Chapter 5 #2
Ash shot him a sympathetic look, and Sean wondered just how many of their friends had been wondering and waiting if he and Gabriel would hook up. “Sometimes,” he said, “you’ve got to take matters into your own hands. You want something? You fucking make it happen.”
“Yeah,” Sean said. “Yeah.”
Ash patted him on the back. “Go get ’em, tiger,” he said.
First thing, Sean went and found Jackson, who’d set up a makeshift bar on a picnic table. Alexis, his boyfriend, and the guy who made the best fucking hummus Sean had ever been lucky enough to eat, had his hand tucked into the back pocket of Jackson’s shorts, and they were laughing about something.
“Hey,” Sean said. “I heard a rumor you had something harder than beer over here.”
Jackson turned and smiled. “Looking for a little Dutch courage?”
Sean rolled his eyes. “Why would I want that?” Apparently everyone knew what was going on. That, he reminded himself, was because you had to open your big fucking mouth and tell Tony. Nobody gossiped like Tony did.
“Something a little birdy told me,” Jackson said, pouring him a shot of vodka in a little plastic cup. “Here you go, champ, just don’t go overboard.”
Sean threw back the shot in one burning gulp. He didn’t love vodka, but Jackson was annoyingly right; if he was going to be as audacious as he wanted to be, he was going to need it.
Jackson poured him a second shot when he held his cup out. “That’s all you get,” Jackson said. “You’re a fucking lightweight, and I don’t want your drunk ass on my conscience.”
“This is fine,” Sean said, sipping this shot instead of taking it all at once. “I’ll be fine.”
Jackson raised an eyebrow. “Guess we’ll see about that.”
“Guess we will,” Sean said, and took off to get his guy.
Sean decided there was no reason to be subtle. That ship had sailed, long ago.
“So,” he said, as he walked up to where Gabriel and Ren were standing. “Which one of you is going to fuck me?”
Gabriel choked on his beer, and Ren just smiled, like the cat who’d just won the cream.
“Um,” Gabriel said, trying to clear his throat. “Uh. Are you okay? Are you drunk?”
“I’m not drunk,” Sean said, trying to be casual, even though his fingers were clamped tightly around the plastic cup he was holding. He wanted, more than he’d ever imagined, more than he’d anticipated, Gabriel to be the one to stand up and say, me, it has to be me. It was only ever going to be me.
“We’re not doing this,” Gabriel said in a hard voice.
Not the tender, intimate one he’d spoken in when Sean had confessed to him all about Milo.
Maybe he never should have told Gabriel the truth.
Maybe he’d created shoes that were too big to fill.
Too much pressure. Too much tension. Too much something.
“Then,” Sean said, turning to Ren. “How about you? You wanna get out of here?” He hoped that none of his disappointment—the hurt—showed on his face.
Ren sighed. “Sweetheart,” he said, “you really don’t want me. You want him.” He pointed to Gabriel. “And I’m not stupid enough to get in the way. Besides, sex is only really fun if the feeling’s mutual.”
“But . . .”
“No,” Ren said gently. “No.”
Sean downed the rest of his vodka. He couldn’t look at Gabriel. It ached too much, the rejection seeping deep inside him. Flirting with Ren—or with someone else—wasn’t going to help now. Even finishing the vodka, burning low in his belly, didn’t make it feel any better.
The fire danced in front of his eyelids, and he felt so fucking stupid.
Of course Ren didn’t really want him. And Gabriel? Sean swallowed hard. He couldn’t think about him at all.
“My cousin isn’t stupid.”
Sean’s gaze flicked to Gabriel, who was still standing there, uncertainly.
Ren was gone, Sean didn’t even know where.
Probably to find someone who actually wanted to have sex with him.
Out of the corner of his eye, Sean saw him across the lot, talking to Ash and that new guy, the tense one, the one that Ash had invited. Lennox? Yeah, that was his name.
Why couldn’t he be more like Ash? Easy come and easy go? Never worried or anxious about how a relationship would turn out?
He wanted to be that way. Specifically he wanted to be that way about Gabriel.
“No, he’s not,” Sean said wretchedly.
If he was insane, he would go over to where Ash was standing, with the new guy, and maybe keep throwing himself at people who didn’t want him.
But he felt rooted in place. It was impossible to tell where Gabriel was going with his train of thought—he was unpredictable, even at the best of times—but Sean discovered he really didn’t care.
In a minute, he’d go back to Jackson’s makeshift bar and tolerate how loved up he and his boyfriend were just so he could grab another shot of vodka. Maybe it would dull . . . everything.
