Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Randall
I don't know where I thought I was fleeing to, but I jumped out of bed and went back downstairs. It was a foolish, immature move made by someone who should have known better. I was a grown man, not some teenager experiencing his first time. I’d known what I was getting myself into with Austin.
A few mind-blowing orgasms when stuck in a snowstorm with the literal only other person for miles shouldn’t have me confessing big feelings. Yet here we were.
Austin was kind and smart and funny. He was also intuitive.
We’d barely been together for twenty-four hours, and it was like he understood everything about me.
Even those things I tried to hide so as not to be a burden on the people around me.
Maybe especially those things. Like understanding me, the real me, was important to him.
I’d come out to him without thinking. Told him about David and my time in London, like I’d nothing to hide or to be embarrassed about.
And he’d been wonderful, perfect even, in his reaction when I had to work.
Hell, it had even felt like we’d been together forever when we’d prepared dinner the night before.
When he was near me, my body hummed. And when he touched me?
It exploded in ways I’d never known were possible.
Crazy as it may have sounded, twenty-four hours in, if it were it not for his age and his last name, I would have absolutely wanted to pursue something with Austin.
I knew it much more emphatically than I had about David after a year together.
And I knew, without a doubt, that what I felt for him was much more real than any silly puppy love I had felt for his father a lifetime ago.
But how could we possibly find a way, and why on earth would he want to?
I could hear him upstairs, though I made a point of not looking up there as I sat on the couch and propped my legs on the coffee table, my arms crossed. I assumed he was throwing his clothes back on. When he came down, he was wearing his sweatpants and nothing else.
I watched him descend the stairs, half naked and comfortable in a space I was still learning to call home.
He walked right up to me and looked at me once again like he knew what I was feeling. My body was wound tight, a scowl, pointed at the fireplace and not at him, firmly on my face. He sat on the coffee table and put a gentle hand on my leg.
“Randall?”
“It was a hookup, Austin. A bit of fun.”
“You don’t look like you’re having that much fun.”
“How do you do it? Different guy every night? No feelings? No emotions?”
He took his hand away and wrapped his arms around himself, mirroring me. There was a pause before he said, “I don’t.”
“But you said …”
“I said guys do it all the time, Randall, and I thought …” He stood in frustration, rounded the table, and stared at the fireplace, wrapping his arms around himself again. His back to me, he continued.
“I don’t know what I thought. I knew what I wanted. I wanted you. Hell, I took one look at you in that sad little bus depot, and I knew that. And we’re stuck here. And guys do it all the time.” He threw his hands up in frustration and stormed toward me.
I assumed his frustration would lead to anger.
I was used to David’s frustration ending up with him yelling at me.
Instead, he started laughing as he sat back down on the coffee table, nudging me until I dropped my legs, and he slid in, putting us face-to-face, our legs interlocked.
He knocked his two against one of mine playfully.
“How did I manage to get stuck with the only other gay man in Upstate New York who can’t navigate a hookup?
For Christ’s sake, Randall, look at us.” He took my hands, holding them lightly, playing with my fingers and watching them as he continued.
“We could be having all the no-pressure fun in the world.” He gave my hands a little squeeze.
“We could be fucking. We could be using each other. We could be getting off.” He shook his head “no” and finally looked up at me.
“But that’s not what I’m doing,” he whispered.
“It’s not?” I couldn’t look at him, so I concentrated on our knees instead, lined up in alternating shades of gray.
The wind howled from behind me. It was the only sound I could hear aside from the beating of my own heart.
I don’t know how long we sat there staring down at our hands and knees before Austin spoke.
“Tell me how I make you feel, Randall?”
“Why …” I said, and I had to clear my throat, embarrassed at the emotion there. I’d been going for obstinance. I had failed.
“Because I’m gonna tell you how I feel, and I don’t want to be left hanging.”
The words escaped me before I’d really thought them through, which was so unlike me. “You make me want to sing.”
“Sing?”
