16. Wolfe
wolfe
The blizzard ended mid-morning, the howling winds settling to white murmurs, leaving behind drifts of six feet that sculpted down to frozen earth. I opened the back door and could just about have kicked my way to the door of the workshop. Behind me, his breath on my neck, Blue stood close.
“Is that blue sky?” he asked, peering up.
I looked where he was looking. White clouds dancing, a flurry of snow with nowhere to go. Icy air pushing itself about, undecided. Clear sky forming out of nowhere.
“It’s still going to be cold,” I said, feeling as though I’d said it before. As though I were warning Blue. As though he didn’t already know.
We had a late breakfast. Fried eggs. Oatmeal with banana, brown sugar, and butter on top. It was a pleasure, I was finding, to cook for two men with hearty appetites.
It was also a pleasure to sit across from Blue and watch him cup a white china mug full of tea, slowly coming awake. Looking at me with sleepy blue eyes, a flush to his cheeks.
If his family missed him, it was their own fault. They weren’t seeing what I was seeing. They didn’t have Blue in their lives. But I did. At least for now. His sweet glances were aimed at me. His energy was shared with me, and not with them. I would enjoy it while I could.
As we cleaned up and did the dishes, moving around each other in the small kitchen as though we’d been doing it our whole lives, I sensed a tenseness in his shoulders.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s getting so quiet again,” he said. “Can you feel it?”
I could feel it and remembered the last time a blizzard had ended and how the skies had opened up to bright blue, and how the stillness had settled as the cold deepened. He’d run off into the snow, barefoot, confused, lost. He shouldn’t have to go through that again. It was my job to make sure.
“We’ll keep busy,” I said. “I have colored pencils. You can create drawings of each of the key ring designs. I can take them to Mabel to show her what we’re doing.”
Mabel was likely to approve of anything I showed her. The point was to give Blue something to focus on, and, though I would admit it only to myself, I was looking forward to seeing Blue relaxed in the way he’d been while sketching punch designs. Shoulders down, hips loose, breathing steady.
Maybe he’d notice me watching him, or maybe he wouldn’t. My job would be to make sure we had the supplies, so we wouldn’t have to stop until we finished once we started. Which meant picking up the special order. Buying paint and brushes online, and little paint cloths to keep things tidy.
In the workshop, I turned on the space heaters, watched Blue out of the corner of my eye, and pretended I was fully focused on my work.
At lunch, I brought us BLTs. Cake donuts and hot tea.
To me, it was a pleasure. To Blue, the silence was deafening.
I watched him scribble and erase, scratch and erase.
At dinner, he was silent, and it made me wish I did have a TV for him, a Netflix account. Something to distract, to fill the air with sound as he flipped through the Civil War book, sitting cross-legged on the couch.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I said when the dishes were done.
I made it quick, sensing tension in the air as the cold air outside did its best to press through the glass.
Hanging wool curtains over the windows had been on my list of things to do for a while.
Considering how fast the temperatures kept dropping, it might be a good idea to move that project to the top of the list.
When I came out in a cloud of steam, dressed for bed in sweatpants and a t-shirt, I went to the back door and opened it to let the steam out. A long gray cloud floated, like a ghost, into the night air. Cold air came blasting in as I shut the door.
“Okay if I go now?” asked Blue.
“Yes, of course,” I said. The conversation was like a dance with unknown steps. An improv in the silence.
I listened to the shower start. Unbidden, imagining Blue as he washed himself. Water-slick skin. Soap suds sliding down his ribs. How he’d seen me, through the half-open door and not looked away.
My heart sped up. I should jump outside and roll in the snow to cool myself off.
I should have taken Blue to the local sheriff first chance I had, because the alternative had gotten me where I was now.
Listening. My body tight. Heat in my groin.
Unbidden images and thoughts in my head.
Maybe I’d take another shower. A cold one.
Instead, I went and knelt in front of the fireplace and built a low fire, gold and yellow embers, dark blue shadows leaping around the split logs.
Heat easing out, spreading around the room.
