Chapter 25 #2
“I’ve thought a lot about what you said earlier, about Lionel, and I’m going to accept a date offer, if he makes one, and if he doesn’t, I’m going to actively look for a boyfriend or girlfriend.
You’re right. I need that kind of . . . physical connection.
I’m fucking lonely. And I have been for so long.
Since April, really. And you are too, I know you are, but I don’t see why you can’t .
. .” He physically shakes the notion from his head.
“It’s not about you. It’s about me. Tomorrow, I’m gonna get the train back to Bath, and maybe .
. . we just don’t see each other again.”
“Harry.” His name is barely a whisper on my breath. “Are you being for real right now?” Why am I saying this? I’m the one who wanted to force this rift between us. Now I want him sticking around, torturing me?
“Hate me if you want,” he says. “I . . . I guess I need to put myself first for once. I’m wasting the best years of my life waiting for you to change your mind. And I’ve been so . . . stupid and naive and . . . I . . . yeah, this needs to stop.”
I swallow the building emotion. Harry is doing what I should have done four months ago. Six months. A year, even.
“Why wait until morning? The trains go all night. Hell, I’ll order a taxi for you all the way back to Bath. Why put off the inevitable?”
He stares at me, into my soul, and I swear I see the exact moment his heart breaks. I fucking hate myself.
“So, that’s it, then?” He pushes the hair off his forehead. “This . . . whatever it is we’ve had for the last year is over?”
“It’s been over since April.”
“You won’t fight for me?”
Why is he breaking me like this? Why is he trying to hurt me? “You already know the answer to that.”
Harry nods. His face crumples, lip pouts, and I think he’s about to cry. Instead, he lunges forward, locks his hand around my nape and slams his mouth into mine.
I’m the one crying. My damp skin pushes against his, and the kiss is salty, and urgent, and desperate, like the last kiss of a dying love.
His shirt buttons find their way in between my fingers and I’m unfastening them, pushing the fabric over his shoulders, massaging the muscles on his back with my palms.
I skate my lips and tongue and teeth over his earlobe, down his neck, along his collarbone.
He cries out and pushes me backwards, and backwards, until my legs hit the end of the bed and my knees buckle.
Then he’s placing his thighs either side of me and roughly manhandling the tie fastenings on my silk Balenciaga shirt, as he brings our mouths together again.
I want him to rip it open. A twelve-hundred-pound shirt torn apart because he cannot control himself around me.
I want him to need me that much.
If he’d been like this that first night, we would never have reached this point right now. I would have fucked him and kicked him out of my house the next morning, and never spoken to him again.
And he went and ruined it all by being nice.
And shy, and cute, and kind, and warm, and beautiful, and wonderful, and a stupid fucking needy prick with a horrible big heart.
Sure, I was miserable, hopping from one guy to another, never developing any form of meaningful friendships. But I was happy being miserable. I knew where I stood. Knew not to trust anybody, or count on anybody, or let anybody in.
I let one person in—one clingy and insecure and vulnerable and loveable and funny as fuck person—and look where it got me.
My shirt is shoved to the floor. It joins his in a jumbled heap. Harry whines into my mouth, his forehead butted up against mine, as he unbuckles his belt, and drops his shorts to the ground.
“Get these stupid fucking trousers off.” Harry yanks my buckle, lifting me off the bed.
“Yes sir,” I say, because it’s what I would say to any other guy in this situation. I pull my trousers down, leaving only my black boxer briefs, which I begin to take off, but Harry stops me with a firm hand on the waistband.
“No, mine.”
Where was this guy a year ago?
Through my underpants, he palms my balls and works his fingers up to my cock, and he pauses. I’m hard. “Is that a reflex action from the stimulation or is it genuine attraction, arousal?”
“Both?” I’m not too sure.
“Lando, I’m going. I’m leaving tomorrow, or in a minute, whenever, I don’t care. But before I go, before we’re officially over, I . . . need you.”
I’m trying not to smile. I need to remain calm and serious, but those are the magic words. He could break me a thousand times over with those words. “Say that again.”
“I need you. I need all of you right now. Is that okay with you?”
