Chapter 25
RYAN
Morning light slants through the blinds, catching dust motes that drift lazily across my empty dorm room.
Jackson’s bed is still made from yesterday.
Last night, he texted a string of eggplant emojis followed by “don’t wait up,” and a photo of Drew’s leather jacket draped over a chair that I recognized as the one in the Hockey House living room.
Which means I’m completely, utterly alone with nothing but my thoughts and the memory of what lies beneath Oliver’s shorts.
I roll onto my back, and my mind drifts back to that night atop the astronomy tower.
I’m really glad you let me come tonight.
Oliver’s voice echoes in my memory, and my abdomen clenches.
Since I was ten years old, Oliver Jacoby has lived in the locked room of my imagination.
For over a decade, I’ve folded “admiration” into the shape of something harmless, creased “loneliness” along its edges until it resembled anything but desire, told myself that whatever I felt was just the desperate reaching of a boy who never stayed in one place long enough to belong.
But I can’t pretend anymore. I want him in ways that make my face heat and my body respond.
I shift in bed, and the sheet coils around my legs.
I’m wearing briefs and nothing else. My hand drifts to my stomach without conscious permission.
Resting there, feeling the rise and fall of my breathing as I think about Oliver’s eyes catching the moonlight, how they lingered on me with a focus that made me feel special.
This has to stop. I should drag myself out of bed, stand under freezing water until my teeth chatter, lose myself in the pages of a good book, or the soothing voice of David Attenborough. Anything to drown out thoughts of Oliver Jacoby.
My fingers trace lower, following the trail of fine hair that leads beneath my waistband. The touch is tentative at first, exploratory.
I think about Oliver’s hands, strong and sure, wrapped around mine with a confidence I’ve never possessed. Those hands have handled hockey sticks. They’ve lifted trophies. They’ve probably touched other bodies in ways I can only imagine.
The thought should make me jealous. It only makes me harder.
My palm presses against the growing bulge, and I let out a breath that’s almost a gasp. The pressure feels wonderful, and I rock my hips up before I can think better of it.
In my mind, the astronomy tower transforms. The eclipse is still happening overhead, the blood moon casting its red glow across the observation deck, but now Oliver isn’t holding my hand. He’s turning toward me, cupping my jaw, tilting my face toward his.
I slip my hand beneath my waistband and wrap my fingers around my cock. The contact draws a sound from my throat—small and needy, almost embarrassing in its desperation—but there’s no one here to hear it. No one to judge.
I stroke slowly, letting the fantasy build. In my imagination, Oliver kisses me; soft at first, questioning, giving me every opportunity to pull away. But I don’t. I lean into it, opening for him, letting his tongue sweep against mine in a way that makes my real-world hips jerk off the mattress.
You’ve never done this before, fantasy-Oliver says against my lips. And instead of being put off by my inexperience, he seems to relish it. Let me show you. Let me make it good for you.
My grip tightens. Precome slicks my palm, easing the friction as I stroke faster. The sheets have fallen away entirely now, bunched at the foot of the bed, and I’m exposed to the empty room, briefs pushed down around my thighs.
If my father could see me now, he’d die of a heart attack.
The fantasy shifts. We’re in Oliver’s room at the Hockey House. He’s kneeling between my legs, his green eyes dark with desire as he drinks me in.
So beautiful, he says before his hand wraps around my cock.
I moan again.
Fantasy-Oliver strokes me with the same confidence he brings to everything else. His thick thumb swipes over the head on each upstroke, spreading the wetness that’s gathered there. His other hand presses flat against my stomach, holding me down when my hips try to buck up into his touch.
Easy, he murmurs. I’ve got you. Just feel it.
I try to obey, try to let the pleasure wash over me without chasing it, but my body has other ideas. My hand moves faster, matching the rhythm of his strokes. The pressure building at the base of my spine intensifies with every passing second.
I’m close, and the fantasy is spiraling out of control, the images bleeding into each other. Oliver’s hand on my cock. Oliver’s mouth on my neck. Oliver whispering filthy, tender things while I writhe beneath him.
Come for me, Ryan. Let go. I’ve got you.
