finn
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The porch light was doing its best against the moths when we came up the walk.
Behind us, the park had gone quiet, just the streetlights holding their little circles.
BEL house sat dark except for the stove light in the kitchen window, the one nobody remembered turning on and nobody ever turned off.
I stopped Jesse at the bottom step and pointed at his shoes. He looked at me, then at the door, and understood. We sat on the edge of the porch like two kids in a time-out, and I watched him pick apart a double knot with both hands.
“Still double-knotting,” I whispered.
“Still judging,” he whispered back.
Inside, the living room smelled like popcorn from whatever had happened here without me. Sofa shapes in the dark. On the far one, Peanut lifted his head, and his tags clinked once, loud as anything.
I put my palm out flat. He watched me, weighing his options. Then his tail thumped the cushion twice, and he set his chin back down on his paws.
I took the stairs the way I’d learned freshman year, skipping the fourth one entirely.
I held up four fingers for Jesse and pointed.
He stepped over it with the exaggerated care of a cartoon burglar, and I had to look away so I wouldn’t laugh.
A strip of light showed under Taylor’s door.
We went past it single file, not breathing.
Halfway up, Jesse leaned close to my ear. “Last time I used these stairs, I got interrogated over French toast.”
“Then walk faster,” I said.
My door clicked shut behind us, and I finally exhaled. Jesse laughed into his fist, quiet, shoulders shaking. I switched on the desk lamp and the room came back in pieces. The blue wallpaper. The hoodie on the chair I kept meaning to deal with.
Jesse crossed toward the window and stepped over the loose floorboard without looking down.
“You know my floor,” I said.
He glanced back. “Lucky step.”
It wasn’t. He’d mapped it the morning he snuck out while I slept, and we both knew it, and neither of us said so. I took the flyer out of my jacket and set it on the desk, smoothing the corner where it had folded.
“You stole that,” he said.
“Souvenir. Sue me.”
“Should have had it signed,” he said.
“Nah. It lives here,” I said, pointing at my head.
He tipped his head back at my ceiling. Bare white, a hairline crack near the light fixture, nothing else up there.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to.”
“I was going to say your ceiling could use some work,” he said. “Structurally.”
“I redid Orion three times on your ceiling,” I said. “You laid on the bed eating snacks and supervising.”
“Somebody had to supervise.”
“You put Pluto over the closet.”
“Pluto deserved to be there.”
“Pluto isn’t a planet, Jesse.”
“See, this is why I supervised.”
We ended up on my bed without deciding to, backs against the iron frame, his knee an inch from mine. The lamp made everything the color of a latte.
“Ghost runner on second,” he said, out of nowhere.
It took me a second, and then I was standing in his old backyard.
Tennis ball, plastic bat, all summer, every summer.
There were only two of us, so we filled out the rest of both teams with players we invented.
You hit, you ran, and when your turn came to bat again, a ghost held your place on base.
We kept their batting averages. Bases were whatever survived the week.
Second was the bald patch where the grass had given up.
I laughed before I could cap it and clapped a hand over my own mouth. The walls in this house forgave nothing.
“He was always safe, by the way,” I whispered.
“He was out by a mile.”
“You couldn’t see him. He was a ghost, and he was fast.”
“Everything you imagined was conveniently fast,” Jesse said.
I elbowed him in the ribs, and he caught my arm and kept it.
“You used to count during storms, Finny,” he said. His thumb moved over the inside of my wrist like he was checking I was real. “One Mississippi. Two. Telling me how far away it was.”
“You hated thunder.”
“I didn’t hate thunder.”
“You got under the desk. With the flashlight and the…”
“I was checking the desk,” he said. “For structural issues.”
I let him have it. His thumb was still on my wrist, going nowhere.
There was a question lined up behind my teeth.
It had been there since the porch. Maybe longer.
What is this? If I blink wrong, do you go back to being a memory?
I looked at his hands instead. When Jesse lies, his thumb goes hunting for a pocket seam, some edge to worry at.
His thumb was on my wrist, and it wasn’t going anywhere.
I told myself I’d ask tomorrow.
He was saying something else about the desk, about how the flashlight had been a precaution, and I kissed him in the middle of the word.
He stopped talking. His breath came out through his nose slowly, and his hand lifted to the side of my neck, sure of the route. He tasted like his last drink and the cold walk home. The iron frame ticked against the wall.
“Walls are thin,” I whispered against his mouth.
“Then be quiet,” Jesse said, and pulled me down by the collar.
Air drained out of me as my lips neared his and the warmth between us blazed almost unbearably fast.
I leaned into him, toppling us both onto my bed, and straddled him just as he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me close, holding me so that we pressed against one another everywhere at once.
Jesse moved his hands along my back, feeling me slowly while I kissed him deeper, harder, desperate for him.
My tongue entered his mouth, meeting the tip of his playfully, and Jesse’s hands slipped down to my ass, holding it firmly.
My stomach fluttered when he squeezed my cheeks and pulled me closer, his dick hard and throbbing under my abdomen.
“You’re so horny,” I teased.