The smell of ash and hot pine. I sat cross-legged in front of it, unwilling to move. Not letting myself think or feel.
“That’s nice.”
Blue was right behind me. Smelling clean from his shower, the air damp, swirling soap-scented around him. My quick inhale was involuntary. His scent was in my lungs. The smell of the simple Castile soap I purchased settled on my skin.
Blue hunkered down next to me, balanced on his bare feet, focused on the warmth of the fire, the glow of the flames, ancient gold, deep blue. He wrapped his arms around his knees. He held the comb.
“Sit here,” I said, gesturing at the space right in front of the small, slate hearth.
He sat in front of me, and I combed his hair dry in the firelight. Again, strand by silky strand, cool damp turning to golden warmth.
The cold couldn’t get at us from outside. Between us, the air deepened, warmth, tension. Closeness. His hair couldn’t get any more dry, silky waves against his neck, which he bent to the side, waiting for the next slow touch of the comb.
I let out a slow breath. Watched the tiny hairs behind his ear stir, his skin tensing as he shivered.
He reached for the comb. I held it out to his extended fingers that, instead of taking the comb, wrapped around my hand.
I could feel the slender, pointed plastic teeth of the comb against the heel of my palm.
Smell his clean hair. Count the beats along a vein in his neck.
“Wolfe.” Just one word, low and hushed.
My breath picked up. I hadn’t moved, yet felt as though I was sliding forward, as though his gravity pulled me to him. It wasn’t right. I had nothing to trade. There wasn’t anything on earth he could be traded for. And he shouldn’t be traded for.
When he turned to me, on his hands and knees in front of the fire, fair hair falling around his face, my heart caught as though it had tumbled into a net.
When he moved toward me, blue eyes, flushed cheeks, a wingless angel, I shifted backward, not to move away, but to feel the floor beneath my palms. To hold myself there, ground myself as I imagined what his mouth would taste like, seconds before I tasted it.
And then his mouth was on mine. He tasted soft, soft as spun sugar, lips warm and plush.
He sighed as he pulled back, just a little, his breath ghosting across my skin.
His gaze skirted between my mouth and my eyes, still on all fours, there in my living room in my small cabin in the middle of nowhere, with only the bare, ice-etched sky above to witness any of this.
“Okay?” he asked.
I licked my lower lip with my tongue, tasting the echo of his kiss.
I could answer yes or no. I could go outside, turn my face up into the cold, dark air, and pretend this never happened.
Or. I could follow where he led, my hands empty, my chest cracked open, all the tenderness I possessed on display.
“Yes,” I said, my sense of shock at having said it out loud quickly erased as he kissed me again.
Unbalanced, I slid the rest of the way to the floor, the thin wool carpet beneath my shoulder blades, Blue’s knees straddling my thigh.
Blue’s hands planted on the carpet on either side of my head.
His hair spreading along my face, graceful tendrils, a lace curtain made of gold.
His form between me and the light of the fire created a shadow, inside which I could be safe, even as my heart sped up, banging inside my chest.
He kissed me again, and I reached up to pull him to me, so we could both be inside the shadow, a warm curve of air from the fire reaching around us, Blue’s weight upon me.
Tension breaking like ice in the warmth of spring, our legs tangled.
The heat of my groin building. The sharpness of his hip digging into me.
My hands moved. Fingers reaching along his side beneath his t-shirt. Warm skin, his ribs just below the surface. Quivering muscle over bone. Our faces close, his flushed, eyes bright. His hands were shaking.
“Blue?”
“I don’t know what to do,” he said, his voice trembling. “I figured it out this far. My body led, and I just followed. Only now—”
My heart went out to him, and I raced to catch up. It was my turn to make him feel safe. To bury my own doubts and fears, and lead so he could follow. We would arrive together. My touch would be soft.
“Here,” I said. I reached back to grab a cushion from the couch and tucked it beneath Blue’s head. Shifted our bodies so I held him to me, our legs becoming tangled. The heat of our bodies joined.