My back arches off the mattress, my mouth falls open in a silent cry, and I come harder than I ever have in my life.
It pulses out of me in thick ropes, coating my fingers and stomach.
The pleasure is intense and borders on painful, wringing every last drop from my body until I’m left trembling and spent on sweat-dampened sheets.
When my breathing finally regulates itself, the reality of it hits me hard.
The harsh jangle of the doorknob cuts through my afterglow. I jackknife upright, heart slamming against my ribs, and haul my underwear back into place.
“Ryan?” Jackson’s voice filters through the door. “You in there? I forgot my phone charger.”
“One second!” My voice comes out three octaves higher than normal. I grab the nearest shirt from my laundry pile and frantically wipe my hands, my stomach, anywhere the evidence might be visible. “Just give me a second!”
“You okay? You sound weird.”
“Fine! I’m fine! Just waking up!”
I shove the incriminating shirt under my pillow, pull on a pair of sweatpants, and spend approximately two seconds trying to compose my face into something that doesn’t scream, “I was thinking about Oliver Jacoby’s hand on my dick.” I fail spectacularly, but I open the door anyway.
Jackson blinks at me. Takes in my flushed cheeks, my disheveled hair, the way I’m very carefully not making eye contact.
“Dude,” he says slowly. “Were you—”
“Phone charger’s on your desk.” I step aside, gesturing with perhaps too much enthusiasm. “Right there. See it? Great. Take it. Bye.”
Jackson’s lips twitch. The bastard is trying not to laugh. “Ryan—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“Good. Great. Conversation over.”
He retrieves his charger with agonizing slowness, his grin growing wider with every passing second. At the door, he pauses and turns back.
“If it helps,” he says gently, “I did the same thing when I was torturing myself over Drew. Right there”—he points to his bed—“with my legs up on the wall and a finger in my ass.”
My face, which had finally started to cool, burns again.
“I think it’s a rite of passage, kid.” Jackson winks and walks out, closing the door behind him before I can respond. Or knee him in his giant testicles.
Wait a minute. If I just did that, and if Jackson has done that, does that mean it’s the same for Oliver too?
My toes curl into the floor as the memory of a fleeting moment of pleasure rewrites something fundamental.
I want to have sex with Oliver Jacoby.
Three hours, two showers, and one failed attempt at reading one of Jackson’s mystery books later, I pick up my phone and call Marvin.
He answers on the fourth ring. The screen fills with the familiar backdrop of his fire escape—wrought iron railing, a sliver of brick wall, and the distant chaos of New York City traffic seven stories below.
“Baby brother. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I need advice.”
Marvin’s eyebrows rise half an inch. In Marvin Abrams language, that’s the equivalent of a full-body double take. “About what?”
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again. The words are right there, fully formed, ready to launch, and yet my vocal cords have staged a mutiny.
“Ryan.” Marvin leans closer to the camera. “You look like you’re about to pass a kidney stone. What’s going on?”
“I want to have sex.”
The silence that follows is deafening. I can hear a taxi honking fourteen blocks away. Marvin stares at me through the screen, his lips slightly apart. A pigeon lands on the fire escape railing behind him, regards the situation, and wisely departs.
“Come again?” Marvin says.
“I’d rather not repeat it.”
“No, I heard you. I just need a second to process the fact that my little brother, who once blushed at a Victoria’s Secret commercial, told me he wants to have sex.” He scrubs both hands over his face. “Okay. Okay, we’re doing this. Who’s the lucky guy?”
“I didn’t say it was a guy.”
Marvin gives me a look so withering that it transcends the digital medium. “Ryan. Please.”
“Fine. It’s a guy.”
“A guy you go to school with?”
“Yes.”
“A guy you’ve been spending a suspicious amount of time with recently?”
My silence is apparently answer enough.
Marvin lights a cigarette, takes a long drag, and exhales a cloud that obscures half his face. When it clears, his expression tells me he already knows who the guy is. “It’s Oliver Jacoby.”
My stomach drops through the floor. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. You’ve been mentioning him in every text message for the past month.
‘Oliver and I watched the eclipse.’ ‘Oliver and I are sorting archives together.’ ‘Oliver said the nicest thing about my bone structure.’” Marvin ticks each item off on his fingers.
