Chapter 25 #2
“For making this feel like… not less.”
He swallows. “It could never be less to me.”
I close my eyes against the sudden heat behind them. When I open them, he’s watching me the way he’s always watched the things he cares about, with a focus that is a kind of safety. He reaches my waistband, then pauses.
“Tell me where you want me,” he says. “Tell me what feels good.”
He’s asked versions of that before—back when we were young and inseparable, before the accident, before fifteen years of silence.
“Do you need me to help with your assignment?” “Do you want me to run the last drill again with you after everyone else is gone?” Back then, I still had both legs, and he didn’t have to think about what my body could or couldn’t do.
Now it’s different. Now he asks because he knows I’ve changed, because he wants to learn me as I am.
Hearing him say it—out loud, steady, deliberate—feels like proof that he isn’t just chasing the boy I was.
He’s choosing the man I am. And I’ve never loved him more than I do in this moment.
“Up here,” I say, and I draw him against me by the front of his shirt. He stands, and I stand with him. He slides his hands down my spine, careful not to rush. He kisses me and keeps kissing me until my body uncoils from its guarded stance.
When he goes for the waistband of my briefs, I let him.
He takes his time. When the fabric sloughs from me, I don’t think about how I look, only about how he looks at me.
He steps back for half a breath, not to assess but to honor.
He drags his gaze up my body as if reacquainting himself with a skyline he’s loved since he was a teenager and noticing every new building with delight rather than resentment.
I can almost hear the way his mind narrates it: “Here’s the shoulder I leaned on when I convinced him to climb the water tower; here’s the scar he got the summer we thought we were invincible; here’s the place where his body ends and his stubbornness keeps going. ”
“Can I touch?” he asks, because tonight, consent is not a formality; it’s the language we’re choosing to speak.
“Yes,” I say. “Everywhere.”
He steps back into me, and the undressing turns tender again rather than ceremonial. He peels off his own shirt under my palms. He lets me unbutton his cuffs, slide the fabric from his shoulders, skate my hands down the inside of his forearms like I’m reading braille.
He laughs once, shakily, when my fingers find the old scar on his wrist from that time with the broken backboard. He says, “You always remember,” and I say, “Always,” and it’s as much a vow as anything we’ll ever say.
He kisses me between every small task like he’s stitching the moments together with his mouth. When he lowers his head to my chest and breathes there, I hold the back of his neck and don’t pretend I’m not trembling. I let him feel it. I want him to feel it.
We climb onto the bed with care. He moves first, and I follow, easing myself onto the mattress with a practiced shift that leaves me balanced and comfortable.
He watches, not anxious, just present. He slides in beside me and props himself up on one elbow, his other hand skimming along my waist. He hasn’t asked for the facts of my body—measurements, scars, what’s missing—because he knows those answers don’t matter here.
He’s asked for guidance instead, and that’s what I give him.
“Here,” I say, guiding his hand to the place above my knee where the skin is always tender when the day has been long.
“Gentle.” He is. “Here,” I say, drawing his fingers to the edge of my hip where sensation hums brighter than it used to.
“More pressure.” He listens. He learns me the way he learns poetry—by repetition for the joy of it, not by rote.
At some point, we stop speaking in full sentences.
It’s not a retreat into silence but a shared language of breath and small sounds.
When he shifts lower to kiss the curve of my thigh, he does it slowly, never making my body a spectacle or a problem to solve.
He lifts his head to check my face, and I smile to tell him I’m not leaving this moment, not drifting away.
He smiles back, big and unguarded, the way he used to right after he hit a shot he had no business taking. It undoes me again, softer this time.
“Climb on top of me,” I say. It’s not a command. It’s a request to share the same line of heat.
He does. We’ve always fit, and after our breaking point, we still do.
He tucks his face into the angle of my neck and inhales like he’s been underwater for years and only just remembered how to breathe.
I stroke the back of his head, the line of his spine, the place at the base of his skull that makes his whole body loosen.
He drifts there, muscles letting go in increments, until what’s left between us is steadiness.
“Tomorrow,” he says quietly.
“I know,” I answer.
“I don’t want this to be just tonight,” he says. He doesn’t make it a question.
“It isn’t,” I say. “It won’t be.”
He nods against my shoulder. I feel him believe me.
Maybe that’s the miracle tonight, more than the undressing, more than the removal, more than the careful choreography of hands and breath.
