Chapter Six #3
He scrubs his hand against his face again, leaving another streak of dust, this one tinged a bit darker, his gaze watery now.
In my silence, he rolls his eyes at me, at himself, and huffs. “You’re not going to ask what that’s about?” he pushes. “What this”—he motions to his teary eyes—“is about?”
I step closer to him. Close enough to run my fingers across his hand, wiping away some of the rock dust to leave lines on his skin.
“I don’t need all your secrets. I’ll take whatever you want to give me.
” I inhale the chalky air, unable to pick up any of his apple scent through it.
“And I want you to have all the secrets of mine you need. Here’s another: I used to come here a lot when I was in college.
No one else in my life knows about it. I always picked this room. ”
“And you had them set up extra Urzoth statues?” Alexo peeks at me, prodding.
I nod.
He doesn’t follow that with the obvious question. With any questions, just like I didn’t push him for any answers either.
We’re our own sort of religious statues, hands cupped, palms up and extended, offerings only. No reaching, no grabbing. Just gifts.
“I grew up with stupid family shit, too,” he tells me, words as evanescent as the dust particles dancing through the air between us. “That’s why Tem’s so overbearing. It’s hard to escape expectations, even when you do escape them. It’s always—” He taps the side of his head.
I take his offering. Take it and tuck it away to pick apart later.
For now, Alexo shifts his hand so it clutches mine and pulls until I’m holding the mace.
Then he points, and when I look, there’s the Urzoth statue.
Untouched. A god with so much dominion over strength that he’s made of stone in his divine form, so having a statue of him created out of poured concrete is common to the point of familiarity.
I’ve seen hundreds of statues like this one over my life. Grew up around them.
I adjust my grip on the mace, eyes on Alexo, who watches me with that intense connection, visceral in its heat.
The mace leaves the ground. I swing it in a wide arch, let it fall with a clattering thud onto Urzoth’s head.
All the while not breaking eye contact with Alexo, whose lips flicker with a ghost of a smile.
He sobers.
“It’s getting late,” he whispers.
My heart drops. He wants me to take him home. Back to that unsafe apartment and Tem.
But I bow my head dutifully and rest the mace against the wall.
The owner has magic on hand to help clean us up, so when we leave, we’re not trailing clouds of concrete dust.
The drive back to Alexo’s place is silent. It isn’t uncomfortable or weighted; Alexo spends most of it tapping his knee to songs on the radio.
When we’re only a few minutes from his apartment, he leans on the center console where my arm’s resting, hand holding the gearshift.
Without a word, he links his fingers around my wrist. Lightly, so I can still drive.
A breathy sound leaves my throat, airy and warbling, and I don’t even try to swallow it. It’s living between us now, this obsession I have with him, and he’s aware of it, so why fight it? He’s got me, pathetically, deplorably; he’s got me.
I start to pull into his building’s parking lot. It’s empty, so Tem hasn’t come back yet. Which causes a contradictory emotional tug-of-war:
How dare Tem leave him alone so long? Does he have any idea what could have happened to Alexo while he was gone?
And then—thank the gods Tem’s gone. I don’t want him here, don’t want him near Alexo, no matter how not all bad he is.
But Alexo points up the street. “Park there,” he says, and I obey, pulling the car into a free spot by the sidewalk a few buildings down from his.
He doesn’t get out of the car right away.
Doesn’t remove his hand from my wrist. I shut off the car then go pliant under his grip, listening to his breathing grow faster.
I swear I can hear his heart thundering.
It’s making mine flurry just as ravenously, adrenaline bursting into my veins with no target yet, nowhere to go.
“Does…” He licks his lips. I hear the smack of his tongue against the pink gloss he reapplied. “Does your chair move back?”
I free my hand from the gearshift, from his touch, to undo my seatbelt and throw the seat as far back as it goes.
And, like an idiot, brain moving through melted gold, I ask, “Why?”
He wheezes a nervous laugh. “Gods, your chivalry, I swear.”
It’s the last thing he says before he’s unbuckling his own seatbelt and scaling the center console to straddle me.