“Yeah, I putter around this place all alone. I cook, I do laundry, I drag firewood in. I even use the bloody hot tub outside every once in a while. But with you here? I want to compose a musical to all of those activities, and I want you and me to sing and dance our way through them.” I paused, my heart pounding in keeping with the exuberance I felt.
I tempered my emotion, though I couldn’t stop the beating of my heart. I sighed.
“I thought I wanted to be alone. The man who’d been the biggest part of my life just wasn’t anymore, and that barely phased me.
I didn’t reach out to my old friends, your parents,” I clarified.
“Or my homophobic family. My only friends are thousands of miles away, writing code, which we can still do together from any computer even if the company we work for keeps getting bigger and changing names. I even bought a home that is not very conducive to having guests over.”
“Oh,” Austin said softly before letting out a shuddering breath. “When you left me up there”—he tilted his head toward my bedroom loft—“I just assumed you were mainly wigging out about my parents, of course.”
“I should be wigging out about your parents! And I should be wigging out about telling you all this, about telling you anything. I should be wigging about your age and … and … Bloody Christ, Austin, we just met!”
Another gust of wind hit the side of the house, and Austin got up, grabbing the neatly folded blanket off the chair before sitting at my side and wrapping us both up in it. His bare chest was cold, but I felt an immediate warmth as he snuggled into me, and I put my arms around him.
He rested his head on my chest.
“I like you,” he said simply. “I like you, and I want to keep getting to know you, and I get that makes your life complicated. But maybe … You’ve tried to simplify your life here, and I get that, too, but that’s not how it works.
That’s not how it should work. I mean, you’re up here trying to hide, and my mother still hunted you down, for God’s sake.
Sometimes messy life just gets in the way. ”
“I didn’t want to see them,” I said quietly, unable to keep the truth from coming out.
“I know that.”
“You do?”
“I mean, I think I do. I was mostly asleep, but I didn’t dream it, did I? You said you couldn’t come out to my dad? I can’t imagine that was because you thought he was homophobic. Is it because … Did you have a crush on my dad, London?”
I nodded but didn’t respond otherwise, requiring him to look up at me.
“So is this all some weird …”
“No! It absolutely is not. You’re nothing like your dad.
No, that’s not entirely true. You have his kindness.
” I sat up straight, forcing him to do the same.
“But I need you to know that my very first thought was that you looked nothing like your dad. And more to importantly, when I got to England, I realized what I felt for your father … He was the first person, one of the only people in college, who was nice to me, hell, one of the only people to even pay attention to me. I didn’t have a lot of other friends, so I inflated how I felt about your dad.
I know that now. Hell, I knew it years ago, but I just felt too …
awkward to reach out to them after all those years.
Hi, it’s Randall. I ran away from you, but I’d like to be friends again.
Oh, by the way, I’m married now. To a man.
” It wasn’t that funny, but I scoffed at my foolish younger self.
“That is not what this is about, Austin. I don’t know what this is about.”
He leaned in and kissed me, lightly, tentatively. I felt like my body was exploding just the same. I relaxed into his touch and was about to encompass him in my arms and pull him down with me when he pulled back.
“This is about you and me. We may have just met, but there’s something here. Something worth exploring, isn’t there?”
“I …” I wanted to say that yes, of course there was, but what came out instead was, “I’m not very good at relationships.
I’ve only had the one, and as it turns out, I was in it for the wrong reasons.
” Instinctively, I was pushing him away, but why wouldn’t I?
The beautiful young man in front of me couldn’t really want to explore something with me.
He’d see that once his snowy world consisted of more than two people and one romantic fireplace.
“That’s okay,” he said with such kindness in his tone and such a soft smile on his face that it made me feel as if he understood everything about me. It hurt to have those eyes on me, embarrassed as I was with what he might see.
“I’m not in a rush,” he continued. “HU is less than an hour from here. I get that you’re not out, and I would never rush you in that, so if we ever get out of this cabin, I think we just put whatever this is on pause when we get to Jersey. But after the holidays ...”