“Who wouldn’t be?” he asked. “Next to you.” He pulled me closer still, making me drag my hard bulge against his leg. He let out a low laugh. “You’re the one talking.”
He sat up with me still astride him, as easily as if I weighed nothing at all.
I sat in his lap, heels digging into the mattress behind him, and Jesse kissed me again and again.
His hand moved between us, and he undid the buttons of my shirt, one by one.
The tips of his fingers occasionally brushed against my bare skin, and I shivered every time they did.
Moonlight filtered through the curtains on my window, bathing the room in silver light, softening the shadows that wrapped us in the secrecy and safety of night. Jesse’s breaths were deep and steady, his chest rising and falling as his hand descended to the last of the buttons.
Shrugging off the shirt, I began to undo his buttons with two hands, popping each like a little treat to be cherished and savored. Even in the shadows, seeing his shirt part slowly before me was precious.
When his shirt was off, our arms closed around one another, and I felt his body rub against mine, skin on skin, flesh on flesh, and I let out a shuddering breath against his lips. “You’re so fucking hot,” I whispered.
“That’s all you,” Jesse said, hands moving along my back until they reached the edge of my pants.
He moved them around and found the front, undoing the button and pulling the zipper skillfully.
As he leaned back again, I rose for long enough to take my pants off.
My underwear followed, and Jesse undressed while he was free to move.
The slanting moonlight fell directly on his naked body, highlighting his muscles, the curves of his hips, and the size of his dick. Short hair framed it, and I found myself drifting toward him again, hungry for his body.
As I returned to bed, Jesse tucked his hands under his head, and I knelt between his legs, watching him and wondering how this could possibly be real. It was too perfect, too story-like, too much like it was made by the committee now sleeping in the other rooms in this house.
That he had even returned was a miracle enough. But that he wanted me the way I was, and that I wanted him too after all these years, was so unlikely that the entire galaxies needed to align to make it happen.
Yet it was happening anyway.
I reached for his dick and leaned down with my mouth open and my heart thundering.
I wasn’t nervous. Far from it. We’d found our rhythm already two nights ago.
The thing that made my heart race was a glimmer of my own future.
A possibility. Could we be like this forever?
The idea was so sudden and big and oddly shaped that it startled me.
Because you didn’t think that about some casual romance. You didn’t think that about the people you expected to leave your life the way they’d entered it.
My lips closed around the tip of his cock, and my head sank lower, taking him deep into my mouth until he filled it and pressed against my throat.
Jesse grunted. My gaze flicked up to his face, and I saw that he was watching me, not taking his eyes off me, which only emboldened me. It took a few tries before my saliva covered his dick and my throat relaxed enough to let him go deeper without the muscles constricting by reflex.
Slapping my hands against his abs, I clawed at his muscles and skin as I forced my head down on him, enjoying his panting, his speeding breaths, and his choked moans.
I worked him for a long time, excruciatingly slow at the start and then dangerously fast, bringing him to the point of shuddering, unraveling him, tearing him apart little by little.
And when I lifted my head slowly, dragging my tongue hard against his dick and licking off the spit that covered it, he cursed under his breath and began to throb rapidly inside my mouth.
A laugh followed, filling the quiet space with joyful relief. “You nearly made me come,” he said.
“I wouldn’t let you,” I said, leaning over him to produce lube from the nightstand’s bottom drawer. “Not until you’re deep inside me.”
“Fuck,” he whispered, breathless.
I poured lube over my fingers, then knelt over him and rubbed two fingers against my hole, holding my breath until they entered me, first one, then the other.
I didn’t think it would ever become easy taking a dick that big, but it would never fail to be exciting.
And I’d never back down from a challenge.
I reached for him, my slick hand wrapping around his hard dick, holding it and letting myself sink onto him inch after aching inch.
When the tension finally snapped, I let out a long exhale, relaxing all over and feeling Jesse enter me deeper with each movement of my hips.
He waited, patient and careful, until I was so free with my movements that he could be sure nothing hurt me.
And after several minutes of running his hands along my body, he gripped my hips hard and yanked me down on his cock, making me choke on a moan I tried hard to suppress.
I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take the uncertainty of it when it was so clear to me that this was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I couldn’t live with these undefined terms when I knew so well that this was how things were meant to be.
My hands rested on his chest, fingernails scratching him now and again, as he thrust his hips off the bed and impaled me all the way, filling my body and making me complete.
The harder he fucked me, the more I gripped him, grabbing his shoulders, pinning him against the mattress, trying to overpower him and ride him instead.
The bed rocked, hitting the wall with the headboard, but neither of us paid attention to it anymore.
The best I could do was keep my voice low as I panted and whispered encouragement.
And when the intensity was such that neither of us could breathe freely, our hands groped and wrapped around each other’s bodies, holding on to the only thing that felt real and tethered to earth.
And as I he grunted and moaned, his dick throbbed hard inside me, filling me with his cum just as I broke and unraveled, spilling ribbons of white cum over his stomach.
Only after, when we lay together, still dazed and afloat, I flicked the lamplight on and wiped the evidence off his skin, but he pulled me into his arms before I could finish, kissed my neck, and held me until we drifted off to sleep.