Chapter 7 #3
It wouldn’t be easy, but Seth had already done enough shitty things, so he’d do as Ren demanded, and even though his gaze always felt magnetically drawn to him, whenever they saw each other, he’d do his best.
Maybe it would even begin to hurt less if he could pull it off.
Seth strapped on his phone holder, shoved his feet into his running shoes, and took off.
He started slow, warming up, but the sedate pace wasn’t blocking out or quieting the screaming guilt in the back of his head, so he pushed harder and then harder still, sweat beginning to drip down his forehead as his feet hit the pavement.
But no matter how far or hard he ran, muscles tensing and tiring, he couldn’t shut out Ren’s words—or the anger Seth had seen in his eyes.
His breaths were coming in big, painful gusts as he finally rounded the corner towards his house.
He’d been gone for at least an hour, though he didn’t have the energy to glance down at his phone and see the statistics for his run.
Slowing down, he pulled off his t-shirt and wiped his face with it, his muscles screaming with exhaustion as he transitioned from the punishing pace to cooldown mode.
He turned the last corner, heading up the path to his front door, and stopped in his tracks.
Ren was sitting on his tiny front porch, dressed in dark jeans and a plain gray t-shirt, hair perfect, and shadows under his eyes.
“Hey,” he said, standing up as Seth just stared at him.
Acutely and stupidly aware that his t-shirt was dangling from his fingertips, his skin burning under Ren’s potent gaze.
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do,” Seth said, his tongue clumsy and thick in his mouth. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk to you—or even look at you ever again.”
“I did say that, didn’t I?” Ren sighed.
Seth put his hands on hips. “Yeah, you did. And I probably deserved it.”
“Did you?” Ren hummed to himself, like he was still trying to decide. “I’m not sure you did, though I was plenty pissed. Pissed and humiliated.”
“I wasn’t laughing at you. Not once. That’s not what . . .” Damn his words, he was terrible with them normally, but after that kind of insane run he’d just put himself through, he couldn’t figure out what he was supposed to say or do.
He’d never imagined that Ren might come back.
“I know,” Ren finished for him. “I know. I wouldn’t let you talk to me.” His smile was wry. “I didn’t see the point.”
Seth stared at him. Just a second ago, he’d been exhausted. But now, his fingertips were tingling and hope began to re-bloom, deep inside him, making him feel alive again.
“Do you see it now?”
Ren shrugged. “I don’t know.”
It wasn’t the answer he’d been hoping for, but it wasn’t no, either.
“I liked Jake,” Ren continued thoughtfully.
“Liked,” Seth said, not bothering to hide his bitterness.
“I don’t know how much of you is Jake and how much of you is Seth,” Ren said.
“Yes, you do,” Seth said bluntly.
Ren rolled his eyes, but he hadn’t moved any closer and there was an uncertainty in his eyes that Seth had never seen before.
He didn’t know what to do.
Well, that made two of them.
He took a deep, shuddering breath, fingers clenched hard around his sweaty t-shirt. “Why are you here?” he asked.
Maybe the only way to convince Ren of what he believed Ren already suspected—which is that the only thing he’d lied about was his name—was to be one hundred percent scrupulously honest going forward.
Seth could do that.
“I was confused,” Ren finally said. He took a tentative step forward.
“About?”
“You took me to your house, drunk and well . . . I know what I’m like when I’m drunk . . . and . . .” Ren’s voice trailed off, like he wasn’t sure what to say.
How much to admit to.
“Are you asking how handsy you tried to be?” Seth chuckled. “Plenty handsy, okay? But I’m not a boy. Not like those guys you normally date. I can control myself.”
Ren eyed him from head to toe, from his bare chest to the shorts that revealed his legs. “Oh, believe me, I know it. But what I’m asking is what I’ve forgotten. If I forgot, it couldn’t have been very good. Was it not good?”
“Forgot what?” Seth shouldn’t have been amused at Ren’s confusion, but it was impossible not to be. Not when Ren was normally so ball-bustingly confident.
“I thought we did . . . I have this memory of us . . .” Ren took another handful of steps towards Seth. Apparently not dissuaded by his sweat. “Getting close. Dancing, maybe?”
Seth tilted his head. Wondered where Ren was going with this. “We danced.”
“Then we . . . got this close,” Ren said, crowding in even closer. Just as near as he had been, the night before. Just as—if not more—irresistible. “And then it just goes blank.”
