19. Everett
CHAPTER 19
EVERETT
I watched Kyle’s dad and brother leave Waffles? for their respective cars, one black and white and lights all over and the other a plain blue sedan that somehow still managed to scream “cop car!” to me. I turned to Kyle, who was paying the bill—the sneak. “So. I think your dad might just hate me.”
“Yeah, he does that,” Kyle said, but there was a little smile on his face instead of the frown I was expecting. “You should have seen him when I brought my first date home to meet the family. He interrogated the poor guy to within an inch of his life, and he was just picking me up so we could go to the movies.”
“Oh, ouch.”
“Yeah, I was fifteen. It was terribly embarrassing but I was too nervous back then to call my dad on it.”
I batted my eyelashes and leaned in. “Aw, does that mean you’ll fend off your dad’s interrogation tactics for me?”
I was being facetious, but the look Kyle gave me was something between tender and…was that smoldering? No one had ever smoldered at me before, so I wasn’t sure, but the lowered eyelashes, that twist to his lips that made me want to kiss them, the way he closed the distance between us until I could smell his bodywash…that had to be a smolder. “Don’t worry, Everett. I’ll protect you.”
Oh my God. Was this why women liking strong, intense men was such a cliché? I was half tempted to press my hand to my chest, and I knew for a fact I was blushing like an idiot. On the other hand, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to segue into what I really wanted. “Does that mean I can stay at your place tonight?”
The smolder dimmed a bit as Kyle considered that. “I’d love for you to spend the night,” he said, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “But will your family be okay with that?”
I shrugged. “I’m an adult. I mean, yeah, if it was my night to cook then I’d have to give them more notice, but I don’t honestly think anyone really notices if I’m there or not.” As long as I made my shifts and got my work done, Dad could go on treating me as invisible and not having any hard conversations with me, the same as he did with his other kids. Maybe that was unworthy of him, but it was what I thought. “And I’d rather be with you,” I added with way more enthusiasm.
“Okay, but I’m warning you right now, the cats like to sleep on the bed,” he said as he carefully got out of the booth and reached for his jacket. I helped him pull it on so he wouldn’t have to strain his ribs. “Patches is pretty good about staying in one place, but Jeff sometimes likes to wake up in the middle of the night and make biscuits in your hair.”
“I thought cats were nocturnal,” I said as we made our way outside into the cool evening air. It smelled like gasoline and cooking oil out here, and our cars, average though they were, were by far the nicest ones in the parking lot. There was a low hum from the neon sign over our heads, one that hitched and broke every few seconds as the question mark flickered on and off. The only trash can to be seen was overflowing with trash, and I was pretty sure I saw the glinting eyes of a raccoon in the storm drain to our right, just waiting for us to leave before it indulged in a feast.
It wasn’t a pretty picture, but with Kyle beside me, the scene went from dystopian video game setting to fun date night. Was that what finding someone you loved did? It made even the most mundane things seem a little bit better and the hard things a little easier to handle?
It took me a second to realize I was missing Kyle’s response thanks to staring at him like I was obsessed. “—think they’re crepuscular, actually,” he was saying. “It means?—”
“More active at dawn and dusk, right,” I interrupted, like a jerk, but he just smiled at me.
“Of course you know that,” he said.
“I, um. Yeah.” Now wasn’t the time to go down the rabbit hole of why I knew what crepuscular meant—I’d been searching for words that sounded like insults but weren’t so I could call my brother names without my mom getting mad at me when I was eleven. “I’ve got spare clothes and stuff in my car, so we could just go straight to your place, if you want.”
“Sounds good.” He headed toward his car and I watched him walk away, because why not, then went to my own and—oh, wow. I guess I parked that kind of crookedly, and…wait, was that a ticket? I snatched it off the windshield.
“Illegally parked in a handicapped—dude!” I was barely inside the line of the handicapped spot next to my car, which was huge. A truck could have gotten in there no problem. I checked the signature at the bottom of the ticket, and yep, Detective Bowman. Looks like I’d gotten my own version of interrogated after all. “What a jerk.”
I could talk to Kyle about it and see if his dad could get me off the hook, but…I didn’t want that to be the way things went between us. There was no Code Blue, as far as I was concerned. No giving family outs that normal people didn’t get. Besides, I was technically over the stupid, almost invisible line. So, fine, I’d take my lumps and pay the thirty-five dollars and start quietly plotting my revenge. His dad was going to get signed up for so many mortuary magazines. So. Many.
