Epilogue
Three days and my duffel bag is still half-unpacked on the floor of my childhood bedroom, which is its own kind of statement.
The room is exactly how I left it: the twin bed with its navy comforter, the desk where I’ve done five years of homework, the shelf of fantasy novels whose heroes I’ve been cataloging with new understanding.
My ass is healed. That’s the thing I keep noticing when I shift in the desk chair or sit down too fast, the absence of the ache, the way my body has quietly gone back to just being a body. I don’t like it.
My phone is face-up on the desk. It’s been face-up since I got home, which is new behavior.
I’m the kind of person who loses his phone in his own room for days at a time, but apparently I’ve developed an interest in it.
I’ve checked it fourteen times in the last hour.
I know it’s fourteen because I started counting.
I’ve also googled Miami to Princeton, New Jersey no fewer than fifteen times.
The answer is always the same: eighteen hours, give or take, depending on traffic through the Carolinas.
I have this information memorized. I have run variations, leaving day of docking, leaving the following morning, accounting for stops, and in every scenario, they’ve had plenty of time to be home, unpacked, and sending a text.
The math is not complex. The math has never been the problem.
My laptop is open on my desk to three separate tabs: a listing for part-time math tutoring positions in Princeton, the university’s undergraduate research portal, and, embarrassingly, the Google Maps driving route from Miami to New Jersey, which I haven’t closed in two days.
The tutoring application is forty percent complete and has been forty percent complete since yesterday afternoon.
Progress has stalled because every time I reach for the keyboard my hand ends up on my phone instead.
I should be figuring out the fall. That’s the plan: get a campus job, nail down housing, maybe email my differential equations professor about sitting in on the graduate seminar.
Good plan. Responsible. Exactly the kind of productive momentum that would make my parents nod approvingly if they knew about it, which they don’t, because I’ve barely left this room.
I lie back on the twin bed. It’s noticeably smaller than the king on the ship.
Everything in this room is noticeably smaller than anything in that room: the ceiling lower, the walls closer, the specific quiet of a house where people are being politely careful around each other after a vacation that ended with their son holding hands with two men in the Miami cruise terminal.
My mother has been warm and careful. My father has made three jokes that weren’t quite jokes.
Lucy texted once to ask if I was okay and then, when I said fine, sent back a single thumbs up and nothing else.
My sisters have things to do, places to be, futures that start in three weeks.
They are already gone, in the ways that matter.
The old logic starts up. It does this. I’ve known it long enough to recognize the sound of it, the internal frequency of self-erasure getting up to speed.
They said see you soon. People say see you soon.
It’s a phrase, not a contract. I was a convenient body in a confined space for ten days, and they were freshly broken up and horny and stuck in a room with someone who looked at them like they hung the moon and apparently couldn’t keep his mouth off their cocks.
I was useful. I was there. Those are not the same thing as being wanted.
My jaw tightens. The thought lands the way it always does, neat and logical and quietly devastating.
I close my eyes.
I don’t mean to. It’s not a strategy. My eyes are just tired from staring at the ceiling and my brain is tired from running the same bad calculation over and over, and when my eyes close what I find behind them isn’t darkness but Wyatt’s face, the dimples cutting deep before his mouth even curves, the way he looked at me across that wrecked bed on the last morning like I was something he was still slightly amazed to find there.
Good boy. Math boy. His voice rough with sleep, all its usual enthusiasm stripped back to something quieter and more real.
Then Jai. His dark eyes going soft and unguarded in the early light, the small private smile he didn’t try to manage, his mouth against my temple on the gangway: don’t do anything boring until we call.
Our boy, he said. Not to me, to Wyatt, low enough that I wasn’t supposed to hear it. Like I was something they were already claiming between themselves, a settled fact, a given. Our boy.
The panic doesn’t vanish. But it softens. The frequency drops. My chest is still tight but it’s not the specific tightness of impending erasure. It’s the other kind, the ache of wanting something and knowing you want it, which is different. Harder in some ways. Better in all of them.
I take a breath. Let it out slowly.
The trick works. A little. Without them here, without their hands or their weight or the warmth of being tucked between them in the dark, it still works. I file that under surprising and let myself feel surprised, quietly, in the dim of my childhood bedroom.