Seth told himself not to laugh. This wasn’t funny. “You think we kissed and you forgot it.”
“Yes.” Frustration crossed over Ren’s face. “I was in your bed. You didn’t make me sleep on the couch.”
“You were hung up on that last night, too,” Seth said. “You kept saying you didn’t understand.”
“Of course I didn’t.” Ren rolled his eyes. “So what am I missing? I wasn’t that drunk but I must be missing something.”
“Lorenzo,” Seth said, leaning in another fraction of an inch, until their foreheads were nearly touching, “if we kissed, it wouldn’t matter how much you had to drink, you’d never be able to forget it.”
Ren licked his bottom lip. “Sounds like a lot of promises you’re making.”
Promises Seth didn’t know if he could live up to.
Ren had probably kissed a hundred guys; he’d probably had a dozen unbelievable, blow-the-top-of-your-head-clean-off kisses in his life.
Meanwhile, Seth hadn’t kissed anybody in a year, and hadn’t kissed anybody he really liked in so much longer than that.
He was trembling, and he told himself it was because his muscles were worn out—but the truth was a lot more difficult to face than that.
“I’m making one promise, and one promise only,” Seth said, because this needed to be said, before anything happened. “I won’t ever lie to you again.”
Ren opened his mouth to say something else and Seth realized, like a shot of lightning to the back of the head, that he was nervous too.
Suddenly it made no sense to stand here, aching for each other and doing nothing about it.
So, Seth did what he always did. He pushed through the nerves and the fear, and tilted his head down, pressing his lips against Ren’s.
For a second, that was all it was: his mouth against Ren’s, not moving, only touching, because even that mere brush of their lips together was like a cataclysm moving through him.
He shivered, or maybe that was Ren, and then Ren’s hands were around his neck, tugging him closer, his mouth slotting under Seth’s own, like it had been made for him.
In the six months since he’d met Lorenzo Moretti, he’d dreamed about kissing him so many times that he couldn’t possibly remember them all.
There’d been hot kisses and sexy kisses and kisses that made his dick hard.
He’d imagined unexpected kisses, and kisses in the rain.
With so little romance in his life, he’d let his mind run wild whenever it thought of Ren, because there was so little chance of him ever getting to enact any of his fantasies.
But never in six months had he imagined such a soft, slow, sweet kiss. That just the soft brush of Ren’s incredible mouth would be enough to make him shake. That he’d enjoy it so much just like this that he wouldn’t want it any other way.
Then Ren made a little noise in the back of his throat, like he was confused, or maybe just that he was as blown apart as Seth was, and he pulled back.
For a second, Seth was confused too.
What had just happened?
He’d been kissing Ren and then he wasn’t kissing Ren, and that seemed like the worst kind of development.
“What . . .” Ren had to clear this throat, his voice rough. It seemed impossible, judging from the look in Ren’s eyes, that he hadn’t been as viscerally affected by the kiss as Seth had. “What are we doing?”
They hadn’t so much as brushed dicks. They’d stayed a sedate few inches apart. Nobody had groped anybody, though the thought had fleetingly passed through Seth’s head that now would be a good time to find out if Ren’s ass was a delicious a handful as it looked.
No, it had been unexpectedly chaste.
Mind-blowing. And so fucking sweet. But mostly innocent.
“I thought it was obvious what we were doing. And now we’re not doing it anymore,” Seth teased.
Ren rolled his eyes. “I mean . . . we still want different things. Why are we doing this?”
Yes, that had always been the problem. Except that Seth was beginning to think it wasn’t actually a problem.
“I don’t think that’s true, anymore,” Seth said.
He remembered how hesitant Ren had been with Jake, how he hadn’t been sure what he wanted.
He certainly hadn’t just propositioned Jake, either.
He’d talked to him. Hung out with him, virtually.
Flirted with him. Everything that Seth craved, that he’d never gotten for real.
Ren shot him a look. “Don’t . . .”
But Seth didn’t let him finish. Ren, he’d begun to figure out, liked to make things difficult on himself. Liked to tie himself into knots when things were really, actually pretty straightforward. Like right now.
“What I mean is that what I want is you. And you’re here, so I think the feeling is mutual. We don’t have to put any pressure on ourselves. We can just . . .”
Ren looked unimpressed. But that, Seth reminded himself, was the facade. He’d been hurt when Seth had lied to him about Jake. He’d been nervous, right before the kiss.
