Chapter Seventeen
TAD DOESN’T want to move ever again. His whole body is boneless, sated, wrecked, and he’s warm and naked and in the arms of a man he’s falling hard for.
It’s a disaster. It’s a revelation.
Falling for Lewis is an invitation to heartbreak. But he is, and he has to do right by the man, no matter how much he wants to stay exactly where they are, bodies pressed together, arms around each other, legs tangled, the smell of sweat and sex clinging to them.
“Do you need to go?” Tad murmurs.
“Mmph,” Lewis replies, nuzzling his face into the crook of Tad’s neck.
“Because, like… I know you”—lips find his pulse point—“don’t want… to… to date”—and now Lewis is kissing him, and it’s hot and slow and wet—“so… um….”
Words fail him and his brain smoothes to white noise and the swell of an endless ocean as Lewis kisses and nuzzles and licks.
“Do you want me to go?” Lewis finally asks, his voice muffled against Tad’s skin. His hands are skimming along Tad’s body.
Tad makes a noise, which is definitely not a response. He doesn’t want to respond because he knows the right thing to say, even if it’s the last thing he wants.
“Tad?” Lewis murmurs. “I’ll go if you want me to.”
“No. Don’t.” He’s a bad person. “Stay. I want you to stay the night.”
He Is The Worst.
Rolling away from Lewis and the perfect heat of his body, he says, “But what I want doesn’t matter. This isn’t what you want.”
“What?” The sheets rustle and warmth presses along the length of Tad’s body again. “Why do you think what you want doesn’t matter? Of course what you want matters.”
He hadn’t even meant to say that. Obviously he knows what he wants matters. At least, what he wants matters as long as it’s not too inconvenient. Like not being able to come out to his family. John would ask, Don’t you want to? And honestly, a lot of days, Tad didn’t . His family won’t like him being gay, so even if he wanted to come out, what was the point?
Lewis puts a cautious hand to Tad’s hip, like he thinks Tad’s going to jerk away. Instead, Tad leans into him. What he wants is this. Lewis doesn’t. Tad should ask him what it means that they fucked again when they weren’t supposed to. The words even form in his throat, but when he opens his mouth, they won’t come out.
“You want me to stay?” Lewis asks. He sounds so vulnerable, like Tad could push on his chest and crush his heart.
That’s why he has to be careful with Lewis. Maybe Tad isn’t Lewis’s Happily Ever After, but Tad cares about him. He cares about him way too much. He doesn’t want to hurt him, even if not hurting Lewis is going to mean hurting himself down the line.
He turns to face Lewis. The vulnerability in his voice is reflected on his face in worried lines and the turned-down corners of his lips. Tad wants to kiss them to make them curve up again.
Wait—he can. So he does.
With his mouth against the corners of Lewis’s lips, he says, “I want you to stay. If you want to.”
“I want to,” Lewis says in a rush, like he’s afraid if he doesn’t get the words out fast enough, he’ll chicken out.
Tad snuggles closer, wrapping his arms tight around him until he remembers he can’t hold on tight to Lewis. “Okay,” Tad says. “Yay.”
“Yay,” Lewis whispers back.
IN THE morning, Tad casually suggests it would be cool if Lewis stayed and worked—only if he wants to! He doesn’t expect Lewis to agree.
Lewis does, though! Yay! Now, they’re side-by-side on the sofa doing their respective jobs. Work is still slow for Tad, but he’s using the time to get things ready for the journal’s first quarter issue, which he’ll start working on after Thanksgiving.
He’s been trying for the last hour not to peek at Lewis’s computer, because Lewis’s work is probably all private and sensitive and stuff. It’s just, he’s really curious. He wants to know everything about Lewis, which is—ugh. Stupid. And probably illegal, somehow. At least knowing the work stuff. And Lewis is lawyer-adjacent, so he’d know exactly how Tad’s breaking the law.
So, of course, Lewis catches him looking. Tad turns red. “Sorry. I didn’t see anything!”
It’s like Lewis knows exactly what he’s thinking. “It’s okay, none of this is sensitive information.”
“Oh.” Tad lets his eyes rove the screen, though it still feels transgressive. “What are you working on?”
Lewis stretches his arms over his head. His spine cracks. He’s wearing one of Tad’s T-shirts and it rides up, exposing taut stomach and dark hair and the sharp ledges of his hip bones. Tad’s cock stirs.
It’s never come up at work—er, not his cock, which probably has—but Tad assumes fucking on company time is frowned upon.
Not that it stops him from wanting to lick a line down Lewis’s stomach and rub his face in that body hair, but he can control himself. Probably.
Rubbing a hand over his face, Lewis says, “Still catching up on emails from being out. I’m researching three cases, and it looks like I’m getting another one soon.”
Tad watches Lewis fire off a quick email. “Can you tell me about the cases? Or is that like, top secret stuff?”
