Chapter Twenty-Three #2
He blinked hard to chase the unexpected sting from his eyes. He wanted to hold Meredith to him, to stroke his face, anything to show that he understood what he’d just been given.
Instead, he found himself saying, “I’m afraid the time’s rather gotten away from us, but how would you feel about chana masala for a late lunch?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“But if I made some.”
Meredith shrugged. “Yeah, I’d have a bit.”
“Right,” said David, yet he was reluctant to leave the room. “Well. I suppose I ought to get on that. Perhaps you might put some music on.”
He returned to the kitchen, retrieved a cooking pot, set out the tinned tomatoes and chickpeas, fished out the necessary spices from the disastrously overcrowded cupboard, finally locating the turmeric in the very back—and still the silence prevailed.
Peering into the living room to investigate, he found Meredith crouched in front of the record cabinet in apparent indecision. At David’s footsteps, he turned and rose.
“Everything all right?”
“Yeah, only I was just thinking.” Meredith took up his cup again, swirling the dregs of tea and avoiding David’s eyes.
When he didn’t elaborate, David prompted: “Yes?”
“That song you played for me last night, about the lilac tree?”
David’s heart beat faster. “Yes?”
“I quite liked it. I mean—” Meredith looked up at him with another flash of uncharacteristic shyness. “If you ever wanted to, you know, listen to it again…”
It was the perfect opportunity for a clever teasing remark—for David to point out that Meredith understood metaphors perfectly well after all.
Instead, he kissed him.
—
This time, they ended up in David’s bed, and soon enough had divested each other of their clothing.
David couldn’t even muster an acerbic remark about the amount of time it took Meredith to struggle out of his ridiculous skinny jeans—after all, it would hardly be fair when David wouldn’t stop kissing him long enough to give him a chance.
As David kissed his way downward, Meredith couldn’t seem to keep his hands off his face, quite impeding his progress. “You’re all prickly.”
“Yes, I know.” David lowered his head to nibble a bit farther along his collarbone. “I need to shave.”
“Nah, I like it.”
“Do you.”
“I do. Like to feel it here…” Meredith straightened up and traced his fingertips over his own face. “And here…” The touch descended along his throat. “And here.” He swept a hand up the inside of his thigh with a wicked grin.
David raised an eyebrow. “Would you like to feel it there now?”
“Oh, God—” Meredith fell back onto the pillows.
Taking that for a yes, David pushed his legs apart and began to make his way in a new direction.
He took his time, nuzzling at Meredith’s thighs and deliberately letting his stubble scrape over soft skin as he moved upward.
Already Meredith twitched under him, and David preemptively pinned him to the mattress, thumbs pressing into his hip bones.
When David took him deeply into his mouth in a single motion, Meredith cried out, and both his hands descended upon David, stroking his hair and the back of his neck. Not pushing him down or holding him in place, just petting him with a frantic, desperate affection.
David eased back to tease the head of his cock, working his tongue lazily around the ridge as Meredith did his best to thrash out of his grip.
“You know,” David reproached him, “it would make things a great deal easier for us both if you didn’t go all squirmy every time I touch you.”
“Can’t help it,” panted Meredith, arching up and lifting his hips off the bed in a wordless plea. David took mercy on him and gave his cock a few slow strokes while he mouthed at his balls, making him shudder and resume his too-eager petting. “Oh, David, please, let me do something for you.”
David rubbed soothing circles into Meredith’s thigh. “Just lie back and relax, love, plenty of time for that later.” Hoping to give them both a moment to cool off, David rose up to press a kiss to the scar at Meredith’s hip.
“No, I want to now,” insisted Meredith, a manic brightness in his eyes. “My mind’s wandering and I don’t want to think about anything else—just you, just what we’re doing.”
David’s resolve was crumbling. “What did you have in mind?”
“Come up here?” suggested Meredith hopefully. “Or turn around for me—just so I can get at you, too.”
“And that’ll help, will it?”
“Course it will. Can’t think about much else when I’ve got your cock in my mouth, can I?”
David wasn’t able to come up with any rational argument against that.
—
Afterward, David found himself curled up next to Meredith, resting his head on his chest. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a vague objection tried to make itself known, a whisper that this was not the way things were meant to be done.
That, however, was easy enough to ignore in favor of the warm comforting scent of patchouli and Meredith’s steady heartbeat and his fingers tracing slow abstract patterns over David’s back.
“Good idea you had there,” murmured David. Meredith gave a hum of acknowledgment and rested his cheek against the top of David’s head.
Then, surprising himself, David asked, “What’s that song you’re always going around singing?”
“Which?”
“The German one.” He hesitated, then softly hummed a couple bars, not trusting himself to attempt any of the few words he did recognize.
“Oh, the ‘Lorelei’! Had to learn that one by heart for the school choir.” The hand on David’s back went still. “Do you know,” said Meredith in realization, “I’ve never once heard you sing.”
“I assure you, you’re not missing anything.” David didn’t need to look to confirm Meredith’s pouting expression at that, but he did anyway. “Really. I can’t sing.”
“Anybody can sing, David.”
“You’d soon reconsider if you heard me.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Meredith softly, combing his fingers through David’s hair. A few locks near his temples were beginning to curl with the dampness of sweat. “I think it’d be wonderful, because it’s you.”
David was too embarrassed to reply to that, and instead occupied himself tracing the now-familiar outline of Meredith’s heart tattoo.