My fingers were clumsy as I splayed them across his belly, bare where his t-shirt had risen up. His belly jumped, and I petted it smooth, breath jagged in his throat. And in mine.
I was not calm. But I kissed him, swallowing his soft sigh, tasting the moment when he relaxed against me. He had to know I wouldn’t hurt him, but sometimes, it was better to hear it out loud.
“I’ll go slow,” I said.
A flare of nostril as he looked to his left, as though remembering something. A thought stabbed my brain that I did not want to sully him with myself.
I paused. A blink. Heartbeats. A snap of flame deep inside a pine log. The dusty perfume of burning sap. Then Blue looped his arms around my neck and pulled me down hard against his body.
“Please,” he said, whispering in my ear, making me shiver.
I would not turn back. Could not, now. Want filled me as though it had burst through an icy dam to land deep inside me.
My cock was hard against my belly, but Blue’s needs came before my own.
Skimming his skin, I reached below the waist of his sweatpants, the band of elastic on his briefs.
The heat of his groin on my fingertips, the tense length of his cock in my palm.
The arch of his neck as I stroked him, dark eyelashes fluttering on his cheeks.
His release did not take long, youth and energy having stoked desire beneath the surface. Since the shower. Since before then. Hot cum spilled over my knuckles, low sounds in Blue’s throat as he turned into my arms.
I kissed him, kissed him again, murmuring something beneath my breath I could not have translated out loud. In my heart, a warm fire had been stoked from cold ashes that I’d long ago abandoned for dead.
A sigh, his forearm over his eyes. My name on his breath, like a prayer, intoned to the air.
“Wolfe,” he said. “Wolfe.”
“Blue,” I said. I kissed his temple, tasting his sweat on my tongue.
“I’ll do the same to you,” he said.
I didn’t stop him as, on shaky colt-wobbly arms, he leaned over me, supporting himself, covering me in his shadow once more. His hand slipped beneath the waist of my sweatpants, the elastic of my briefs. Watching himself do this, mouth open as though in awe of the power of touch, of scent.
His fingers didn’t quite know what to do; his strokes jagged, uncoordinated, taking me to the edge of pleasure and then fumbling. I closed my eyes and eased into it, that sense of what we were doing. Him and me. Having come to this place, on the thin wool carpet in my cabin.
His fingers tightened around my cock, warm now, a little more steady, his breath coming hard.
I opened my eyes, looking up at him, and just as I reached release, he bent and kissed me as though he’d been doing it all his life and knew just the right moment.
Pleasure came in waves, his sweet scent in my lungs, his hair fanning across my cheek exactly as though his angel's wing was stroking my face.
As we lay in each other’s arms, breathing our bodies to calmness, the hard floor became more apparent to me. The hard edge of the carpet where it ended, going right across my spine. Blue’s hair was in my mouth. I smiled just the same.
Tomorrow, I would deal with that nagging feeling that was pushing to the center of my gut. For now, I wanted us off this floor and in the bed where we could cuddle—a word, a concept, so unfamiliar to me, I could hardly trace the shape around it. But I could make it happen.
“Up,” I said. “Bed.”
Normally, after an encounter in prison, a quick wash was in order. But with Blue, the taste of his kisses, the feel of his fingers on my skin, the scent of sex swirling around us, those were the marks I wanted to keep always.
I led the way, turning off lights, checking the doors and the temperature gauge.
Then pulled him into the bed, between the cool sheets in the darkness, pulling the blankets up.
Holding him so his head rested on my chest, tucked beneath my chin.
His silky hair turning scratchy, which I could tend to with a comb.
In the morning, while the world waited. Tasks and jobs and projects and all the rest of it could wait until forever.
Together our bodies made a warmth that was as steady and cozy as the fire I’d built.
In a little while, when Blue was asleep, I would need to go and bank the fire, turning the flue so the heat stayed in the cabin, and the cold from outside could not get in.
But for now, I breathed in time with Blue’s breaths, the steady cadence of his chest rising and falling. This was enough, for now.