting too.”
“I count the ones that matter. Eight days since the car, and we’ve been in the same vehicle twice a day since, and neither of us did a thing about it.”
“I was waiting for you to be sure.”
“I’ve been sure since about October. I was waiting for you to catch up to your own depth chart.”
“I caught up.”
“I noticed.” He doesn’t move off the door. Leaves the floor to me.
So I cross it.
The thing my brain does, the locking-on, turns out to have a use I never found. I never wanted anything badly enough to aim it.
I aim it now.
His jaw. His mouth when I reach it. The sound in his chest when my hands find the hem of his shirt.
“You’ve done this before,” I say against his mouth. It isn’t a question.
“Yeah.”
“A lot?”
“Enough.” He doesn’t dress it up. I appreciate that. Dressing it up would be a lie and we’re out of those. “None of it was this. Don’t go building a model out of it.”
“I build a model out of everything.”
“I know you do. Build it tomorrow.”
“Hey.” He breaks off an inch. Both hands framing my face. Steady. Reading me the way he reads a shooter at the top of the crease.
“We’ve got all the time there is. We don’t have to do anything tonight. You set the pace, and you can stop it anywhere, and I won’t ask why.”
“I know what I want.”
“Then tell me. I’m not going to guess at you. Not with this.”
And here is the sentence I’ve never said to a living person. The truest thing I own.
“I’ve never wanted anyone.” My hands have gone still against his chest. Not the counting gone quiet. The opposite. Every circuit I have is pointed at him.
“Before. Anyone. My whole life I thought wanting was a thing everyone else got issued and I’d been built without, and I made my peace with the building.”
I hold his eyes because he should get to watch me say it.
“There’s a word for what I am. Demisexual.
I’ve had it for years. My therapist didn’t hand it to me like a diagnosis.
I found it and it fit, the way a piece of equipment fits when it’s been cut for your hand and nobody else’s.
The attraction wasn’t missing and it wasn’t locked and I wasn’t saving it.
It just doesn’t start until someone gets all the way in, and nobody ever got all the way in. ”
I don’t look away.
“Then it was you. I’ve never wanted anyone before. I want you.”
He’s done this before. He carries a whole framework for it. A man who has wanted and been wanted and learned the steps cold.
I watch the framework set itself down between us. No one has ever handed him a first one. A first one has no steps.
His thumb drags slow across my cheekbone. When he answers, his voice has gone to gravel.
“Okay,” he says. Same word he used for the name, except nothing easy in it now. It lands weighted.
A man who knows exactly what he’s being trusted with.
“Jules. Come here.”
The bed is four steps and my hands aren’t steady, which is new information, because my hands hold under a hundred miles an hour of vulcanized rubber and they don’t shake, and they’re shaking now reaching for the hem of his shirt. He notices. Of course he notices.
“We can slow down,” he says.
“I don’t want slow. I want to stop being nervous and I can’t, so I’d rather just be nervous and have you anyway.”
He gets his shirt over his head and then mine, unhurried, giving my hands something to do that isn’t trembling, and then it’s skin against skin for the first time and the nerves go sideways into something with more current in it.
The lamp stays on because I want to see.
He stretches back against the pillows and lets me look, lets me take inventory the way I take inventory of everything.
The breadth of his shoulders. The cut of his hips.
The hard line of his cock flushed dark against his stomach, already wet at the slit, already like that because of me.
I made that happen. I’ve spent my whole life certain the part of me that could want this was simply absent, and there’s the proof I was wrong, straining toward me in the lamplight.
“You’re staring,” he says, and his voice isn’t steady either.
“I’m reading.”
“Read with your hands. Please.”
So I do. I put my palm flat on his stomach and feel it jump, and I drag it down through the trail of hair and wrap my fist around his cock and he makes a sound like it’s been pulled out of the bottom of him.
I learn him the way I learn everything, by total attention, by watching what catches his breath and doing it again to confirm the read.
A slow stroke to the head and back. The drag of my thumb through the slick gathering at the tip, spreading it down, and his hips lifting off the bed to chase my hand.
“Like that?”
“Tighter. God, Jules, just like that, where did you.”
“From you. Ten seconds ago. I’m a fast study and you’re easy to read.”
“I’m not usually.” He laughs, ragged, undone already. “You’re going to ruin me, you know that. You’re already ruining me and you’ve barely.”
I want more than my hand on him. The want arrives complete and certain, same engine as my reads, no hesitation once I see it, and I slide down the bed before I can let the nervous part of me build a case against it. He gets a hand in my hair, not pushing, just there.
“You don’t have to,” he says. “I mean it. Don’t do anything to prove something.”
“I’m not proving anything. I want to know what you taste like.” It comes out flat and certain, flat and unsanded, how the true things always leave me, and I watch it land on him like a hit.
And then I take him in my mouth, and the first thing is the heat of him, the weight of him on my tongue, the salt of him at the tip, and the second thing is the sound Lundy makes, low and broken, my name in it.
I understand all at once that the focus I’m running right now isn’t the loop, not the counting, not the pattern that dogs me.
This is appetite, finally lit. Orientation in motion.
The same faculty, maybe, but aimed by want instead of driven by alarm, and the difference is total.
