Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
harrison
Our first week together—truly together, not fake dating—flew by too fast, yet looking back on it, I saw a lifetime worth of memories.
That moment when Taylor had been standing in my living room, shirtless, waiting for me to hand him the T-shirt, knowing that I wouldn’t, felt like it had marked the shift in the fabric of reality, not just the life I’d been leading to that point.
Taylor had stormed into every corner of my soul and body. He’d crashed into my life with the fury of a shooting star and its beauty, too.
Waking up next to him, here on the morning after or in my cottage, only brought a smile to my face. And waking up without him didn’t fail to fill me with anticipation of seeing him later that day.
A week, yet an entire life, too.
The culmination of our first week was on Saturday evening, when I took Taylor to an abandoned power plant that had been converted into an underground cabaret scene.
Drowned in the sea of strangers, we were absolutely anonymous, and pinning Taylor against a brick wall to kiss him senseless gave neither of us a pause.
The roaring twenties party followed the week after, though we spent plenty of quiet evenings together in my apartment, too.
It was chaos, pure and filled with lust and wonder. It was a perfect storm of glimmering moments neither of us wanted to give up or let pass. So we came together, came back to one another, time after time, never quite looking into each other’s eyes to discuss what it was that we were doing.
Why use words when actions spoke so loudly? I didn’t want words to muddle the beautiful thing that we had found for ourselves. Out of thin air, out of impossibility and chance, we had carved a little piece of heaven for ourselves, and we lived in it every day, every night.
Taylor never freaked out, though I’d been holding a breath while waiting for it in the early hours and days.
I had been expecting some moment of clarity to sweep over him and remind him that he was not and never had been into men.
Yet he simply was now. He was into me, whatever the hell that meant in the grand scheme of things.
And I was into him, though there was little surprise in that. I had been into him since the moment he’d strolled over to my table and pretended to know about Lord Tennyson. I’d been into him since he’d sat down and admitted to wanting to take me to a date because of a dare.
There was something like jazz between us, something that was solely based on a common rhythm, built purely on our understanding of one another without too much thinking and planning.
When I wanted to drive us out of the city, Taylor had his backpack ready to go, no questions asked.
He didn’t want to know where or why, and I didn’t want to tell him.
So we found ourselves spending a night in a houseboat on a lake, all alone, rocking it like a storm until our hearts were beating so loudly I could hardly hear anything else.
And when the third week came to a close, I asked Taylor what he wanted to do, and he wrapped his hands around my upper arm, sank into my sofa, and pulled me close to himself. “This,” he said. “Just this.” His hand moved over the back of my head, and he held me close.
His fingers traced the shape of my ear until they moved over the two silver earrings, and he smiled.
My eyebrows asked the question that my drowsy voice couldn’t.
“I’ve always wanted one,” Taylor said.
“You did?” I asked, rising a little to look at him, my torso leaning on my elbow. “What kind?”
“Something like this,” Taylor said, touching the round earring hanging from my ear.
“Silver will look good on you,” I said. “Gold would, too.”
He snort-chuckled. “You’re not buying me a gold earring, Harrison.”
“Silver it is,” I said. “And I’m not buying it.” He stood up, then walked over to the black box by the record player, where several rings, bracelets, earrings, and necklaces were left in a disorderly mess.
“What are you…?” Taylor asked, but stopped himself, sitting up all alert in the periphery of my vision. “It better be a clip-on.”
I laughed and found a silver earring just like the simple one I was wearing. I turned around and found that look of excited anticipation on Taylor’s face, the same one he had every time before he released his breath, relaxed, and took me into his body. Fearful, but only a little.
“Are we doing this?” he whispered.
“If you want to,” I said, handing him the earring.
He looked at it sitting in the palm of his hand. Taylor’s gaze flicked up to meet mine, then down at the earring again. “Will it hurt?”
“A little. Like a mosquito bite.”
He laughed. “That’s what they all say.”
“I pierced my own ears,” I said. “And under my tongue, too, when I was a teen.”
“No way you did that,” he said, looking at me in disbelief.
“I don’t have a reason to lie.”
“Do you have the equipment? The tools?” he asked, frowning.
I sucked my teeth. “I’m old-fashioned like that.”
