Chapter 34
AREK
Mac said, “Move,” and I moved.
The first thrust was careful, shallow, my body shaking with the effort of restraint.
Mac was tight around me, impossibly tight, and the heat of him, the reality of being inside this man who’d spent his life keeping everyone out, overwhelmed me so completely that I had to stop and press my forehead to his chest and breathe.
“Arek.” His voice was rough, strained, but steady. His hand found the back of my head. “I’m okay. Keep going.”
I lifted my head and looked at him. His jaw was set, the muscle jumping, his eyes dark and fixed on mine.
Not in pain—if I’d seen pain, I’d have stopped—but in the intense, focused concentration of a man processing something enormous.
His body was learning. I could feel it, the gradual yielding, the resistance softening with each breath, his muscles unclenching as his nervous system caught up with his decision.
I moved again. Deeper this time, a slow roll of my hips, and Mac’s breath punched out of him in a raw sound I’d never heard him make. His hand tightened in my hair. “There. That’s—”
“I know.”
I angled my hips and found it again, the spot that had made him come off the bed when I touched it with my fingers.
Mac’s entire body arched, his head pressing back into the pillow, his throat exposed, a sound escaping that was somewhere between a groan and my name.
I’d spent months learning this man’s body—his responses, his tells, the geography of his pleasure—and nothing I’d discovered compared to this.
Mac undone. Mac open. Mac with every wall demolished, every defense abandoned, trusting me with the most vulnerable version of himself.
I set a rhythm. Slow, deep, watching his face with every thrust, reading him through sensation, through response, through the language of his body that was more honest than any words he’d ever spoken.
His legs tightened around me. His hands moved from my hair to my back, gripping hard, pulling me closer, deeper, and the urgency in his grip told me he wanted more.
I gave him more.
Careful restraint burned away and changed into intensity.
Deeper thrusts, a faster rhythm, my hips driving into him with a purpose that was both physical and emotional because this wasn’t just sex.
This was Mac letting me in. All the way in.
Past the granite, past the discipline, past the fortress he’d built on a mountain and the silence he’d wrapped around himself like armor.
He’d opened every door, and I was walking through them, one by one.
What I found on the other side was a man who was shaking, gasping, and gripping me like I was the only solid thing in a world that had gone liquid.
“Arek…” His voice broke. “I can’t… I’m going to…”
I wrapped my hand around his cock, hard and leaking between us, and stroked in time with my thrusts.
Mac made a sound I felt in my spine, in my teeth, in the deepest part of my chest. His body locked, every muscle going rigid, and he came with his eyes open and fixed on mine.
I watched it happen, watched the pleasure tear through him like lightning through a clear sky, watched all those years of control, restraint, and self-denial shatter in a single, beautiful, devastating moment.
The clench of his body around me, the expression on his face, the sound of my name in his wrecked voice pulled me over the edge. I came inside him with a cry I couldn’t contain, my hips driving deep, my face buried in his neck, his arms locked around me, holding me as I shook apart.
We lay there, connected, trembling, breathing.
The lamp cast its warm glow over us, and I was inside the man I loved as neither of us moved.
I didn’t want to leave his body. The intimacy of remaining, of being held inside him, of feeling his heartbeat through his chest and through the place where we were joined was so profound that pulling away felt like it would break something.
Mac’s hand moved through my hair. Slow, rhythmic, the gesture he used when words were too far away. I pressed my lips to his throat, felt his pulse hammering, and stayed.
“Hey,” he said eventually. Quiet. Wrecked.
“Hey.”
“So that’s what that feels like.”
A watery laugh escaped me. “Yeah. That’s what that feels like.”
“Arek.” His hand stilled in my hair. I lifted my head and looked at him. His eyes were bright, wet, and completely undefended. “Thank you for making it safe enough to let go. I’ve never… In my whole life, I’ve never…”
He couldn’t finish. He didn’t need to. I kissed him, soft and slow, tasting salt, and when I pulled back, he pressed his forehead to mine, and we breathed together. The silence held everything his words couldn’t.
I withdrew carefully. Cleaned us up with the warm cloth and quiet attention that had become our ritual.
Mac lay on his back and watched me with heavy-lidded eyes, his body loose and open in a way I’d never seen, the tension that lived permanently in his shoulders and jaw simply gone.
He looked ten years younger. He looked like a man at peace.
I crawled back into bed and he pulled me against his chest, my head over his heart, his arms around me. The position we’d found weeks ago and had returned to every night we’d spent together since—my ear against his heartbeat, his chin on my hair, our legs tangled, the quilt over both of us. Home.
“I’ve been thinking,” Mac said.
“Dangerous.”
“Funny.” His chest vibrated with something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I’ve been thinking about the fall. About what happens when summer ends.”
I traced a line along his collarbone. “What about it?”
“Boden goes back to San Francisco. The boys start school. You go back to the clinic.” A pause. “And I go back up the mountain. Alone.”
The word landed in the dark bedroom with the weight of something he’d been carrying for a while. Alone. The thing Mac had chosen two years ago and was now, I could hear in his voice, finished choosing.
