Chapter 25 #2
So it is with the light on. Where he can see all of it.
The gap and the fear, and the thing under the thing I have spent my whole life keeping in the dark.
I let him lay me out on the narrow bed. I do not board a single window.
His mouth goes down my throat, my chest. I feel my own hands stop knowing any sequence.
Stop wanting one. I let them. There is no account running.
I have narrated my whole life. Kept the running tally, the angle, the shelf, the order the crease would hold.
It goes quiet. All of it. The quiet is not the peace I chase on my knees in the cathedral.
It lies under the peace. The thing the order was built to keep me from ever needing.
He gets his hands and his mouth and the whole warm weight of him on me, and there is no order anywhere in it.
He watches my face the entire time. Whatever makes me shake, he does again, and again, until that is the only language left in the room.
His mouth finds the hollow of my throat and stays there until I cannot hold still under it.
Then lower, wet and unhurried, until my whole body is nothing but the place he is about to put his mouth.
He takes my cock in his mouth with the light on.
Where I can watch him do it. Where he can watch me come undone from it.
The drag of his mouth pulls a sound out of me I did not know was in me.
I am not quiet. I am always quiet. I am the quietest man in every room I have ever stood in.
Here I am loud. Here I am shaking apart under a boy’s mouth with the light on.
I let it happen. I do not reach for a single wall to put between me and it.
I get my hands into his hair at last. He makes a sound around me that I feel in my hips before I hear it.
He sounds like a man who has wanted this all season.
He pulls off me slow. He kisses the inside of my thigh.
Then he asks me for the thing neither of us has done.
Not with each other. He asks it plain, his mouth against my skin, his eyes up on mine.
“I want to be inside you,” he says. “Can I have that? Say it out loud so I know.” I understand what he is asking.
He is asking me to let go of the last of it.
To hand him the one thing I have never handed anyone.
To lie here in the light and let him in.
“Yes,” I say. It is rough coming out. It is true, all the way down. “Yes. I want you to.”
He is careful with me and he is not careful.
He takes his time and the taking is its own cruelty.
He opens me one slick press at a time, and when I push down for more he gives me more.
He does not look away from my face once while he does it.
That is the part I did not brace for. Not his hands.
His eyes. He is reading me the way he reads a shooter and using every bit of what he finds, and I let him have all of it in the light.
He presses up into the place that whites out every thought I have ever put in order, and he stays there, and stays, until I am open and shaking and saying his name.
Saying please. A word I do not use. A word he pulls out of me anyway.
Everything I usually hold on to is gone.
There is nothing to count. There is only his hand. His mouth. The wanting.
His name comes out of me. Then it comes out of me again. He answers with mine, the real one. Said into my skin like a thing he has earned the right to.
Then he is there, pressing in slow, and there is more of him than I have any room for, and I take him anyway. It hurts. Then it stops being hurt and becomes a thing my whole ordered vocabulary was never built to carry. His forehead drops against mine.
“Okay?” he says, low and gone rough. His forehead still down on mine.
I get my hand around the back of his neck and hold him where he is. “Keep going.” My voice is not one I recognize coming out of me. “All of it. Keep going.”
He keeps going. He moves in me slow, and then the room takes the slow away from both of us, and there is nothing careful left anywhere in him.
His hips against mine. Driving deep. The narrow bed knocking the wall on his side with every stroke.
The side where the music always lived. I let him.
I let him take me apart with the light on.
I let him see me come undone, the whole of me, no wall over any of it.
He gets his hand around my cock and strokes me in time with himself.
I watch him watch it. There is nothing in me holding anything back.
There is his heat and his skin and the drag of him inside me, and the sound I make that I have never made for anyone.
He swallows it, and gives me his own back.
His rhythm breaks. He says my name, the real one, and spills into me deep.
And it breaks over me the way nothing in my ordered life has ever been allowed to break.
Clean off the board. Past every rule I ever built.
His mouth on mine and his weight on me and no sequence anywhere.
I do not miss it. I do not miss it at all.
After, he does not leave. That used to be its own danger. Now it is the only place I want to be. He is a warm heavy line down my side. His heart is still going hard against my ribs. The room is not cold anymore.
He traces something on my chest with two fingers. Slow. I feel the shape of it before I understand it. Glove. Blocker. The corner touched, once. My sequence, drawn on my skin by the hand that learned it to take me apart.
He learned it to find my gap. He kept it to put me back together.
I catch his hand. I hold it flat against me, over the place it was drawing. So he can feel my heart. Doing the thing it does only for him now.
“Move the glove whenever you want,” I say. “I will always tell you why.”
He laughs. Wet, into my shoulder. I feel it more than hear it. “You hear yourself?” he says. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me, and it’s about goalie equipment.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“It’s everything you’ve got.” He lifts his head. In the light I left on I can see his eyes are not dry. “That’s why it counts.”