“Ren’s not stupid enough to fuck with you, because he knows I’d kill him. Slowly.”
Sean glanced up, and realized that Gabriel had walked closer, and was only an arm’s length away. His jaw was clenched, his dark gaze intense.
“Why would you even bother doing that?” Sean wondered.
“You know why,” Gabriel said, his voice still annoyingly steady.
“You weren’t even serious about hooking up with Ren; you just wanted to push my buttons.
” He hesitated. Sean looked up at him, again.
He couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away. A problem he’d never been able to solve, not in two long years of frustrated bickering. “Consider them pushed.”
Before Sean could stop him, Gabriel plucked the empty plastic cup from his hand. “You won’t need this any more,” he said.
“That’s mine,” Sean said. It wasn’t easy to make his voice hard and frosty—before, it had been so easy, as easy as breathing, but something had changed when they’d kissed. An inevitability, sliding right into its given place, and changing everything.
“Do you really want to get drunk?” Gabriel asked, and suddenly he was even closer, and his voice was hushed and reverent.
That was an easy enough question.
There’d been a period right after Milo, when he’d used alcohol as a crutch.
He’d been unable to face the reality of his new life, and it had been easier with the cushion of a shot of booze in his coffee every morning.
Then it had been easier with a beer at lunch.
And it had spiraled from there. With the help of his therapist, he’d pulled himself out of that spiral, but he’d been cautious around alcohol ever since.
“No,” Sean said. And meant it.
“Good. Because I try to avoid having sex with drunk people,” Gabriel said.
“What?” Sean wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly.
Gabe sighed. “You want to do this, except it’s kind of a disaster waiting to happen. We have so much . . . crap . . . between us. But I can’t deny that this is probably inevitable.”
“Are you saying that throwing a meatball at me was a kind of come-on?” Sean wondered.
“I don’t know what it was,” Gabriel admitted. “But there’s a part of me that’s very glad I did it.”
“Because it meant we spent the next two years fighting?” Sean asked.
He could still feel the weight of it, as it had hit his chest. At the time, he’d thought that was the end of his new beginning.
That he’d never make any friends because that guy that everyone already seemed to like had decided to hate him.
But it hadn’t been the end at all.
Maybe he wasn’t quite as mad about it as he had been, all those years ago.
Because not only had Gabriel’s friends become his own friends—he’d gotten Gabriel.
“No,” Gabe said. “Because it meant that someday, I was gonna get to do this.” He leaned in, and for a second, Sean tensed, remembering they were surrounded by those friends, and they were probably all watching.
But then just because they’d agreed it would be a no-strings hookup didn’t mean they had to hide it, like they were ashamed of it, right?
That would be silly.
Sean didn’t want to keep any more secrets. Especially not from people he cared about.
He reached up, tangling his fingers in the soft hair, right at the base of Gabriel’s neck. “I’m glad, too,” he said, and pressed his lips to Gabe’s.
There was only the barest impression of a hot, needy mouth on his—the taste addicting and Sean wondered, briefly, if he would ever get enough of it—and then it was gone.
“Hey,” Gabriel said, their breath still mingling together.
His arm was a firm hot line against Sean’s back, and he felt something he hadn’t in so long.
It was support, both physical and metaphysical.
Maybe this was a terrible idea. Maybe he’d end up changing Milo’s name for their food truck, and he couldn’t help but feel a pang of hurt at that, but what would he gain, instead?
Sean didn’t know. He felt the world opening up in a way that it hadn’t in a very long time.
And god, more than that, he was feeling his blood heat up just from that brief kiss and from having Gabe touch him. “Hey,” Sean repeated with a grin, “we should get out of here.”
“Nope,” Gabriel said firmly. “We made it six goddamn months here, and we deserve to celebrate.”
“What’s a better celebration than getting naked?” Sean teased.
“Oh, that’s happening, but just a little bit later,” Gabriel promised. He leaned down and kissed him again—another one of those all-too-brief moments where it ended practically before it began. Sean had been hungry for it before, but now he felt ravenous.
“Haven’t we waited long enough?” Sean wondered.
“Yeah,” Gabriel said. His arm slid down Sean’s back and rested right at the curve of it, right above his ass. The heat of it burned into his skin, through the thin cotton of his tank. “But I think we can wait a little longer.”
“Can you though?” Sean trailed a finger down Gabriel’s bare arm. It seemed wild and impossible that they’d never touched like this before, because it felt like they’d been in each other’s space for so damn long, but he knew that this was all new because it felt new.