“We can just what,” Ren said. “I can’t just become a different person. Neither can you.”
“If I’d gotten my way,” Seth said, dropping down and settling on the front step of the porch, “I’d have taken you out, the first time. Nice dinner, I’d have worn a tie, probably, and we’d have finished the evening at a movie, or a concert, or with a quiet drink.”
“And you’d have kissed me,” Ren said, hesitating, but finally taking a seat next to Seth. Not touching, but not precisely far away either.
“You’ve seen yourself,” Seth teased. “I’d have kissed you, for sure.”
“And? What’s the point? You’d have taken me on a big fancy date, kissed me at my doorstep, just like a thousand romantic comedies, and then we’d be what . . . dating? You know I don’t . . .”
“I know,” Seth said firmly. “I know you don’t. That’s why I won’t. Not now. But I wanted to tell you what I would’ve done, because if I didn’t, then you wouldn’t understand my compromise.”
“Your compromise?” Ren looked suspicious. Like he was waiting for another shoe to drop.
Seth was waiting for it too, except he knew what it looked like, and he realized as he pictured it in his mind that he wanted it more than was probably healthy.
How would he move on if Ren rejected his idea? After he’d already tasted him? Experienced a shadowy possibility of what they could have together when he’d been Jake?
“I just want to hang out with you. No pressure, no expectations. I told you, all I ever wanted was you.”
“No strings?”
If Ren didn’t think they had any strings tying them together, he was lying to himself, because Seth could feel them tugging at him now, but the idea of them clearly terrified Ren, so he shook his head.
Not a lie, exactly, but a necessary deflection.
“What about . . .” Ren hesitated, worrying his bottom lip again. Seth wanted to lean down and lick it. “What about sex?”
“What about it?” Even hearing him say the word sent a tremor through Seth’s body but he kept his voice casual.
“You’re really going to make me say it?” Ren looked annoyed. Frustrated.
Sexually frustrated, Seth realized, and then it hit him, sudden and jarring. He’s sexually frustrated because of you.
“It’s better,” Seth said mildly, hiding how utterly thrilled he was, how much his pulse had suddenly accelerated, “to be straightforward about these things, right?”
Seth didn’t have a moment to brace himself, because suddenly Ren was in his space, and this kiss wasn’t sweet or soft. It was hot and filthy, Ren’s tongue inside his mouth, nimble and quick and blowing Seth’s mind.
And then as fast as it had begun, it was over, and Ren’s face was hovering a few inches from his own.
Seth had to look away, because it was too much. Ren far away was a gorgeous sight, but up close, his mouth wet and red from his own, pupils blown in his dark eyes, curls mussed from Seth’s hand, he was a fucking masterpiece.
But when he glanced away, the first thing he saw was Ren’s hand, and it was trembling.
“Point taken,” Seth said wryly. “We’re going to have sex, okay? Is that what you wanted?”
“More than once,” Ren said with satisfaction, a smile creeping across his features like a cat who’d just won the cream. Like he hadn’t practically made a career out of never sleeping with the same guy twice.
“If you want to, sure,” Seth said, making a promise to himself that he’d make sure that Ren wanted to.
Ren laughed. “You’re terrible at this.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?” Seth said, gesturing around him. “So I must not be so fucking terrible after all.”
Ren might have rolled his eyes again, but he also looked so pleased that Seth felt the mirror image of the feeling roll through him.
“I guess,” Ren said, standing, “I should give you my number. For whatever this casual hanging-out thing is we’re doing.”
“Actually, I already have it,” Seth said.
“Really?”
Seth could see how Ren was trying to puzzle out how he’d gotten it. “I have the number of every person who works at the food truck lot,” he said. “For work.”
“And you’ve never used it,” Ren said, a smile breaking over his features. “Not once. Should I be impressed?”
“Yes,” Seth said. “Very.”
“Well, then, I am. Impressed, that is.” He dusted off his dark jeans. “You’ll text me, then?”
Seth was pretty sure that Ren hadn’t meant to sound so hopeful, but it was there, anyway. He couldn’t hide it.
“Yeah, I’ll text you,” Seth said. He’d promised he wouldn’t lie, after all, and he definitely intended to text him.
And more.
“Then, I guess I’ll see you around,” Ren said, and then he turned and walked away.
Unlike every other time he’d walked away, Seth didn’t watch him go with a single bit of regret.