“Yes, fuck me, please. I need you too.”
I’ve needed you for so fucking long.
“Do you have condoms? And lube?”
I point to the drawer next to the little dressing table, and Harry walks over in only his pants.
“Can I just look at all of you one last time, please?” I say.
His bottom lip wobbles again, and his brow creases, but he drops his underpants, revealing the full glory of his naked self.
His stiff, freckly cock, his thick as fuck rugby thighs, that beautiful ass.
He grabs my phone from the dresser, unlocks it, and snaps two mirror selfies.
One from the front, and one from behind, and then tosses it back onto the table.
It thunks loudly against a glass bon bon dish.
“I’m not deleting the photos I have of you, so we’re even now.”
Ah, the pictures of me in my lace knickers, and at the beer garden covered in his cum.
“Do you still look at them?” The last time I checked, he’d saved them to a favourites folder.
“Every morning. Most evenings when I’m alone.”
“Really?”
“Almost every orgasm I have is fuelled by thoughts of you.” He stares me dead in the eye, zero embarrassment. “By the memory of things we’ve done. Me, imagining things I would have done to you if I were brave enough.”
“If I were brave enough.” Not, “If you weren’t the way you are.” I feel like crying again, and I have no idea why. I swallow down the painful lump.
“I want to make you come too,” he says, and I’m too stunned to reply. “You can say no. You can say stop any time you like. But . . . just once . . . I want to watch you feel the things I feel for you.”
“What if it doesn’t happen?”
Harry shrugs. “Then I’ll try harder.”
I nod. “Then . . . I won’t fake it.”
“Lando!” He shouts like he’s scolding me. He’s frowning so much his face is turning pink. “You’ve been faking enjoyment?”
“Not with you.”
Fuck, I want to cry so badly.
“Do you want this, yes or no? Because I can’t bear you lying to me any longer. I’ll leave right now, no more questions, if you say you don’t want it.”
“No, don’t go. Please. Fuck me, just once. Please stay,” I beg. I use those magic words. “I need you.”
Because I do. I really fucking need him, but I don’t know how to make it work where we’re both happy . . . and satisfied.
I wish it could be different—wish I could be different. Harry deserves someone who can give him everything he needs.
Harry watches me for a few moments, evidently deciding something. He’s still hard, absently stroking his cock as he rakes his gaze over me. The firm set of his jaw returns, and he rolls a condom on and throws the rest to the carpet. He lubes up, and I scoot up along the bed to the headboard.
And then he’s above me, his cock nudging my entrance. He brings his lips down to my neck, and traces the lines of my throat, my Adam’s apple. “I’m still leaving after this,” he says.
“I know,” I reply, arching into him.
“You’re so fucking frustrating.” He pushes inside me.
“I know.” I don’t stop the tears as they roll back into my hairline.
I love him. In ways I shouldn’t be able to love him. I want to hoard him, like a bottle of perfume. Want to keep him in my light- and temperature-controlled closet so nobody else can put their filthy undeserving fingers on him.
He’s leaving, and I should be happy about that. It’s what I’ve been trying to get him to do since we first met.
I don’t have to inflict “me” on him any longer.
But for just one last time, I let myself cycle through all those images I told him were too depraved to utter aloud in the beer garden of Owen’s pub.
The memory of us eating duck eggs together at my breakfast counter.
Him drunk at the end of the season last year, poking me in the chest, telling me he liked me, slagging off Mathias.
The way he stood up for me in front of my father, the way he looked at me in my lingerie on Halloween, the way he quietly sat beside me on Mum’s birthday.
And I imagine us two, five, ten years in the future.
Maybe we’d get married, have a fabulous wedding.
I’d wear a dress—black of course. Maybe we’d have kids.
Loads of them, like the Ellises. A whole rugby team of offspring, and we could go on picnics and Disney World holidays, and be surrounded by love all the fucking time.
And every single day Harry would tell me that I am enough. That I am wanted. And loved. Just the way I am.
“Babygirl,” he whispers, one arm bracing him up as he thrusts, and the other hand cradling my nape, tilting my face towards him. His eyes skim over the tears tracking into my hair. “Am I really that bad at this?”
