Chapter 7
The drive home from the wedding is quiet.
Not avoidance. Not two people pretending nothing happened in a coatroom with a concrete floor and a single flickering bulb.
This is processing, two men carrying the same secret and not yet knowing what to do with it.
Dominic drives with both hands on the wheel, which he never does.
I sit in the passenger seat, still tasting him, still feeling the phantom weight of him on my tongue.
Streetlights strobe across his face, catching the line of his jaw, the way his lips keep twitching like he wants to speak and can’t find the words.
Neither of us tries.
The house is dark. The maple tree is a black shape against the stars. Inside, the familiar smell of my childhood wraps around us, dust, old wood, my mother’s lemon cleaner. Strange to be here like this, thirty years old, my best friend’s cum still warm in my stomach.
Dominic drapes his jacket over a kitchen chair. Tie loose, shirt untucked. He looks wrecked. Beautiful, in a way that aches.
“Bedroom,” he says. Not a question.
I follow him past the bathroom, past the closet where my mother keeps my old trophies. The door’s open. The beds are exactly as we left them. Three feet between them. The same three feet that used to feel like an ocean and now feels like nothing.
We stand facing each other. Only light from the streetlamp outside, everything silver and shadow. His chest rises and falls. I watch it. He’s still wearing his tie. I want to pull it off with my teeth.
“I want to be with you.” Raw, scraped from somewhere deep. “Not just tonight. Not just this weekend.”
His eyes fill. The tears don’t fall, but they glisten. “I want that too.”
We kiss.
It’s different from the parking lot. Different from the bleachers, different from the coatroom.
Those were desperate, hungry, fuelled by beer and adrenaline and the thrill of the forbidden.
This kiss is something else entirely. It’s slow.
Deep. A conversation finally spoken aloud after fifteen years of silence.
His mouth opens under mine, and I taste him.
Champagne from the wedding, the salt of his skin, the faint echo of myself from earlier tonight.
His hands come up to cup my face, and I lean into the touch, my eyes closing.
I lay him down on the floor between the twin beds.
The carpet is old, thin in places, the floor hard underneath.
He doesn’t complain. He just looks up at me, his eyes dark and trusting, and lets me take the lead.
Above us, the glow-in-the-dark stars I stuck to the ceiling when I was twelve still cling faintly, barely visible after all these years.
I used to lie in bed and stare at them, dreaming about the future. I never dreamed about this.
I undress him slowly. Each button of his shirt, each slide of fabric, each inch of skin revealed.
I press my mouth to his chest, his stomach, the jut of his hip.
He tastes like salt and heat and the faint soap from the bathroom we used before the wedding.
His hands find my hair, my shoulders, the nape of my neck.
I take my time. There’s no rush now. No coatroom door, no party thirty feet away, no risk of being caught.
Just the two of us on the floor of my childhood bedroom, surrounded by the ghosts of who we used to be.
I kiss the inside of his thigh, and he shudders, a sound escaping him that he doesn’t try to muffle.
I do it again, higher this time, and his hips lift off the carpet.
I reach for the lotion on the nightstand. It’s the same bottle I’ve used since I was a teenager, half-empty and slightly dusty. I slick my fingers and settle between his legs. He watches me, his breath coming faster, his chest rising and falling.
“Is this okay?” I ask.
He nods. “Keep going.”
I work him open with one finger, then two.
He’s tight, hot, and the sensation of being inside him, even like this, makes my cock throb.
I watch his face the whole time. The flutter of his lashes.
The way his lips part. The small crease between his brows that smooths out as he relaxes into the stretch.
When I push inside, we both shudder.
The sensation is overwhelming. Tight. Hot. Perfect. A grip so intimate that my vision blurs at the edges. I stop, my forehead dropping to his, my breath coming in ragged gasps. The floor is hard under my knees. The carpet burns through my dress pants. None of it matters.
“Okay?” I whisper.
His answer is to wrap his legs around my waist and pull me deeper.
I move. Slowly at first, finding a rhythm.
The floor creaks beneath us with every thrust. The twin beds loom on either side, silent witnesses to something they’ve seen coming for years.
The glow-in-the-dark stars overhead are dull now, barely holding their light, but I can still make out the constellations I used to trace with my eyes when I couldn’t sleep.
“I’ve known you my whole life,” I say. The words come out broken. “Why did it take this long?”
Dominic’s hands cup my face. “Maybe we weren’t ready.”
I kiss him. It’s messy, uncoordinated, our teeth clicking, our breath tangling. I keep moving, deeper now, the rhythm building into something desperate and inevitable. The sound of our bodies joining fills the room. The floor creaks. The beds creak. The whole house seems to hold its breath.
Dominic comes first. His back arches off the carpet, his body clenching around me in rhythmic pulses.
His cock cums hot between our stomachs, untouched, and the sight of it, the feel of it, sends me over the edge.
I bury my face in his neck and let go, pulsing inside him with a broken moan that I don’t try to muffle.
Wave after wave. I empty myself into him, and he holds me through it, his hands gentle on my back, my hair, the nape of my neck. The aftershocks roll through us both, leaving us trembling and spent.
I don’t pull out right away. I stay inside him, our foreheads pressed together, our breathing slowly syncing.
The floor is hard beneath us. My knee is raw from the carpet.
Dominic’s back is red where it pressed against the floorboards.
Tomorrow we’ll notice these small hurts and say nothing.
Tonight, they’re the only proof that any of this was real.
I lift my head and look at him. His eyes are wet at the corners. He’s smiling, small and fragile, and my chest aches. I kiss him, soft and slow, and he kisses me back like I’m something precious.
Eventually, I pull out. We clean up with tissues from the bathroom, the ones my mother keeps for allergy season. The silence between us has changed. Not two people who don’t know what to say. Two people who’ve finally said everything.
We don’t move to the beds. We stay on the floor, tangled, the carpet rough against our skin. His head settles on my shoulder. His hand rests over my heart.
I press a kiss to Dominic’s shoulder and stay there.