ASHER
Chapter Fifteen
As the days moved in their lazy summer fashion, I watched the people around me.
The four of us, a family held together by duct tape and prayer.
The relationships that shifted and changed.
In the span of a few weeks, everything that had been our world had turned upside down.
For the first time ever, I found something that resembled happiness.
The true kind that came from enjoying another human being so purely and completely that almost nothing could cast a shadow over it.
On the opposite end of things, the people who had once loved each other so passionately were barely capable of sitting at the same table with the electric feel of tension sparking us all. Mom was unhappy. In fact, she was so clearly unhappy that I was ashamed I hadn’t seen it sooner.
And George was tired. He was perpetually exhausted and on the verge of collapsing. Sure, he wore his easy smile and kept his tone light, but his eyes were older than they had been the last time I’d seen him.
Jordan was the oasis in this desert we called family. He was my well of tranquility. He was the embodiment of all my dreams. And a pillar on which I could see my future built.
Was it crazy to think up these grand plans in the hours when I was alone?
Was it totally mad that I should hope to spend my life the way I’d spent these last few weeks?
With him and all the things that came along with it.
Laughing, fighting, sulking, fucking. I wanted it all until the end of time.
The ambition was so big and bright that it made everything else pale in my mind.
Everything I thought mattered was less important in comparison to holding onto Jordan.
I was supposed to be enjoying it. I was supposed to take pleasure in this wild, unimaginable, unpredictable thing we had carved out for ourselves.
So why was I crying?
Now and then, I would sit alone, and my gaze would drift, and I would go over things that had happened this summer, and tears would simply tickle me as they brimmed in my eyes and rolled down my cheeks.
I’d call myself silly, splash my face with water, and forget about it. The knot that tightened in my throat would loosen and I would go on as if nothing had happened. But the deep melancholy could only be buried for so long before clawing its way out of the grave in which I’d put it.
He made me happy.
In the hours we spent together, tears were not welcome. Only, perhaps, those fiery tears that came with the ecstasy of merging our souls and bodies. Those I let him kiss away from my face while I glowed with heat and adoration.
His steadiness and strength never stopped amazing me. His cool composure had once been the biggest thorn in my ass, but now I was grateful for it. It was, without an ounce of exaggeration, the reason we got through this summer.
Guilt was present deep in me whenever we mentioned our parents’ looming divorce.
Neither of them had spoken about it in front of us, but George was no longer taking his bedding into the bedroom before the house woke up.
Instead, he moved into the room at the end of the hallway on the upper floor, surrendering the main bedroom to my mother.
The tension between them was palpable but never addressed.
They simply avoided engaging in most of the topics.
I should have been glad. They were both still in the best times of their lives.
They were still attractive and successful in the adult ways I was only beginning to recognize.
Perhaps I could understand the feeling of a personal failing that came with a second divorce, but I saw everything through the rosy glasses of someone deeply in love.
Their parting would clear the way for Jordan and me.
Lately, Jordan and I began talking about the future. Not in any real terms, but in passing. He would hold me in his big arms at night and we would watch the ceiling in my room while the sweat cooled on our bodies. He would whisper to me, “I can never have enough of you.”
I would smirk to myself and raise my eyebrows at him. “You want to go again already?”
He would laugh lazily. “As a matter of fact, yes.”
The conversation would go on hold for another hour and Jordan would take me to the stars and back.
His rough treatment of my body was always more pleasurable than intimidating.
His underwear shoved into my mouth to keep my moans down were always a triggering point in my journey to the climax and his muscled arms around me were always my favorite place to be.
“What do you think is gonna happen when we tell them?” I asked once.
We were on the balcony in our underwear, catching a breath of fresh midnight air rolling in gusts from the mountains and the forest. It was abrupt but welcome.
The day had been a stuffy, tiring one. The stars were hidden by thick clouds that carried a summer storm.
Jordan was watching the clouds, saddled over the concrete railing of the balcony. “Not much, I think,” Jordan said after a few moments. “Why should they care now?”