My phone buzzes.
My eyes open. I reach for it with the unhurried calm of a person who absolutely has not been waiting for exactly this, which fools no one. The message is from the contact saved as Jai golf guy, which I haven’t renamed because I don’t know what I’d rename it to.
Jai: Come downstairs, baby.
I sit up so fast I nearly fall off the twin bed.
My socks are on. That’s as far as preparation for going downstairs gets before a horn sounds in the driveway, two sharp blasts, impatient, and I’m already moving, taking the stairs two at a time, my shoulder catching the doorframe to the kitchen where my mother’s voice says something I absolutely do not catch before the front door is open and the New Jersey afternoon is bright and hot and there is a black Range Rover in the driveway.
Wyatt is visible through the windshield before I’ve cleared the porch steps.
That grin, the full one, the dimples cutting deep, the entirely unstudied joy of it, lands in my chest like something dropped from a height.
He’s waving me around to the passenger side with the energy of a man flagging down a rescue aircraft, and I’m walking toward the car before I’ve consciously decided to, my socks getting wet in the grass.
The passenger door swings open and Jai is in the passenger seat.
He looks up at me with his dark eyes and that sexy smirk, and then he opens his arms, and I don’t ask questions.
I climb in. Sideways, my back against the dash, my legs across the center console, and Jai’s arm comes around my waist and he slips his other hand up under the hem of my shorts, and the press of his fingers against my hole, loose, lazy, circling, pulls a sound out of me that’s barely audible.
“Hi,” he says, into my hair.
The car smells like them. Whatever combination of Wyatt’s deodorant and Jai’s hair product and eighteen hours of driving has settled into the upholstery, it’s them, and my body does that thing it’s been doing all week, recognizing, settling, the unclenching of a knot I didn’t know was there.
Jai’s fingers circle my hole through my shorts and I shift into the touch like it’s instinct, which I suppose it is now.
“Hey,” Wyatt says from the driver’s seat, one arm thrown over the headrest. “Missed you, math boy.”
I look at him. At both of them. Three days of catastrophizing, of running drive-time calculations and making arguments against myself, and they’re here, in my parents’ driveway, with their arms around me, and I have feelings about this that I’m going to need to address.
“What’s going on?” The words come out more plaintive than I meant them to. “You didn’t text me. You didn’t—I didn’t know what was happening.”
They look at each other. It’s a specific look, the one they exchange when they’re recalibrating, not quite confused, more like two people consulting a map they thought was unnecessary. Wyatt’s brow furrows. Jai’s fingers pause on my hole.
“We had to drive home first,” Jai says, like this is self-evident. “Obviously. Miami to my place is like eighteen hours, we couldn’t exactly text and drive the whole way. We took turns sleeping.”
“And then we had to find the rental,” Wyatt adds. “That took a day, there were a lot of options, Jai has strong opinions about kitchens for someone who doesn’t cook.”
“I have standards,” Jai says. “That’s different from opinions.”
I blink. “A rental. For what?”
Wyatt turns in the driver’s seat to look at me fully, and his expression goes patient and slightly bewildered, the look of a man explaining something he considers obvious.
“Okay, Cade. Where has all your fucktelligence gone? We’re renting a place near your campus.
Obviously. So we can keep you.” He says it the way he says everything, easy, generous, like there’s no other reasonable interpretation of events.
“Keep me?” I squeak.
“Of course. You’re ours, right? We agreed on the cruise. Besides, we can’t just leave you up here unattended. You’re a little gay cockslut who’s been without dick for three days already and will absolutely get himself into some kind of situation.”
Jai’s fingers resume their circling, unhurried. “You need your boyfriends to take care of you,” he says. “It’s a whole thing. We talked about it in the car.”
The word moves through me before I can stop it.
“Boyfriends?”
The flush comes up from my collar like a tide, and my ears go hot. Jai’s hand leaves my hole and connects with my ass in a sharp, bright smack that makes me jolt.
“What did you think the kissing was?” he asks. “On the balcony. In Miami. In front of the whole port of entry. Did you think that was just a thing that happened? Like weather?”