“I’m not an idiot, Ryan. I can identify a pattern. ”
“I never said the thing about my bone structure.”
“You implied it. Heavily.”
I want to argue, but he’s right, and we both know it. I slump back against my headboard and pull my knees to my chest. “So you figured it out.”
“Sure.” Marvin shifts on the fire escape, crossing one ankle over the other. “So. You want to sleep with Oliver Jacoby. The hockey player. The guy who carried you across campus while naked.”
“That’s not—it was a complicated situation—”
“Ryan.” Marvin holds up a hand. “I’m not judging. I’m orienting. Give me a second to adjust my worldview, because up until thirty seconds ago, I genuinely believed you were going to die a virgin.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“I’m being honest. You’ve never shown interest in anyone. Not once. Not in high school, not in college. I’d started to wonder if you were asexual, which would have been completely fine, but this is—” He gestures at the screen. “This is new territory.”
“It’s new territory for me too.”
Marvin studies me through the camera. His expression shifts from shock to something more measured, more brotherly. “Okay. So you want to have sex with Oliver. What exactly do you need from me?”
Here it is. The moment I’ve been dreading and building toward since I picked up the phone. I grip my knees tighter and force the words out.
“I need you to give me the talk.”
Marvin blinks. “The talk.”
“Yes.”
“The birds and the bees talk.”
“Yes.”
“Ryan, you’re twenty years old.”
“I’m aware of my age.”
“You have access to the internet. You know how sex works. You’ve taken biology. You probably know the Latin names for every reproductive organ in the human body.”
“Knowing the Latin names for things and knowing how to actually use them are very different skills, Marvin.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m completely serious. Dad never gave me the talk.
Mom died before she could. You were too busy building your social empire to notice I existed.
I learned everything I know from a health textbook and a very clinical Wikipedia article that used the phrase ‘penile-vaginal intercourse’ enough times to put me off the entire concept forever. ”
“Jesus Christ, Ryan.”
I barrel forward before I lose my nerve.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never kissed anyone.
I’ve never touched anyone. The closest I’ve come to physical intimacy is what happened this morning, alone, in this room, thinking about—” I cut myself off.
“The point is, I have no practical knowledge. And if—when—something happens with Oliver, I don’t want to be fumbling around in the dark, clueless and terrified. ”
Marvin is quiet for a long time. Behind him, the New York skyline stretches out in a haze of glass and steel. A siren wails in the distance, rises, fades.
“You really want me to do this, don’t you?”
“I really do.”
“The actual talk. The full talk. Mechanics, safety, communication, all of it.”
“All of it.”
He exhales slowly, his cheeks puffing out. “This is not how I saw my day going.”
“It’s not how I saw mine going either, and yet here we are.”
Another pause. Then Marvin straightens up, squares his shoulders, and assumes the persona of Professional Marvin. Capable Marvin. The version of my brother who can handle anything. It’s so strange to see, he might as well be a Martian.
“Okay,” he says. “We’re doing this. But I have conditions.”
“Name them.”
“One: you never tell Dad about this conversation. Ever. If he finds out I gave his youngest son a gay sex tutorial over FaceTime, he’ll have me court-martialed, and he doesn’t even have that authority anymore.”
“Agreed.”
“Two: you don’t interrupt me. This is going to be awkward enough without you stopping me every five seconds to ask clarifying questions. Save them for the end.
“Fine.”
“Three: you owe me. Big. I’m talking Christmas presents for the next decade. Good ones. Not those star-naming certificates you gave me in high school.”
“Those were thoughtful.”
“Those were pieces of paper with fake coordinates, Ryan. The International Astronomical Union doesn’t recognize them.”
“They’re sentimental.”
“They’re worthless. Do we have a deal?”
I nod. “Deal.”
Marvin takes one more drag of his cigarette, sets it aside and folds his hands together.
“Alright. Here’s what you need to know.”
By the time Marvin ends the call, my face may be hotter than the surface of the sun, but at least I’m better prepared for what may come.
Now, all I need is for Oliver to be on the same page as me. Easier said than done, right?