“I don’t want to do that anymore,” he said. “The back and forth. A few nights here, a few nights there. I want…” The jaw worked. “I want to wake up next to you every morning. Not some mornings. Every morning.”
My heart was doing something arrhythmic and clinically concerning. I pressed my hand flat over Mac’s sternum and felt his heartbeat, steady even when his words weren’t.
“The campground is almost finished,” he said. “Cas is done with the electrical. I have two more cabins that need some last work, which I can have finished by the end of August. And then I can sell it.”
“Sell it,” I repeated.
“It’s served its purpose, Arek. I needed to be alone and build something, and now it’s done, and I don’t need to live on top of a mountain anymore. I need to be where you are.”
I closed my eyes. The words washed over me like the river, cold and comforting at the same time, shocking and inevitable.
I’d wanted this. I’d wanted it since long before I’d admitted it to myself, since the first Saturday morning on the porch, since the chair, since the coffee.
Mac in my life, not as a visitor but as a permanent fixture.
Mac’s boots by the door every night. Mac’s coffee mug next to mine every morning.
The left side of the bed occupied. Always.
“We could look for something bigger together,” I said.
“My place is too small for when Boden visits. He needs a real room, his own room, not a couch or an air mattress. We need a place with four bedrooms, enough space for all of us. Something at the edge of town, maybe. Room for a yard. Room for a workshop.”
Something moved across Mac’s face at that. The mention of Boden’s needs—me thinking about Boden’s needs, planning for Boden as a member of our household, not an afterthought but a given—registered with an impact I could see in the softening of his jaw and the brightness in his eyes. “A workshop.”
“You’re going to need somewhere to build things, Mac. I’ve accepted this about you. My future involves sawdust.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. The almost-smile became an actual smile, slow and real. “A house. Together.”
“Together. Ours. For all of us.”
He was quiet for a moment, and I let him be because this was Mac processing something enormous and pushing him would only slow the gears.
I watched the thoughts move behind his eyes—the logistics, the finances, the reality of selling a mountain property, buying a town property, and merging two lives into one address.
“I’d need work. Real work, not just finishing the cabins. Something steady.”
“Have you thought about Cas?”
He looked at me.
“Didn’t you tell me he has a wait list now because he can’t handle all the work? He needs another set of hands. Skilled hands, Mac. Someone who can frame and finish and build from scratch. You’re the most talented builder I’ve ever seen, and Cas knows it. He’s watched you work for months.”
Mac stared at the ceiling. I watched him turn the idea over, examining it from every angle the way he examined a joint or a plank—testing for weakness, for hidden flaws, for the structural integrity of a plan that would hold weight.
Working for Cas. Building things in Forestville, not on a mountain alone but in a town, for people, alongside someone who respected his craft.
Using his hands the way he’d always used them, but in service of a life instead of in retreat from one.
“That could work,” he said slowly.
“It would work. You know it would.”
“Arek…” He turned his head on the pillow. His eyes found mine, blue and serious. “A house is… That’s not small. That’s a commitment.”
“Mac.” I put my hand on his face. His jaw, his cheekbone, the place where everything had started. “I’ve been committed since you painted my porch, probably even before that. A house just gives it an address.”
He turned his face into my palm and kissed it.
The center of my hand, where the nerves were dense and sensitive, and the press of his lips sent a current up my arm and into my chest. And I understood, with a certainty that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the man beside me, that this was what the rest of my life looked like.
This man. This bed. This future we were sketching in the dark with our voices and our hands.
“Okay,” Mac said against my palm. “Let’s do it.”
“Let’s do it,” I echoed.
We lay in the dark and the word okay settled between us, small and enormous at the same time. No, it wasn’t dramatic or some grand declaration, but we didn’t need that. I didn’t need that. This was enough. Truly enough.
Mac’s breathing slowed. His hand found mine under the quilt, our fingers lacing with the automatic ease of a gesture we’d made a thousand times.
The house creaked around us, settling for the night the way old wood did, the sounds of a building that had held one person for two years and was learning to hold more.
Outside, in the cabin, our boys were sleeping. Three of them, in a space they’d claimed with sleeping bags, books, a guitar, and a table they’d built with their own hands. Our boys. The word fit now in a way it hadn’t even a month ago. Not Mac’s son and Arek’s sons. Ours.
“Mac?”
“Mm.”
“I love you.”
“Love you too.” Drowsy, certain, the words mumbled while half-asleep but fully meant.
I closed my eyes and listened to the mountain. The creek, the wind in the firs, the silence that wasn’t empty but full. Full of the future. Full of plans that would take shape in daylight due to the slow, steady work of people who’d chosen each other.
My heart was full. Not the anxious, performative fullness of a man trying to carry everything alone.
The real kind. The kind that came from being held, from holding, from the simple and extraordinary act of lying next to someone who wanted the same life you did and was willing to build it together, one day at a time.
The future could wait until morning. Tonight, this was enough.