15. Alex
Alex
Iwasn’t exactly sure when the panic began to creep in. It might’ve been five minutes after I came. Or it might’ve been after I’d jerked Leo off. If it did, I didn’t notice it at first.
No, the panic came after I woke up. It slipped in through the cracks, like the light leaking through the shutters as a new day dawned.
Outside I could hear the birds singing. But inside, here in my bed, I was extremely aware of the warm body pressed against me.
I was aware of his soft skin, his deep breathing, and the way my cock had hardened against his ass.
Two things were very clear to me. One, I’d had sex with a man. Granted, it was mostly foreplay, but the fact that I was rock hard just thinking about it told me that I wanted more. A lot more. Two, and probably the most important, that man had been my stepbrother.
That was a can of worms I could never put the lid back on.
I lay there in the gray morning light and stared at the ceiling and tried to breathe slowly and evenly, like a man who was not currently in crisis.
It didn’t work.
Leo shifted against me in his sleep, a small unconscious adjustment, and his hair brushed my chin.
My arm was still around him from the night before, draped over his hip and my fingertips dangerously close to his dick.
He was completely relaxed. His whole body had the particular heaviness of deep sleep, the kind that meant he wasn’t fighting anything.
He’d just gone under and stayed there, like he was more comfortable than he’d ever been.
I had not slept like that. I hadn’t slept much at all.
I’d lain awake for what felt like hours with Leo’s back against my chest and the candle burning down to nothing on the table beside us.
I’d watched the shadows on the ceiling and listened to the rain slow and stop and the night go quiet.
And I’d tried very hard to feel something manageable.
Something I could organize into a shape that made sense.
What I felt instead was everything at once, which was not helpful.
I was attracted to Leo. I’d established that. That part, terrifyingly, had been the easy part. What I hadn’t established, what I was now lying here in the early morning light trying and failing to establish, was what exactly I was supposed to do with that information going forward.
The ceiling, despite its age, offered nothing.
My arm was starting to go numb. I shifted it carefully, trying not to wake him.
Leo made a soft sound in his sleep and turned slightly, his face tucking into the crook of my shoulder with an ease that suggested he’d been sleeping next to someone for years.
But he’d always been away on trips. That’s why he and Ben fell apart in the first place.
They’d been together for years and Leo made it sound like they almost never spent the night together.
But with me… it was just natural.
I looked down at him. His dark hair was loose against my shoulder.
His lashes were very dark against his cheek in the morning light, and his mouth was soft.
I was aware, with a clarity that was almost painful, that I had kissed that mouth last night.
That I had done it deliberately and with full knowledge of what I was doing, and that I had not wanted to stop.
I was in so much trouble. We both were.
I pressed the back of my head into the pillow and closed my eyes and ran through the facts the way I always did when I needed to get a handle on something.
The facts were simple. I was a thirty-year-old man who had been attracted exclusively to women his entire adult life, or at least had believed himself to be.
I had, last night, kissed my stepbrother and then held him while he fell asleep and had not experienced a single moment of regret until the sunrise. And I was currently hard.
That last fact was not helping the situation. And it definitely wasn’t helping me think clearly.
I needed to get up. I needed to get out of this bed and go downstairs and drink some coffee and figure out where the fuck I’d gone off the rails. I’d always heard about people changing their lives after a divorce, but this seemed a bit drastic.
But getting up required moving. Moving required waking Leo. And waking Leo required having some kind of answer ready for when those amber eyes opened and looked at me, which I absolutely did not have.
So I stayed where I was and continued staring at the ceiling and hating myself for being such a coward.
The light coming through the shutters was pale and thin, the kind that didn’t survive the sunrise.
The storm had washed the air clean and everything smelled like wet stone, rosemary, and the distant salt of the sea.
It was obscenely beautiful. It always was.
In fact, I was starting to genuinely resent this country and its complete refusal to provide me with any kind of ugly backdrop against which to have a proper breakdown.
Leo’s breathing changed. Slightly, almost imperceptibly, but I’d spent enough sleepless hours listening to it that I noticed. A small shift in rhythm. A fractional increase in tension across his shoulders.
He was awake.
Neither of us said anything for a long moment. The birds outside were getting more confident about their morning routine. One of them took off, the sound of their fluttering wings filling the silence for a moment. The old house ticked and settled around us in the early quiet.
“Morning,” Leo said finally. His voice was soft with sleep, but still careful, like he was scared to break the silence.
“Morning,” I said.
Quiet again. Not uncomfortable, exactly, but weighted. Like we were both waiting to see what the other thought or if anyone could come up with a convenient excuse for why we were both naked in my bed.
Leo shifted slightly, putting a small and deliberate inch of distance between us that I felt more than I should have.
“How long have you been awake?” he asked.
“A while.”
“Thinking?”
“Obviously.”
He made a small sound that I couldn’t decipher. But he didn’t move to sit up. Neither did I. We both lay there looking at the ceiling, which had apparently become the most important surface in the villa.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he said quietly. “I mean that. Not right now. Not if you’re not ready.”
I turned that over for a moment. “I don’t know when I’d be ready.”
“That’s okay too.”
“Is it?” I asked, and I meant it genuinely. I wasn’t being rhetorical. I actually didn’t know the answer.
Leo was quiet for a moment, the way he got when he was choosing his words with care rather than just filling the silence. “I think so,” he said. “I think figuring out where you are right now is more important than having a speech prepared.”