He stayed like that longer than he’d like to admit, until drowsiness began to creep in—until Meredith’s phone chimed on the bedside table and he slipped out of David’s embrace to turn over and retrieve it.
Fully awake now, David took advantage of the opportunity to run a hand over Meredith’s now-exposed back (and, he hoped, to discourage him from leaving the bed or getting dressed anytime soon).
As Meredith tapped out a reply, David traced teasing fingertips down his spine, along the tattooed peacock feather.
He followed the same path with his mouth, trailing kisses from the nape of his neck down between his shoulder blades, taking in the feel and taste of his skin the way he’d wanted to ever since he’d first seen him shirtless in the steam-filled bathroom.
Meredith gave one of those intoxicating little sighs that David could never get enough of. “ ’S nice,” he murmured. “Really nice, actually, even if you are making it quite difficult to concentrate.”
David shifted to a sitting position, nudged Meredith until he lay on his stomach, and resumed stroking his back, pressing his knuckles in gently to work out spots of tension. “Anything important?”
“Nah, just progress pics of some flash art Kinley’s been working on.” Meredith finished sending his reply, then said, apropos of nothing, “Florian’s having his bachelor party on Saturday.”
In all honesty, anything to do with Florian Schwarzwelder or his upcoming marriage had escaped David’s mind entirely. “Are you going?”
“I’m expected to.”
“I don’t want you to go.” Hearing the words leave his mouth, David was taken aback by his own bluntness.
It was true, though. He didn’t want Meredith to go, not when he thought back to Florian’s disparaging remarks, that hateful mocking tone, the sight of daisies trampled into the dirt.
Not now that bits of scattered information gathered from offhand comments and evaded questions had begun to come together in his mind.
Yesterday’s jigsaw puzzle rearranged itself, revealing a new image David didn’t like at all—a picture that went far beyond childish rivalry.
No, this was a deeper contempt, a cruelty that had persisted well into adulthood.
He didn’t realize he’d ceased his back rub until Meredith moved away and sat up. Unsure whether he’d overstepped, David amended, “I mean, I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t think it’s good for you, being around him.”
Meredith gave a mirthless laugh. “Course it isn’t.”
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place.
David reached out and cupped Meredith’s chin.
In return, he got a look of puzzled apprehension, but he kept his touch light, and Meredith didn’t flinch away.
Slowly, David turned his face until he found the angle at which, if one were looking, it was just possible to guess that his nose had been broken after all.
I didn’t say I didn’t, Meredith had said. I said, I didn’t.
“You didn’t,” said David, “but Florian did.” His voice came out harder than he intended.
“Oh, go on.” Meredith swatted his hand away in annoyance. “Don’t go getting all het up over it, that was ages ago.” He pulled away and rose from the bed. “Siblings fight, you know how it is.”
“I’m not sure that I do.” In fact, David could not recollect a single instance of himself and Ruth striking each other, but perhaps things would have been different if they’d been closer in age.
He, too, got to his feet, but found himself standing awkwardly at the side of the bed as Meredith prowled the room in search of his haphazardly discarded clothing.
“Besides, he’s always had a temper, same as me.”
“Same as—” David stared in disbelief. “Meri, your version of having a temper is telling me you don’t like my moustache.”
To his surprise, Meredith cringed. “I am sorry about that. I didn’t mean it. That is,” he amended, “I did mean it, but it wasn’t true.”
“I don’t follow.”
Meredith turned away and picked up his—or, rather, David’s—rumpled shirt from the back of the desk chair, gazed at it in indecision for a time, and then set it back down, his shoulders drooping.
“I’m ashamed of it now, of course, but I was just trying to say the worst thing I could think of, to hurt your feelings so you felt as bad as I did. ”
“That’s—” David stopped himself from saying, That’s all right, because it wasn’t, and, after consideration, settled on, “I forgive you. And I seem to recall that coming right on the heels of me saying a lot of things to you that I shouldn’t have, either.”
Meredith waved a dismissing hand. “ ’S fine.”
“It isn’t,” David persisted. “It wasn’t right for me to speak to you like that.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now, anyway.”
The next few moments were spent in silence as the two of them dressed, not looking at each other. At least David took care to keep his eyes off Meredith, and thus was taken by surprise when he asked thoughtfully, “David? You don’t suppose—I mean, he wouldn’t be unkind to her, would he?”
Despite the vague question, David knew exactly who he was talking about.
“No,” he said slowly. “No, of course not. She’d hardly stick around long enough to marry him if he did, would she?
” Though he’d met Adalynn only a few times, she projected confidence and self-assurance, and she was a successful businesswoman in her own right.
David knew, of course, if in an abstract sort of way, that anyone could be mistreated by a partner, but he truly hadn’t gathered that impression.
“Course not,” agreed Meredith. He leaned in close to the mirror to finger-comb his bangs. “All the same—nah, what am I on about? What would one even say, really? Oh, lovely centerpieces you’ve picked out, and by the way, do you mind that your fiancé is a bit of a dick?”
David huffed out a laugh in spite of himself, but sobered when he met Meredith’s eyes in the mirror.
“Hey,” he said softly. “I know I made a fuss about going to this wedding, but if you’d rather wash your hands of the whole thing right now—”
“I said I was in, didn’t I?” When Meredith turned to face him, his vacant grin had become quite unreadable. “Best not back out now. Besides,” he added with a philosophical shrug, “it’ll all be over soon.”