I’d regained my sense of equilibrium by the time I got to Kyle’s house. I grabbed my spare bag out of the back of the car, then walked up and knocked on his front door. Kyle opened it with a smile, and I had to work not to reach and sweep him off his feet right there because he probably wouldn’t appreciate being swept while he had bruised ribs. Luckily, there was someone I could sweep off their feet standing right next to him, meowing up a storm. I hoisted Jeff into my arms and nuzzled his soft, furry side with my nose.
“Nice to see you too,” I laughed at the purring cat, then gave him scritches under his chin until he flipped onto his back—while in my arms, which took some acrobatic skill but he managed it—so I could reach better. “Your cat is so awesome,” I said to Kyle, who was looking at me with his mouth open, like he was about to say something and had decided better of it. “Have you already fed the fish?” I asked as I stepped inside.
“Um, no.” He pushed his glasses a little farther up his nose. “They need it, but I know you like it, so…”
Aw, he was helping me make inroads with Steve! “You’re the best,” I told him as I put Jeff down on the floor. Then I leaned in and kissed Kyle right on the nose. I loved nose kisses almost as much as I did regular kisses. “Shrimp dinner for them?”
“Mmm.”
“Nice.” I peered into the tank and instantly picked out Steve, who was swimming in aggressive back-and-forth motions in the near corner of the tank. “Dude, your daddy spoils you so much,” I told him. “You need to save some of this shrimp for the others, got it? No being a food hog.” Cat still in hand, I opened up the top of the tank, then reached for the shrimp.
You know who else likes shrimp? Cats. Before I could dump it into the tank, Jeff began climbing up my pantleg to get the bowl. “Ow, fuck!” I managed to get most of the shrimp into the tank, but only because I lost my grip on the bowl itself and the entire thing went plop down through the hole in the top and then drifted, trailing soft pink bodies, down until it hit the gravel. It was immediately obscured by feeding piranhas, while Jeff had abandoned me completely at this point and was snarfing up the shrimp that had fallen to the floor.
“Jeff, you asshole,” Kyle snapped. Jeff just purred like a tiny freight train, ignoring our glares, while Patches stared with an air of regal disapproval from where she was lying on the back of the couch. “Are you all right? He didn’t scratch you, did he?”
I inspected my hand. “No, I’m good,” I said. “Sorry about the bowl, though. I’ll get it out.”
Kyle grabbed my arm. “Maybe wait until they’re done eating,” he said. “The last thing we need is for you to lose a finger in there.”
He was so nice. “Good call.”
“Here, let me show you the rest of this place.” He went to pick up my bag, but I saw the wince on his face clear as day and snatched it up before he could go more than ten degrees over.
“I’ve got it.”
He took me back to his bedroom, where I duly admired his king-sized bed, goddamn, and put my bag on the floor by the wall where I wouldn’t trip over it in the night if I had to get up. When I looked back at him, Kyle was staring at me with a gaze that was somewhere between hungry and resigned.
I got it. Here we were, in his bedroom, none of our family members around to ruin the mood, but with his ribs the way they were, we couldn’t fool around the way I think both of us were looking forward to.
That didn’t mean we didn’t have options, though. “Do you like blowjobs?” I assumed he did, somewhere between seventy-two and ninety-four percent of men were rated as finding the act “very appealing,” and while I was one of them, I also really liked giving them. It felt straightforward to me, and I liked straightforward, but there were also so many ways to tailor it to what the other person enjoyed. I might have had just a few boyfriends I got this far with, but damn if they didn’t like my mouth.
“What?”
“Do you like them?”
“I—yes.”
Awesome! “Can I please give you one?” I said, aware I was maybe coming off too eager but too into the idea to hold back. “I’ve been thinking about it since probably the first time we met, only I didn’t know you very well then so it was just a passing kind of thought, but now that I do know you I basically can’t stop thinking about it. Not,” I added, “that you have to say yes or anything. I know your chest probably hurts, and it’s actually kind of late, and…you know what, we don’t have to do it, it’s fine. We can just go to bed and?—”
“No!” Kyle blurted that out loudly, more so than he was expecting, judging from the look on his face, but he pushed through. “I’d, that would be great, I just wasn’t expecting it. I mean, we already spent a night together and we didn’t…”
“Yeah, because you’d just gotten out of the ER,” I pointed out. “You were on strong painkillers and exhausted and not really in an ideal place for sex. Not that now is perfect either, but your bed is a lot bigger than mine.” I sat down and bounced it for a second. “Softer, too, so much more comfortable for your injuries. So.” I bounced again and grinned. “Can I?”
Kyle shook his head, but he was smiling. “You’re really not shy.”
“Nope.”
“Yes, but only with protection until we get tested.”
That was more than fair. “Where are your condoms?”
“Bedside table.”
