10. That was a lot of word vomit #2
Hunter looked at his cargo shorts and then at Colby’s basketball shorts and laughed, covering his mouth to stifle the sound. Then he shrugged. “Fuck it.”
Hunter undid his shorts and pushed them down, leaving him in just his boxer briefs, which were tight and a pale gray and black striped pattern. Colby was watching him intently. Or at least it felt that way, and Hunter suddenly got… even warmer. “What?”
“I… I’m not wearing underwear,” Colby confessed.
Hunter wanted to blush at that for some stupid reason, but instead he pointed at Colby’s shorts. “So, swim in those.”
He walked to the stairs. Normally, he jumped straight into the deep end, but he didn’t want to make splashing sounds.
So he moved slowly, letting the cool water swallow him inch by inch, and tried not to think of Colby watching him.
Truth was, now that he was loose and happy thanks to the weed, he could admit the truth to himself.
A thought he’d been running from but was frequently bouncing around his brain.
He was attracted to Colby. Maybe? It was a distinct possibility.
The fact didn’t scare Hunter, and it wasn’t some new revelation for him to consider a man attractive.
It did, however, make him worried. Nervous.
Uncomfortable. He was eleven when he first told his mom, absently, that a man was pretty.
It was Justin Timberlake. His mom looked startled, but she didn’t reprimand him.
She just nodded, her lips pressed tightly together.
Still, Hunter got the immediate idea he’d done something wrong.
So he didn’t say it again because the idea of being difficult, or not normal, made Hunter’s skin itch and his heart race.
But those thoughts never actually stopped, he just didn’t speak of them.
In high school, he’d watch reruns of Gossip Girl and jerked off to the Chase Crawford character, not the Blake Lively one.
And he had once, at a cottage party back home in twelfth grade, gotten lost in the woods with his friend Gavin and they’d kinda fucked around.
Just touched each other’s dicks on top of their pants and said some heated shit like “rub it harder” and “make me come.”
They never talked about it after, or did anything together again, so Hunter sometimes wondered if it had been a drunken teenage fever dream and not real life.
Nothing like that had happened again, with anyone.
He’d never had an opportunity to try it again with a guy, but he wasn’t actively avoiding it.
But he’d watched shows like “Game of Thrones” for Khaleesi, not Jon Snow, so… whatever.
“You know you joked upstairs that I was celibate, but you haven’t brought home one girl.” Hunter didn’t know why he let that slip out of his mouth. When he was high, his thoughts were coated in Vaseline and became slippery little fuckers he couldn’t contain. “So, you’re not dating either?”
When Hunter was in the pool, submerged up to his nipples, he turned and watched Colby walk into the pool to join him.
Colby kept his eyes on the water's surface, watching his fingers as they skimmed across it, disrupting its glassy appearance. Hunter walked backward toward the deep end, the water rising over his shoulders before he stopped. Colby finally looked up. He’s more shadowed than Hunter because there was a large palm tree in that corner of the courtyard, just past the pool, and it was blocking out any moonlight. “I haven’t really dated a girl.”
“Recently?”
“Ever.”
Hunter blinks and lets his arms float out beside him, taking one more step back so the water rose to his sharp chin and only his toes were on the bottom of the pool. “Like ever, ever?”
“I mean, I’ve fucked around.” Colby shrugged, his eyes moving to scan something behind Hunter.
“You’ve had sex? With a woman?” Hunter immediately regretted being blunt.
It wasn’t at all like him. He was the guy who could talk around an issue until everyone was so exhausted that no one wanted to talk about the issue.
At least that’s what Leandra had always complained about.
It was his constant fear of making waves or causing friction. Hunter hated friction. “Sorry.”
“Yeah dude, I’ve had sex.” Colby kind of chuckled, and then he emerged from the shadow, the moonlight glinting off the paler sun-kissed strands of his wavy hair as he walked toward Hunter and the deep end. His eyes shifted to the water’s surface again. “Is the woman part important to you?”
Oh fuck. Hunter felt like a complete idiot now, and his skin heated in the cool water. “Nope. Not even a bit. I don’t know why I said that. I meant sex in general.”
“I’ve had sex. Only with women, actually,” Colby replied easily, and Hunter was relieved he wasn’t going to make a big deal about his stupid comment.
His broad shoulders rose as he shrugged.
“But not a relationship. I just don’t really connect with them very often, like, enough to want to date them. ”
Hunter let that roll around his brain. He’d never had a problem connecting.
If anything, he connected too easily. He’d kissed Leandra the night they met, within half an hour.
They’d texted each other the whole next day, for hours.
He slept with her the next time they saw each other, which was forty-eight hours later.
He’d moved into this apartment, which was her apartment, three weeks after that.
His relationship with his girlfriend before Leandra, back in Canada, he’d fallen into the same sort of way—fast and easy.
Hell, that was kind of like his friendship with Colby, too.
Hunter went from cowering with him in a public restroom in an earthquake to patching up his forehead and offering him a place to stay in less than twenty-four hours.
Granted, at first it was a parking spot, but still.
The night Leandra left, Hunter offered Colby the couch.
He moved his gaze to the very faint scar left from the cut Colby had gotten when the tree pushed in the roof of his van. It was probably going to be there for years. But it was hot. Colby let out a breathy laugh. “I sound insane. Sorry. Let’s blame the weed.”
“No. It’s not insane,” Hunter argued. “I wish I were more like that. Less… attached to everything. Everyone.”
Colby shook his head. “No. You don’t.”
Colby dropped as if his knees stopped holding him up, disappearing under the surface of the water entirely.
Hunter watched his shadowy mass move below the surface, and then Colby popped up in the middle of the deep end, his hair flat against his head and looking darker and straighter.
“Do you know how much easier my life would be if I could fall in love? With anyone?”