Taylor laughed with me and pursed his lips after. He thought about it for a moment longer, then released a breath of air, relaxing into the idea as always. “Go for it.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
He nodded firmly. “I’m sure.”
So I went to the bathroom, looked through my cabinet, and found sterile needles, cotton swabs, alcohol, and iodine. When I returned to the living room, I placed everything on the coffee table, poured plenty of alcohol into a small cup, and dipped the earring into it.
Taylor’s bare chest rose and fell steadily as he kept himself calm by the sheer power of his will. He could do that, I knew. He could control his breathing and become what he wanted to be.
So he was relaxed and confident, sitting up a little while I brought over a desk lamp and set it on the coffee table. “Sit here,” I said, folding my legs under my ass on the floor. We’d had sex in this spot once, the first time we’d done it.
Taylor sat down facing me. “If my ear falls off…”
“You’ll still have the other one. I have two tries.” I began to unpack the needle, and Taylor threw his head back and laughed out loud. “We don’t have to do it if you’re worried about my amateurish setup.”
“I’m not worried,” he said. And I believed him. “I want you to be the one who does it.”
My gaze moved swiftly to his eyes, holding the eye contact for a long moment, seeing the liquid warmth in his brown irises.
The act itself was swift and over before Taylor had had a chance to wince. The needle went in and out, the earring following its path, and the sting of iodine and alcohol made him frown more than the piercing of the soft flesh.
But it was the moment before it, and the moment after it, that I would forever have imprinted in my consciousness, a memory embossed before my eyes.
Taylor looked away, leaning so that I would have a clear view and a good angle to pierce him, his gaze distant and searching the room, and then he flicked it all the way to the right, finding my eyes, and held his breath.
“And…done,” I whispered.
The stinging of the disinfectants caused a tightness around Taylor’s eyes, but his lips stretched into a fascinated smile, emphasizing his beauty so much that the warmth of his olive skin seemed to glow brighter after a moment of fear.
“There,” I said, pinching his chin and turning his head left and right, watching for the silver to gleam in the light. “You’re beautiful.”
Taylor’s eyes snapped into focus, eyebrows rising a little as if he had just realized that I’d pierced his ear, and he hopped onto his feet.
“I want to see.” He walked over to the bathroom, where the big mirror was lit from above and behind, and he leaned against the sink, gazing into his reflection with eyes wide with fascination.
“Holy shit,” he whispered. “That’s hot. That’s seriously hot. ”
I stood next to him, a little behind, arms crossed on my chest. “You have to clean it every day until it heals.”
“I have a guy for that,” Taylor murmured, still gazing at the reflection. “I look like a pirate.”
I laughed from the top of my lungs and stepped closer to him, towering behind him while he still leaned over the sink. My hands found his hips and pulled him back enough for his ass to press against my crotch. “A sexy pirate.”
Taylor straightened and turned around, his stomach pressing against mine, his chest touching mine, his crotch gently rubbing against mine, getting hard already. “This sexy pirate is gonna make you cry his name tonight.”
“He can try,” I dared him.
And he did. He did it so intensely that my throat was sore and my voice cracked the entire following day.
But Taylor walked around confidently with his silver earring dangling from his right ear.
“Next up, a matching tattoo,” he joked one morning, just before he was due to travel home for a long weekend.
I took him in my arms and looked into his eyes. “I’ll do anything you say,” I whispered. “Dare me.”
Taylor laughed, not daring me after all.
That weekend, while he was away to visit his parents, I drove up to the cottage for some time alone.
That morning, in Taylor’s absence, I thought reflection would be the thing I needed.
But entering the house alone just before noon, I found myself constantly checking my phone to hear that he had arrived home safely or that something had happened and he needed me to come and pick him up.
No news. No texts. All I had was an empty house and the fresh memories of Taylor’s naked figure in every room that now felt a few degrees cooler in his absence.
I packed myself a small lunch and a thermos of coffee, then hiked through the woods to a clearing where we had watched the sunset on our last day here.
I hadn’t bothered with the picnic blanket, so I sat in the grass and poured myself coffee into the cup, wrapped my hands around it, and brought it near my face so that the steam curled from the cup and into my nostrils.
It soothed something restless deep within me.