The miracle is the parts of us that trusted each other as boys finding each other again as men and choosing to trust deeper, with more to lose.
“Teach me the rest,” he says after a long while, and the way he says it makes it clear he’s not talking about mechanics anymore. He’s talking about a life.
“We have time,” I say. I mean it, even if the clock on my flight will contradict me in the morning. We have time because we’ll make it. We have time because tonight stretched it like gold leaf and laid it over everything we lost for fifteen years.
He kisses my mouth again, and the heat builds in a way that needs no description to be understood.
It’s in the tremble of his hands against my ribs when I work my fingers inside his tight channel, the catch of his breath when I draw him closer, the way his weight settles over me like it belongs here when he stretches around me and sinks down on my cock.
We move together, slower and then not slow at all, guided by all the yeses we’ve already said—some aloud, some only in the way our bodies lean and give.
I trace the long line of his back, committing each dip and curve to memory as if I haven’t been carrying the ghost of him in my hands for fifteen years.
“Theo,” I whisper, the name breaking on my lips like a prayer I’ve been holding too long.
He pulls back to peer down at me, then rests his forehead against mine, and our noses bump, clumsy and perfect. His voice is ragged when he answers. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”
My chest aches with everything that spills into that promise. Twenty years ago, he was the first. My first kiss that meant something, my first confession, my first time feeling what it meant to give myself over completely. And God, lying beneath him now, I want him to be my last.
“I—” My throat closes around the words, but I force them out in fragments. “Don’t… don’t let go. Not this time.”
His mouth finds mine again before I can choke on the plea. The kiss is steady, grounding, like an oath sealed in breath. He enlaces his hand with mine, pinning it to the mattress, and I feel his pulse hammering in his grip.
As he moves, careful and sure, I guide him with small touches, with broken words as he rides me, hips moving, thighs working. “Yes… slower, that’s—Theo—God, yes.” Each sound is half moan, half confession.
He shudders above me, muttering against my skin. “You feel… you feel like home. Like—like I’ve been waiting for this… for you. Always you.”
The intensity swells between us, tenderness sharpened by years of hunger neither of us could feed. Every shift, every press, every gasp carries an edge of desperation—like we’re trying to make up for every night we spent apart, all the time we should’ve been here and weren’t.
My back arches, dragging him deeper against me, and I stammer through the sensation. “Theo, I—oh, God—I can’t—”
“Yes, you can,” he breathes, pressing his forehead harder to mine, his voice breaking with need. “We can. Together.”
The rhythm builds, faster, fiercer, but never careless.
His hands map me like he’s relearning a country he once called his own.
My nails scrape down his shoulders, not to hurt but to hold, to anchor.
The air is thick with the sounds of us—our ragged breathing, the helpless sounds caught between groans and gasps, the near-sobs of finally, finally.
“I love you” slips from me in a rush I can’t stop. It bursts out raw, desperate, undeniable.
He falters for half a beat, a shiver running through him, then whispers back like it’s the only truth he’s ever known. “Always. Always have.”
That does it. The urgency tips over, all the careful control breaking apart.
The world narrows to his weight above me, his breath against my mouth, the heat and pressure that coils tight, too tight, until release rips through me with a cry I don’t recognize as mine.
His name leaves me again and again, my voice cracking on it like I’m twenty-two all over.
Theo follows me, his body shaking with the force of it, his face buried against my neck as if he needs to hide as he comes undone. I feel him everywhere—his trembling, his broken moans, the way his grip on my hand never loosens, not even for a second.
And when the shudders fade and the frantic rhythm softens into stillness, he doesn’t roll away. He stays pressed against me, breathing hard, whispering my name like it’s the anchor that will keep him here.
I close my eyes, my heart still pounding, and think, Twenty years ago, he was my first. Please, God, let him be my last.
Later, when the room is quiet, he reaches down without thinking and straightens the sock I pulled on for comfort after we had sex.
It’s such a small thing that it almost undoes me again.
I catch his hand before it leaves and keep it there, covering the place he’s just tended.
He looks at me like I’ve handed him something. Perhaps I have.
“Stay,” he whispers.
“I am,” I say, and I’m surprised to hear how certain I sound.
He smiles into my shoulder.
The wind chimes knock softly outside. I close my eyes. For the first time in a very long time, I feel like the story I’m telling myself about my body and the story he’s telling himself about me are the same one. It feels like relief.
It feels like home.