It’s such a Harry thing to say that I laugh, and then cry even more.
“Do you remember ages ago when we were talking about what we like to do?” He’s out of breath, and his words are staccato.
“Yes.”
“This is what I wanted . . .” He doesn’t finish his sentence. Making love, that’s what he’d told me he was into. He’d wanted to make love. “Are you close? I’m really close.”
I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I say and purse my lips together to stop the tears from forming again.
Harry pulls out of me, and instead, fills me with his fingers.
He brings his lips down to my cock, and I close my eyes and just try to enjoy the sensation.
The first few minutes are spent worrying, panicking about how long he’ll be there, how tired his jaw is going to get, how much longer before he throws in the towel and gives up on this pointless endeavour.
After a while, I stop being so in my head. I think about all the moments in my life I’ve ever felt even the slightest bit turned on, and unsurprisingly they all feature Harry.
Harry’s left hand holds mine beside my hip, our fingers intertwined, and he’s whining these beautiful, intense moans in time to the building crescendo of pleasure.
No, wait. Those noises are coming from me. It feels good. Oh, it feels really fucking good.
“Oh my god, I’m gonna come,” I say.
Harry doesn’t let up. He tries to look at me, but the angles are off.
Before my orgasm robs me of my vision, I catch him smiling to himself.
He holds my hand and sucks me gently until I feel completely limp and boneless.
Then he’s above me, jamming his thumb between my teeth and tilting my head back. He spits the cum into my mouth.
Okay, hot. Actually, that’s very hot.
He swallows. “I googled snowballing. RIP my browser history. Also, cum doesn’t taste that bad.”
“You don’t have scent receptors. That dramatically affects taste,” I tell him, but I’m not sure he’s listening any more. His eyes have a glazed, drunken sheen to them.
Harry uses his hand to line himself up with my hole. “I’m going to fuck you now.”
He’s heavy on top of me, and I want this moment to last forever.
I want to freeze time, spend the rest of eternity with Harry as my weighted blanket.
But I know by his whining, by the way he can’t quite catch his breath, by the increasingly erratic thrusting of his hips, that we’re nearing the finish line.
The end of this moment, and us.
Less than a minute later, he’s pillowing his forehead against my shoulder, and crying out as his back spasms. He slumps and lies on me for a little while longer.
Abruptly, he pulls out and pushes himself into a seated position, and we stare at each other for an eternity. I feel like we have an entire conversation in our heads before he speaks.
“Am I leaving now? Is this the end?”
I can’t answer. My airways have closed themselves off. Instead, I roll onto my side and face away from him.
I don’t have the words to explain how I can’t steal his future.
I can’t be the person who denies him his happiness. Daisy was right, I led him on. I let him fall in love with me, knowing I can never be the person he’s dreamed about being with.
The one he deserves.
I’m selfish. But I’m not so selfish I’d force him to stay here with me.
He stands. “I’ll just pack up my stuff, then,” he says, and leaves the room.
Five minutes later, my door opens again. Something heavy hits the mattress next to me. It’s my phone.
“If you ever change your mind, give me a call. I can’t promise I’ll wait for you whilst you figure this shit out, though. I love you . . . I don’t think that will ever change, but . . . you aren’t giving me enough credit. You’re projecting shit onto me that I . . . that never originated from me.”
He waits for me to reply, but I don’t.
The silence that falls after Harry leaves is suffocating, pressing in on me from every angle, rushing down my throat, stopping words and breaths from forming. I can’t even cry.
I just feel so . . . empty.
Out of habit, or desperation for distraction, I pick up my phone, and check the last app used. Fucker’s ordered an Uber—an Uber Exec no less—all the way to Bath on my account. I hate how smart that move is.
My finger hovers over the “cancel” button, but I don’t press it. Instead, I close the app, open my photo gallery, and stare at Harry’s naked body until I feel something. Anything.
I won’t tell Daisy it was Harry’s decision to end it. Won’t admit that yet another person chose to leave me.
Everything that happened tonight and over the past year has been my fault. It’s time I took some responsibility for myself.