Giving him a surprised look, Lewis says, “It’s not top secret. But it’s also not very interesting.”
“Try me.”
Lewis looks even more surprised. Did his parade of shitty boyfriends never show interest in his work? “Well, I’ve been working a ton on this recycling case. It’s the county versus this waste company because the county says they’re not processing what the contract says they will. And another one, it’s the Park Board against a landscaper, that one’s around the type of fertilizers they’re using. And then one involving JFK. The airports are always getting sued for environmental violations. They usually settle.” Lewis reads an email, sighs, and flags it. “It’s not as interesting as a botany journal.”
Tad bumps their shoulders together. “You’re literally the first person to tell me that.”
Lewis grabs his hand and intertwines their fingers. Tad’s stomach flips over. “If your ex made you feel like your job wasn’t interesting, that’s another reason he sucks.”
Compared to John, Tad’s job isn’t interesting. John’s a published author now—his debut is the sort of YA novel that gets called Important and Unapologetically Queer and got put on a bunch of Best Of The Year lists before it even came out.
Is Tad allowed to kiss Lewis? They’re working, but… if they were a couple, and they were both working from home, no one would expect them not to exchange kisses throughout the day.
He leans over and kisses Lewis on the lips, lingering but keeping it closed-mouth and chaste. “You’re really nice,” Tad says, which is probably too much.
Lewis’s fingers trace little shivering paths on Tad’s forearms and he leans his forehead against Tad’s. His breath puffs on Tad’s face. There’s intimacy there that Tad’s missed so much since John broke up with him.
It’s funny—he doesn’t miss John, but he misses all the little comforts of a relationship. He misses being close to someone who gets you.
They stay that way for a while. Lewis is the first to pull back. “You’re really distracting.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It was.” Lewis grabs Tad’s hand again and kisses the back. “Thanks for letting me work here today.” Hetty saunters by and stops to stare at Lewis. “You too, Hetty,” he adds.
Halfway through the day, Tad gets an email from Callie that he’s expecting, because they all get it every year, but which still makes him let out a resigned sigh.
“What’s up?” Lewis asks.
“Uggghh.” Tad’s head falls back against the back of the sofa and thunks harder than he means it to. Ow. “My boss just sent her yearly email giving us the entire week of Thanksgiving off.”
“That’s… good, isn’t it? More time off?”
Rubbing the back of his head—his hair’s getting long, way too long for his family to see—he says, “My family expects me to have that whole week off now, so they want me to come home for the whole time.”
“You don’t want to?”
“Not really.”
Lewis looks thoughtful. “You could tell them something came up and you can’t make it this year?”
“I wish.” Tad’s shoulders sag. “Even if my mom wouldn’t turn it into a whole Thing, I just… well, I spend so much time telling them such a huge lie, it kind of makes me feel like I use up all my white lie credits on that.”
Unsurprisingly, Lewis looks confused. And curious. And like, just the tiniest bit wary, but honestly? Not as much as Tad expected. If someone said that to Tad, his mind would jump straight to serial killer.
“So….” Lewis cocks his head. “Probably overstepping, but….”
“You can ask.”
With an uncertain smile, Lewis says, “Okay, good, because you really lined that one up. What’s the big thing you’re lying to your family about?”
It’s fine. Telling him isn’t a big deal, because they aren’t anything serious. Lewis isn’t going to backpedal as fast as he can, because this isn’t a Relationship. Lewis isn’t ever going to be a person Tad should be able to bring home to introduce to his family, to become a fixture at holiday dinners. So him knowing that none of those things are possible isn’t going to freak him out.
Still, the wounds John made left deep scars. John talked about how coming out wasn’t the safest thing for everyone, and how people should be able to make that decision on their own terms. Turned out that was all well and good for other people, but not for the guy he was dating.
“Um,” Tad says. He rubs his hair again. He meant to get it cut before Vegas but never made it to the salon. Every time Walt looked at him, he was sure his brother was going to make some comment about his hair being girly. “I’m not… exactly… really… at all… out to my family. Or anyone in Watertown. I mean, not that there’s anyone in Watertown besides my family. I don’t have any friends there or anything. I never really had any friends in high school. Well, I had friends , but not like, good friends. Not the kind of friends you stay friends with when you all go off to college. I don’t even know where any of the people I hung around with are now—”
Great, cool word vomit. He snaps his mouth shut, then bites his lip and chances a look at Lewis.
“That sucks,” Lewis says. He looks… sad? “That really sucks you don’t feel like you can come out to them.”
Relief socks Tad in the solar plexus. Even if Lewis’s response is the one that makes the most sense, he was still afraid Lewis would recoil. Like, excuse me, you’re setting the cause back; you’re not being gay the right way; you’re letting the queer community down.
“Yeah, it does,” Tad agrees. When Lewis gives him a funny look, he realizes he has a big smile on his face. “Er, sorry. I don’t always get much sympathy when people find out I’m twenty-nine and still in the closet around my family.”