Perfect. I grabbed one, put it in my pocket, then stepped right into Kyle’s space and pulled him into a kiss. God , he was eager now; there was no more ice to break between us since I’d pulverized it into shards, and it was just him and me and?—
“Meow.”
“Mmrrp.”
I pulled away with a “what the fuck?” that made Kyle laugh, then turned to glare at the two fuzzy voyeurs sitting in the doorway. “Dudes. No. You can come in after, but I’m not into being watched in the act,” I said, and shut the door in their faces. One of them hissed with indignation, but I ignored them and returned to kissing the hell out of my boyfriend as I slowly maneuvered him out of his clothes and onto the bed. By the time Kyle was undressed, he was hard and I was breathless with how much I wanted him. Kneeling in front of him at the edge of the bed was the easiest thing I’d ever done.
I paused when I saw his bruises, though. They looked even darker than the last time I’d seen them, and had spread and drained some since then, rendering his entire left side a canvas of purple and blue splotches. I squeezed his good hip and kissed the point of his knee. “Do you need to lie down?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I’ll let you know, I promise.”
“Good.” I lowered my lips to the smooth skin of his stomach, just above his groin, and pressed another kiss there, a lingering, sucking one. Kyle quivered, and one of his hands hovered over me for a moment before he wound it into my hair.
“Mmm, feel free to pull,” I said with a grin as I nuzzled lower and lower, until he had to spread his legs to make space for me and I could reach his balls with my mouth, which?—
He hissed, sensitive, but didn’t pull away or tell me to stop when I took one of them into my mouth. I used my hand on the other, rolling and tugging and losing myself in how fucking good he tasted, how he sounded, how he moved against me. He finally pulled me up by the hair, which yes please more , and I made a sound I’m not proud of but that seemed to do it for him if the way his grip tightened was any indication.
“Get the condom,” he said. I pulled it out of the package and rolled it down his length, then lifted up a little bit so I could get a better angle and slowly, smoothly, sucked him into my mouth as far as I could take him. Maybe a bit ambitious of me on the first try, but I was desperate to taste him, to have him as deep as he could go, to put him inside me. I wanted him in me, wanted to feel him come apart for me. I gripped the base of his shaft with one hand and used the other to unzip my jeans as I moved for him, up and down, a slow slip-slide of our bodies merging over and over.
Even with the latex between us, the heat of him was intoxicating. How much better would it be when he was bare, and I could taste him for real? How much better would it be when he could put me on my knees, finger me open, and fuck me so hard I’d have to brace myself against the wall to stay up? All of that would be so good, but this was so good too— he was so good, fuck, he was holding my hair so tight, so perfect, moving my head in the rhythm he liked and I was never going to forget now, and I sucked harder, enough to make him groan all broken and eager as he went even harder, and?—
Kyle came, almost soundlessly, carefully contained so he didn’t hurt his ribs, but he showed me how much he liked it with the tension in his body and the way he looked at me after, as I finally drew back. “Holy shit,” he croaked. “That was so good.”
“Yeah?” Screw it, I needed affirmations as much as the next guy.
“Yes, oh my God. Come here.” He scooted back and drew me with him, pulling me on top of him as he gingerly lay down. I hovered over him, not sure what he was going for until his hand slid through the fly of my jeans and beneath my boxers. He wrapped his fingers around my dick, grip warm and firm and sure, and my eyes squeezed shut as I moaned.
This, someone else’s touch—I’d been missing it for so long. It was so much better than it had ever been before, too, because this was Kyle, and it took me all of about ten seconds before I was coming in his hand. I collapsed down onto my elbows, just managing to keep my weight off him because I wasn’t about to send him back to the hospital due to an orgasm, and he initiated the kissing this time. He kissed my cheek, my chin, and the very tip of my nose before finally touching my mouth. We kissed again and again, warm and hazy and satisfied, until?—
Scritch. “Meow.” Scritch-scritch. “Mrrrrrpp. Meow!”
Kyle started laughing. “So much for the afterglow.”
“Eh, afterglow, who needs it?” I said, although in all honesty I would have loved more cuddle time, but I knew how to prioritize. Damn it.
Ten minutes, a quick wash-up, and one bowl retrieval later, Kyle and I settled into bed. Wow, his mattress was… “Is this memory foam?”
“Hybrid, springs and foam,” he told me as Patches curled up at his feet, purring.
“It feels like floating.”
“Yeah, it’s nice.” He sounded drowsy, half asleep already after a tiring day. I leaned over and kissed the point of his shoulder, then rolled onto my back and relaxed against the pillow. I was nearly asleep when I felt paws begin to bat at the ends of my hair.
Thanks, Jeff.