Chapter 24 #2
I’m mouthing words on his skin, but he doesn’t know it.
Uttering whole sentences, odes dedicated solely to him, starting from the inside of his knee and along his inner thigh as it quivers.
Pulling down his tight, taut little shorts until his firm and gorgeous cock is revealed in all its glistening, pink-tipped glory, arcing slender and perfect against his porcelain hip.
I watch him as he reaches up without being told, grasping firmly the bars of his headboard.
His face is flushed and his lower lip is puffy from where he keeps biting it.
He is the perfect picture of need, watercolor soft and ardently begging as I run the tip of my nose along his length.
Breathing him in, marveling him, because he’s the most stunning fucking thing on earth, especially when he’s like this.
Surface tension, seconds before disaster, calm before a storm. I adore it. I adore him.
“Beautiful,” I whisper to him, my lips brushing skin that’s overripe and all-too-sensitive.
“Oh, god,” he whispers back.
And when I tell him to let go of the headboard he complains, in his whimpering-whining sort of way, what the hell he’s supposed to hold on to instead. I tell him: “Me.”
I love it, the feeling of his fingers in my hair as I slide him into my mouth, inch by inch.
The taste of him, too, salty like tears, my tongue swirling around him.
And the sound of him, breath hitching and coming short, feathery gasps and moans that make my stomach tight and hot and my own cock hard as glass where it twitches beneath my boxers.
Love how, meds or no meds, I can bring him right to the edge keep him there until it’s the sweet kind of torture we both love.
He is mine, after all. Much as I’ve fucked everything up, one thing remains constant. He is all mine.
“Luca.” The sound of my name on his lips is the sexiest thing of all. “Don’t stop. I’m sososo close.”
Oh, I have no plans to stop. My gaze rolls upward and I watch him watch me, my head bobbing slowly, the tip of my tongue tracing the delicate slit.
I want to tell him to come for me but I have no intention of releasing him for even that long, because knowing him, he’ll blow the moment I do.
I want to see his face when he finishes in my mouth.
It’s a beautiful thing when he does, of course, as it is every time—first the rising pitch of his sighs and then the seizing of his lower lip between his teeth, lashes fluttering against his red cheeks as his eyes slip closed.
His squirmy hips rise off the bed. I keep my gaze fixed on his face as he comes, and it’s my name he’s saying, of course, stuttering off his tongue over and over in a sweet refrain until there’s nothing left and he collapses like the pretty mess he is.
I rise and kiss him, hard, open-mouthed and my tongue on his so he can taste himself, and he’s already reaching for me. Damp fingertips skip down my belly and fumble at my boxers and he’s keening against my mouth, so I break away. “Let me,” he says softly, breathily. “I want to touch you.”
“Go on.” I nose his cheek, settling at his side. “Touch me, then.”
No further encouragement is needed. He presses his forehead against mine as I help him pull the underwear off, and I can’t help the sharp intake of breath when he gets his hand around my cock, or the moan when he slides his knee between my legs and presses even closer.
There is the part of me that wants to take over, just bend him over and fuck him, and the need is mounting every second he touches me.
My lower belly feels hot and tight and it’s hard to breathe, my face buried in his neck, and I want him in so many ways that I can’t.
I can’t own him. Can’t get close enough, can’t get enough of anything.
There is so much want in me. For him.
“Easy,” he murmurs to me, and just that is nearly enough to undo me.
When he talks. When he’s doing this. When he’s got me and I don’t know when the roles suddenly reversed in this moment.
Instinctively, I want to fight it, and he senses that too.
“Just let go,” he says against my ear. “I’ll catch you. ”
My stomach flutters. “My job.” I breathe the words, barely audible. “That’s my job.”
“No. Both of us.” He kisses my ear, and I feel his tongue snake around the lobe.
I shudder against him. “Come on, Luca. I want you to come all over me.” I raise my face to his, and he kisses me.
I’m making soft and urgent sounds, quite against my will, deep in my throat, as he rolls his wrist, fingers squeezing my cock just so. “Close?” he asks against my lips.
I don’t get to tell him whether I am or not.
One moment I’m in a sweet spot and the next it’s all over for me.
I’m sinking my teeth into the crook of his neck, the perfect spot to mark him, and he’s crying out as I’m groaning and spilling everywhere, all over his hands and arms and my stomach and the bed.
Infinite, endless, I’m letting go, I’m giving up, I’m all his and it feels so fucking good. For once. To just give in.
To him.
Which is what I should’ve always done.
Noel. My lips shape his name on his flushed and sweaty neck, and other words, too. Stunt girl. Sweet boy. I love you so, so much.
“I love you, too,” he whispers back. “Luca.”
I stay over for the rest of the weekend.
It’s comfortable and happy and safe. It’s intimate.
We don’t even have to be doing something together—he can be working on his commissions while I lie in his bed, doodling potential flash in an empty sketchbook he had lying around and gave to me, and it feels so companionable and right.
There’s no silence between us that’s bad.
There’s no real questions left unanswered anymore.
You are the question that drives me. I told him that once, a million years ago. It’s still true as ever.
He lets me turn on music, even, my own Spotify playlists that consist solely of songs that are his age or older, and doesn’t complain or poke fun at my taste like he tends to. I even catch him humming and mouthing the words to a few songs, and I smile to myself.
This is how it should be. This is how it always should’ve been. Don’t know why I fucked it up or denied myself for so long. Don’t know what I was so afraid of.
That’s not true. I do. Know, that is. And it does still hurt, it’ll probably always hurt.
Not as badly as it did yesterday; already it’s subsided a bit, but the sting still lingers and it probably will for a long time.
I believe, maybe, when you love someone—and I do love my dad and the rest of my family in a fucked up and distant sort of way, a tired way that is altogether unconditional and out of my control, the way I imagine Noel loves his own mother—it never just stops.
Maybe it winds down, though, over time, like a spinning top.
Maybe there will be a point where it finally kicks and splutters and crashes to the side and then…
what? What does the absence of love feel like?
I don’t think I ever want to know.
I manage, after a while, to pull Noel away from his work long enough to grab ice cream off the corner, and we walk over to Jamaica Pond.
Sitting in the afternoon sun on a bench by the bike path, warming our shoulders as we watch people fish and enjoy the day.
He’s tucked into my side nursing the remains of his cone and he’s so, so terribly cute.
I want to lean down and kiss him, so I do, lingering there as long as he lets me.
When he breaks it first—because I don’t—he announces, quite suddenly, “I’m gonna be okay, I think. In spite of everything.”
“Of course you are,” I say. “You’re you.”
“And you’re going to be okay, too.”
“You know what?” I swipe a smudge of ice cream from the corner of his mouth and lick it off my thumb. “You’re right.”
And when I go home at last on Sunday afternoon, I find my wife where she sits in the living room quietly, almost as if she’s waiting for me. When we hug, it feels strangely final, like we’re both saying goodbye. And when I ask her if we can talk for a while, she agrees.
“I don’t think this is working,” she tells me heavily.
“I don’t think so, either,” I say.
And into the evening we sit together with our heads bowed, and we speak for a long, long time.