I scoffed, shaking my head. “You’re acting like this is just about the gay thing,” I said. “And we both know it’s a lot more than that.”
Leo went still beside me when I said it. Not the kind of still that meant he was thinking. The kind that meant he’d been waiting for me to say it.
“No,” he said carefully. “I know it’s not.”
The ceiling continued to offer nothing. I was beginning to take it personally.
“You’re my stepbrother,” I said, because apparently I needed to keep saying it out loud until it started to feel like the obstacle it was supposed to be. It wasn’t working. “Our parents are married. We grew up in the same house.”
“I know who we are, Alex.”
“I just want to make sure we’re both clear on the specifics.”
“We’re clear,” he said. His voice was even.
Patient in a way that I found both reassuring and slightly infuriating, because patience like that didn’t come from nowhere.
It came from practice. It came from years of being the person who absorbed everyone else’s difficulty without complaint, which was its own kind of problem that we were going to have to talk about eventually, just not right this second.
I pressed my palm flat against my sternum. My heart was doing something irregular that I didn’t appreciate.
“I’ve been lying here trying to talk myself out of this,” I said. “In case you were wondering what I’ve been doing for the past several hours.”
“How’s that going?”
“Poorly.”
He made that sound again, the one I still couldn’t decipher. Low and quiet, somewhere between a laugh and something more serious.
“Alex.” He shifted, turning toward me, and I felt the moment he did it in every nerve ending I had.
He propped himself up slightly, and I made myself look at him.
His hair was loose around his face and his eyes were soft from sleep, but I could see he wasn’t just staring.
He was looking at me the way he had in the candlelight last night, like he’d already decided something and was simply waiting to see if I’d catch up. “Can I ask you something?”
“You’re going to, regardless.”
“True.” The corner of his mouth moved. “When you were trying to talk yourself out of it. What were the arguments?”
I stared at him.
“I’m serious,” he said. “What did you actually come up with?”
I thought about it. Not about the arguments themselves, I’d been living inside those for the past several hours, but about the fact that he was asking. About why he was asking.
“It’s wrong,” I said. “Technically. By most conventional metrics.”
“Okay.”
“We’re family.”
“Step,” he said quietly. Not correcting me exactly. Just noting the distinction.
“Our parents are married,” I repeated.
“They are,” he agreed. “That’s a real complication. I’m not dismissing it.”
“And I’m not—” I stopped. The words snagged on something. I tried again. “I’ve never been with a man. I don’t know what that means about me. I don’t know what label I’m supposed to be reaching for.”
“You don’t have to reach for one.”
“That’s easy to say.”
“I know.” He was quiet for a moment. “What else?”
I exhaled slowly. “You’ve been through a catastrophic year. So have I. There’s a reasonable argument that neither of us is in any condition to be making decisions like this.”
Leo nodded slowly. “That’s a fair point, actually.”
“I thought so.”
“And yet.”
“And yet,” I agreed, which was the most honest thing I’d said out loud since arriving in this country.
We looked at each other in the pale morning light.
The birds outside had settled into their full chorus by now.
It was earnest and completely indifferent to the crisis unfolding inside the old villa.
A thin bar of light had found its way through the shutters and lay across the foot of the bed with a brilliance that was completely unnecessary.
“Here’s my argument,” Leo said, and his voice was careful but steady.
“Every reason you just gave me is a reason to be cautious. To go slowly. To think about consequences and complications and whether the timing is right.” He paused.
“None of them are reasons that what happened last night was wrong.”
I opened my mouth.
“Let me finish,” he said, not unkindly.
I closed it.
“I’ve spent my entire life,” he said, “finding reasons why I didn’t deserve what I actually wanted. I have a gift for it. I can manufacture a reason to deny myself things out of thin air and make it sound completely reasonable.” His jaw was set, but his eyes were soft. “I’m not doing it this time.”
The bar of light at the foot of the bed had shifted slightly. The morning was moving forward without us, indifferent and unstoppable.
“What are you saying,” I asked.
“I’m saying I want you,” he said simply.
“I’ve been trying not to for the past few days.
I’m done trying not to.” He looked at me steadily.
“I’m not asking you to have the whole thing figured out.
I’m not asking you to know what to call yourself or what to tell our parents or what any of this looks like in six months.
I’m just asking you to stop lying there trying to undo something that we both wanted. ”
The silence that followed was the longest of my life, or it felt that way.
I had spent thirty years making decisions based on projections and outcomes and the careful calculation of risk.
I had built a career out of knowing where every variable was going before it got there.
I had structured my entire life around the belief that certainty was achievable if you just worked hard enough and thought clearly enough and refused to move until you had all the information.
And all of it, every bit of it, had still ended with me sleeping on the floor of my own apartment.
Leo was watching me.
“I… I just…” I shook my head again. “I don’t know what to think right now. Or what to feel. I’m just… confused.”
“Then take your time,” Leo answered. “Nobody is rushing you to figure it out today.”
He said it like it was simple. Like the past week hadn’t already rearranged everything I thought I understood about myself without asking my permission first.
I looked at the ceiling again. Old habit.
“Okay,” I said finally.
Leo didn’t respond right away. He let it rest for a moment, knowing I needed the space to breathe.
“Okay,” he said back, quietly. And left it there.