I snap back against the seat, body gone to unyielding steel as he grabs the headrest behind me and his knees spread over my hips.
My first reaction, brain still sluggish through that melted gold, is to say, “You’re going to hurt your legs sitting like that,” because he’s so small, and my thighs aren’t exactly thin thanks to my half-giant ancestry with near-daily glute and hamstring drills.
Alexo whimpers, his eyes glued to my lap. “Happily. Your thighs are a wet dream.” And before I can rattle my way through sensibility enough to fully appreciate that, he’s kissing me again.
A triumphant, relieved mewl trills in my throat and I attack him, tongue thrusting into his mouth, chasing that flavor I’m already addicted to.
He rocks with me, and I may not greedily push him for answers, but here?
Here, I will be greedy, I will take and take; but he’s giving just as fervently, meeting all my needy moans with little cries that fucking ruin me.
My hands dart up under the back of his crop top, following each knobbed ridge of his spine until I splay my hands on the wings of his shoulder blades, feeling, feeling, he’s letting me do this.
He rocks against me, that dancer’s body malleable to the point of implausibility as he fluctuates his hips and grinds on me, and my sense of awareness whites out, nothing but apples and his soft skin and the aphrodisiac taste of him.
His legs spread this way has me thrusting up unconsciously, the barriers of my sweats and his baggy jeans thin enough that I can feel the drag of his hard length against mine. He must feel me in turn, because he slurs a curse into the seam of my mouth and a tremor goes up his thighs.
“Orok,” he whines, and I chase the reverberations of it in his mouth, biting at his tongue, dragging it between my lips with an ardency that has him squirming in my lap even more.
He’s all motion, constant, rippling waves that churn and froth against me—his hips gyrating and his torso swaying and his fingers scraping for purchase in my beard so he can position my jaw how he wants it.
I try to be stationary for him, let him work this dance on me, but I’m insatiable, too, and when he grinds down on me with renewed desperation, I nudge his head to the side and clamp my teeth on his collarbone.
Right where he had that gold shimmer the night of his song at the bar, I kiss and lick and he thrusts down against me with a liquid plea.
“Please, I—”
“What do you want?” My hands grip his narrow waist, not to hold him still, but to feel the rhythm of his movements, to try to follow his wriggling flow.
“I want. I want—I don’t know, I want you.
” His eyes are heavy-lidded, and the car’s barely illuminated by the gray haze that permeates this neighborhood, but I can feel the heat coming off his face, know he’s flushed.
I want to see, want to know what his skin looks like this way, but he moans weakly and my chest crushes with leonine need.
I thrust my hands down his body, intending to get ahold of his ass and help him grind down on me, get that last little bit of perfect leverage.
My fingers dip beneath the waistband of his jeans.
Alexo sucks in a serrated breath and snatches my wrists off him. “Wait! Wait, wait—”
I rear back, hands palm up, my already panting breaths scraping hoarse. “I’m sorry, I’m so—”
His fingers pinch on my wrists. “Stop. Don’t apologize. You’re perfect.” Each word comes through a constricted throat, his own breaths still ramped up high, and the fog is lifting. Not just lifting—it’s entirely blown away, a switch-flip so jarring I catch up in jerks and pulls.
He’s still on my lap. But he’s holding himself up now, not seated fully on me anymore. And he’s clinging to my wrists, keeping my hands back, like he’s afraid I’ll grab him again. Or maybe he’s pinned here, delayed in his reactions like I am. Processing, beat by beat.
I have only one second to note the way his face collapses in the dark—heavy, aching sorrow—before he’s scrambling off me, back into the passenger’s seat.
“Alexo—”
He whips a glare at me. “Don’t,” he snaps, and I sink back, hands still up, unthreatening, in surrender.
He winces, that flash of anger getting overridden by the emotions that stack up in his eyes: grief, regret, sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.
I’ve seen how majestic this man is when he’s happy. That’s all he should ever be, happy, and yet something’s keeping him caged. It’s costing him something to let me see this.
“Fuck,” he mutters. “I’m—I’m sorry. It isn’t you. I swear, Orok.”