“What?” Lewis looks incensed. “That’s bullshit.”
Warmth fizzes in Tad’s belly. He is in T-R-O-U-B-L-E.
Lewis locks his computer and slides it onto the coffee table. “You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but is it a religion thing? Or just like, general homophobia? Are they…?”
This is the worst part—it’s kind of neither. And also both. “Gun-toting, Bible-verse spouting, MAGA psychos?” Tad makes a face. “Not that bad, no. But is there a painting in my childhood home of Ronald Reagan riding a horse, with an American flag billowing behind him? Yes, yes there is.”
Lewis guffaws, which makes all of this a lot easier to talk about. Tad draws his knees to his chest and loops his arms around them, his heels perching at the edge of the sofa. “It’s never been any one thing, you know? It’s not like, oh, they’re super religious, so they’re always talking about how queer people are an abomination in the sight of God or whatever. And it’s not an owning-the-libs thing, where you just hate the gays because that’s what Your Side does. It’s just… I don’t know. It’s always been a bunch of little things.”
Lewis’s hand slides over Tad’s knee. “It’s shitty you can’t show them that part of yourself.”
“Yeah,” Tad says quietly. He turns a memory over in his head, wondering if he wants to share it. It still hurts, even though nothing was directed at him. “There was this one time when I was in high school. We went to a wedding of one of my mom’s friend’s kids, and the bride’s brother was gay. He was there with his boyfriend, and he was wearing a rainbow tie, and I thought he was the bravest person I’d ever seen. I kept trying to work up the nerve to go talk to him.”
Tad watches Hetty curl up in a patch of sun on the floor. Sometimes he wishes he had cat problems—wanting food now, wanting attention now, being aggrieved that the sunny spot moves.
“My dad,” he continues, “said he didn’t understand why the bride’s brother had to rub everyone’s faces in it. He said he doesn’t care what anyone does in their bedroom, but that doesn’t mean people should have to see it, especially when there were kids around. And I just….”
He trails off as he registers the look on Lewis’s face. Lewis looks gutted . Like this tender spot that Tad’s tried for years to wall off so it doesn’t bother him is the saddest thing Lewis has ever heard. And it’s not . It’s obviously not. They’re queer men. Sad stories are part of the experience. It’s fucked up, but that’s how it is.
“I just thought,” Tad goes on, “that coming out was… exhibitionist, somehow? It took me a while to realize no one ever says opposite sex couples are rubbing people’s faces in what they do in the bedroom.”
Reaching for Tad’s hand, Lewis says, “Tad, that’s horrible. It’s bad enough when strangers act like that. Having it be your family is so much worse.”
Lewis’s fingers squeeze Tad’s, and maybe he shouldn’t be so easily comforted by it, but he is. “I’m guessing you don’t have issues with your family?”
The feel of Lewis’s thumb rubbing circles on Tad’s wrist is exactly the kind of intimacy he misses. “No,” Lewis says. “My mom works with queer youth groups. My parents have gone to every single New York Pride March, and they brought me and my sister along every year. And when I came out, they started marching in the Jersey City Pride parade.”
“Wow,” Tad says softly.
“Yeah. They’re pretty great. I know how lucky I am.” Lewis remains quiet for a moment. “I hate that things are so different for you.”
Tad shrugs. Not much anyone can do about it. There’s definitely nothing Lewis can do about it. Tad knows he’s a coward. He knows there are so many people who have it so much worse. His parents wouldn’t have disowned him if he’d come out as a teen, but he couldn’t bear the cold silences he knew would descend every time they were all together. He didn’t want to deal with his mom looking heartbroken and his dad avoiding the subject altogether. He couldn’t handle Walt being weird about bringing his friends around.
It’s like Lewis is reading his mind. “Your brother’s part of the issue too?” When Tad nods, Lewis says, “Huh. I guess I figured you told him why you went camping.”
“Yeah, about that….” Tad grimaces. “I kind of told him I hooked up with a woman named Louise.”
He doesn’t think Lewis will get mad. He wouldn’t have said it if he thought Lewis would get mad. But his shoulders still tighten because he knows the reaction he would’ve gotten from John.
Lewis laughs so loudly that Hetty jumps up from her sunny spot. He claps a hand over his mouth, which does nothing to muffle the sound. “Louise?” he repeats, giggling.
Tad gives him a light, backhanded little swat on the chest. “I panicked. I’m not good under pressure.”
The giggling gives way to a smile, and Lewis leans forward to kiss Tad gently. “That’s totally not true. Remember how you rescued me when I almost plummeted to my death?”
“Hm, true. I guess I’m strapping and dashing and heroic?”
“Yes, yes, and yes.” Lewis kisses him again. “My brave knight in shining armor.”
And oh, that makes Tad ache. He’s not brave, and he isn’t Lewis’s.