I didn’t search for all the reasons they should still care. I could probably find a dozen, a score, a mountain of reasons if I looked hard enough, but his words gave me such hope that I didn’t want to taint that.
Foolishly, I believed what I wanted to believe.
And I trusted Jordan’s judgment. He had always been the person who considered things carefully before acting.
As time went on, I began to believe that he had considered the risks and rewards of getting together with me, too, even if it always seemed like the storm of passion was what carried us.
Distantly, the sky was beginning to flash and glimmer with bolts of lightning.
It was supposed to be a welcome relief after the days of humidity and tiring heat. Even the grass and the trees were beginning to wither with the lack of rain. But the storm that was approaching made me nervous. Something ominous about it occupied my thoughts.
“We’ll have to tell them,” I whispered a while later. “Eventually.”
Jordan looked at me with such a depth of feelings displayed across his face, lit only by the lights pouring out of my room, that I knew he felt the same.
This wasn’t just a summer fling. We had both spent too many years longing to let it pass in a flash.
We were building something bigger and better than either of us had expected but both of us had always wanted.
And if we wanted to do it right, we needed to be honest for once.
There was enough deception around here for a lifetime. Perhaps what we felt for one another had to live in the light of day in order to thrive.
“Ash, I want them to know,” Jordan said. “I want everyone to know.”
I wished it didn’t fill me with dread when he said things like this. I wished I could cut off the fears that might have been totally uncalled for.
Jordan flung his leg back over the railing and dropped onto the balcony tiles, standing straight in front of me.
He was so tall and handsome under the gentle light from my room.
He was beautiful. And when he cupped my cheek like this, I was willing to jump off the edge of the Earth with him.
“You and me,” he said softly, his voice smoky deep.
“I don’t want us to be a secret. I’m not ashamed of it. ”
Was I ashamed? No. I didn’t think I was. “Me too,” I said. “I want everyone to know.” But I don’t want to break their hearts. Would it break their hearts, though? There was no knowing it until we told them. I’d played all the scenarios in my head until I was dizzy.
“We can’t hide forever,” Jordan went on. “Besides, I wouldn’t want that. If it’s us against the world, I’ll always bet on us.”
My lower lip quivered before I could control myself.
The eruption of feelings rocked my body.
All I could do to keep myself from collapsing was to throw my arms around his neck and hold him close, leaning my head on his shoulder, inhaling the exciting scent of his cologne, and letting myself feel everything that his words had sparked in me. Hope and dread and love.
He would bet on us.
“Why are you crying, baby boy?” he asked.
I didn’t realize I was until a sob made my chest tremble. But it wasn’t a sob at all. It was a laugh. “You make me happy,” I whispered.
He said nothing else. Instead, he simply put a hand on the back of my head and held me there, on his shoulder, while happy tears brimmed in my eyes and a grin stretched so wide on my mouth I must have looked like a fool.
The storm arrived early in the morning. The rolling thunder ripped across the sky and startled me awake.
Jordan was next to me because we didn’t sleep apart anymore.
He would sneak back to his room before “waking up” and heading downstairs.
Or, when I slept in his bed, I would tiptoe across the balcony to do the same.
Rain pelted the white and blue tiles on the balcony floor, splashing the windows, drenching the ground, and nearly ripping the leaves off the trees according to the sound it made.
The storm was much worse than what I’d expected.
The bolts of lightning split the sky and thunder roared so loudly that the glass shook and rang in the window frames.
“Fuck,” I murmured, sleepy after staying up so late and, frankly, a little scared. It was obviously day outside, but the clouds were so thick and dark that sunlight was struggling to get through them.
I only managed to sit up before a stronger wave of rain arrived, washing my windows and door like they were a cascading waterfall. I could barely see the world outside my room.
He wasn’t sneaking over the balcony this morning. I wouldn’t let him, even if he was foolish enough to try.
Jordan muttered something as another roar of thunder rippled above us.