I reach for him, but hesitate. “Can I touch you?”
He grunts an empty laugh that cracks apart and he tugs his fingers through his hair. “I’m a mess. You don’t want me. You don’t want to be part of this. It’s easier when it’s fake, okay? Let’s just let it be fake.”
I rest my hand on one of his forearms. He doesn’t flinch, so I tug until it falls, then dip my fingers under his chin and twist him to look at me.
“Is that what you want?” I ask. “For this to only be fake?”
Please, no. Gods, I don’t think I can.
He laughs again, manic this time, high and creaky and distressed. “You have no idea how much I want something real.”
“I told you, I’ll take whatever you want to give me. We can go at your pace. I won’t touch you like that again unless you tell me to. You lead this.”
It’s killing me not to ask more. Not to demand to know what’s hurting him. It might not be Tem, but something sure as hell is hurting him—he mentioned something with his family? My hands shake with a barely repressed quiver he has to feel where I hold his chin.
“Why?” he whispers. Not for the first time tonight.
I force a smile, force a lightness against the clawing, reawakened beast in my chest, the one now pacing and irately snarling mine, mine, he’s threatened, and he’s mine.
“Because I think we could both use something in our lives that’s good.”
Alexo stares up at me, eyes shining in the darkness, all those heavy, awful emotions now warring with a glimmer of hope. He’s a cut wildflower in a vase. A lightning bug in a mason jar. He’s something wild and beautiful confined.
I don’t know how long I’ll be able to hold myself back from figuring out what I need to do to set him free.
Alexo leans in, but doesn’t kiss me again, just tips forward until I match him and our foreheads rest together.
“Thank you,” he tells me. “For tonight. It was—” An airy chuckle. “One of the best nights I’ve had in a long time.”
“Breaking shit is soul balm,” I say, but he shakes his head.
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
I go still.
He exhales, and I bask in him for this last moment, until he leans back. As he reaches for the door handle, I dig in my pocket.
“Hang on—take this.”
I hand him the unused vial of fireball potion.
Alexo’s teary eyes brighten. “Oh my gods. You—”
And he cackles, laughing so hard he doubles over.
I smile at his levity. “What? It’s good for protection. In case, ya know. Like a taser.”
He loses it. “A taser?”
“Kind of.”
“You’re basically—giving me—a bomb.” He punctuates his words with gasping breaths and more delirious giggles. “A bomb, Orok.”
Well, when he says it like that. “You don’t have to take it.”
I move to stick it back in my pocket.
“No, no.” Alexo snatches it from me. “Fuck that. It’s mine. You gave it to me. It’s just—most people give flowers. Or chocolates or some shit. But this date started via stalking and attempted kidnapping and ended with you giving me an incendiary device.”
I snort. Distantly, I know I should be mortified, because that’s exactly what happened; every moment tonight was one prolonged cry for help. My therapist will have a brain bleed.
But Alexo’s laughter is still warm on the air and his cheeks are shining with happy tears, and I don’t regret any of it, if it brought us here.
“Can I walk you to your front door?” I ask. “Or would that be far too normal and cancel out the creepy vibes I’ve spent all evening painstakingly crafting?”
Alexo’s smile tempers. He bites his lower lip.
I know what that lip tastes like.
“This is enough,” he says softly and cracks open the car door. “Until next time?”
I bob my head. “Until next time.”
He climbs out into the night.
I wait a beat, then step out onto the street, but I hold over the roof of my car as he walks up to his building. I don’t know if Tem pulled in while we were … occupied, but Alexo walks quickly for the steps.
Before he ducks inside, he looks back at me. It’s too far for me to see his face, too far for him to do more than make out my silhouette. But we both hold for one, two, three seconds.
Then he’s through the door and gone.
I jog up the road until I can see his apartment’s window, and I wait until that curtain flutters with the door opening and shutting. Even when the fabric settles and I know he’s safely in his home, probably moving around in his room, getting ready for bed, I linger, watching.
Because it’s all I can do right now.
All I’ll let myself do right now.