I’m not nervous anymore. I’m the most certain I’ve ever been off a sheet of ice.
I take him deeper and learn the limit and work back from it, listening with my whole body to what makes his breath stutter, building the read in real time and giving it back to him better.
“Look at you,” he breathes, watching me with his control already coming apart at the seams. “Look at you, you’re, fuck, Jules, you’re a natural, of course you are. You’re thorough at everything.”
I hum around him because I can’t answer with my mouth full and because I want to feel him jerk when I do, and he does, and his hand fists tighter in my hair without pulling, and the noises he’s making are the least managed thing I’ve ever heard from him.
Then he’s tugging me up, gentle and insistent.
“Come here, come up here, I want, I need to do you too, I’m not finishing without my mouth on you.”
He rolls us so I’m under him, his weight settling down the whole length of me, and he braces on a forearm and looks at me until I can’t look away.
“Nobody’s ever gotten to do this for you,” he says, and it isn’t a question, it’s a thing he’s holding carefully. “Let me be the one nobody. Let me make your first one good.”
I don’t have an argument. I don’t have anything but the want and the trust, which it turns out are the same thing now.
He kisses down my body the slow way I did his, and when he takes me in his mouth the entire managed surface of me goes to static.
I make a sound I’ve never made. My hands find his hair and hold on, because there’s nothing in the world but heat and his tongue and the obscene patient skill of him, and the wanting underneath it, the care, the fact that this is Soren and he’s doing this because he wants me to feel good, not as a transaction, as a gift.
The first language comes up through the cracks before I can catch it. Oh, calisse, Soren.
He pulls off just far enough to ruin me with his voice. “Yeah. That. I want to hear you, give it all to me,” and then he takes me deep again and the English goes.
It builds with nowhere managed to put it.
He pins my hips when they buck and takes everything and hums around me like I’m the best thing he’s ever had in his mouth, and his eyes come up to find mine, holding them, making sure I know exactly who this is.
I’m gone, babbling, viens, je vais, s’il te pla?t, Soren, the words spilling out unsanded because there’s nothing left to sand them with.
“I’m going to,” I get out, the last English I own, a warning, and he doesn’t pull off, he takes me through it with my fingers laced in his on the sheet, and I come harder than I ever have in my life, the whole architecture coming down at once, no surface, no count, no managed anything, just a body finally allowed to be only a body and a name in my mouth that means home.
I’m still shaking when I reach for him, because I need to give it back, and he’s close enough already that it takes almost nothing, my fist tight the way he showed me and my mouth at the hinge of his jaw and his real name said low against his skin, again and again, Soren, Soren, like I’m learning it.
He chases my hand and his breath goes short and his forehead drops to mine.
“Like that. Don’t stop. God, look at me when I…”
I look at him. I keep my eyes on his and my hand moving and I tell him the true thing in the only language that’s left, watching the exact second his control finally goes, his whole face opening, and he breaks apart over my knuckles saying my name like it costs him something to give it away.
I catch every frame of it. I’ll be replaying this one on purpose for the rest of my life.
After. The lamp still on. His heart going under my ear.
The what-now starts to stack. He feels it begin, because he reads me. His hand comes up into my hair and stops it before it builds.
“Not tonight,” he says. “No list tonight. You wanted something, you said it out loud, you got it. That’s the whole entry.”
“That’s not how my brain files things.”
“I know. Let me hold this page for you. Just this one. You can audit it in the morning.”
“In the morning I’ll have forty questions.”
“I’ve got a long road trip and nowhere else to be. Ask me all forty.”
“Question one,” I say.
“Already. I said morning.”
“It’s a stupid one. I’m getting it out of the way first, like you told me to.”
“Go.”
“Was that normal. For a first time. For me.”
“There’s no normal. There’s what we did, and what we did was good. Really good, Jules. You don’t get to audit that one down.” A beat. “Was that one of the forty?”
“Free sample. The forty start tomorrow.”
“I’m going to need a nap before the forty.”
“You said long road trip, nowhere to be.”
“I did say that. Past me was generous with present me’s time.”
He laughs at something in that. The whole-chest one.
I keep the sound. It goes somewhere I’ve decided never to audit.
His hand keeps moving through my hair. Slow and even. A pattern I’m not running because he’s running it for me.
“You’re still thinking,” he says, eyes shut.
“I’m always thinking.”
“The allowed kind, or the audit kind.”
“Allowed. The cat. If I’m getting one I should do it before the next round starts, so it settles in before I leave it with a sitter for a road trip.”
“That’s not a stupid question. That’s a plan.”
“It’s not a question at all. It’s a decision I’m apparently making out loud in a hotel bed.”
“Best place for it.” His thumb traces the shell of my ear. “What would you call it.”
“I don’t know yet. You don’t name a thing before you’ve met it. You don’t know what it is.”
“You named the goalposts before they’d done anything.”
“The goalposts earned it later. Go to sleep.”
It’s the most reckless thing I’ve ever done. Wanting out loud in a room that smells like every other room. No guarantee it was safe.
I told him the truest thing I own with the lights on. He took it weighted.
His heartbeat in my ear. No urge to rebuild anything tonight.
Its own kind of save. The kind nobody scores and everybody remembers.
?