Strangers to Husbands

Chapter Thirty-Four

THREE WEEKS after Christmas is Stacy’s wedding. Lewis gets crazy busy with his maid-of-honor responsibilities on January 2nd, throwing the bridal shower, keeping track of arriving gifts, making sure dresses and his tux are going to be ready for final fittings, helping Stacy and Alang with last minute RSVPs, coaching Stacy through a centerpiece disaster that ends with them DIYing the whole thing in one night and which results in him taking the subway home at five in the morning covered in glitter, glue, and several stray fake flowers.

After the penultimate dress-and-tux fitting, which runs late because Stacy is adamant that her dress absolutely cannot be taken out anymore because she needs to be a certain size for her wedding, Lewis takes a Lyft to Tad’s. He’s texted multiple apologies to Tad for being late, but he couldn’t leave his ride-or-die in the state she worked herself into, which involved tears, a vow to take laxatives between now and the wedding, insisting the dress can stay the way it is because she won’t eat anything except celery and wheat grass powder during all that time, and locking herself in the boutique’s office while she wailed that she was ruining the wedding with this.

Once he talked her down from that, he had to talk her down from her horror over the fact that she was buying into fat-shaming culture and that the whole wedding-industrial complex was based on harmful beauty standards and patriarchal, heteronormative gender nonsense from a less enlightened era.

“But I still want my wedding to be perfect,” she sniffled with his arm around her, mascara so smeared around her eyes that it was almost impossible not to tell her she looked like the Hamburglar.

He kissed her forehead, assured her that the wedding would be perfect because he’d make sure it was, and then told her she looked like the Hamburglar.

Lewis lets himself into Tad’s apartment and sprawls on the sofa. The shower is running. When Tad emerges from the bathroom, his face lights up. “Hey! Sorry, I hung out at the gym longer when you said you were going to be late.” He comes over to the sofa—nothing on except a pair of blue briefs that are doing delicious things to his anatomy—and straddles Lewis’s thighs. “You look tired.”

“I’m so glad this is all going to be over in a week and a half. I don’t know if I could handle any more than that.”

“You could,” Tad says fondly. “You love it. You’re like, totally in your element. Stacy got super lucky that her best friend happened to be incredibly organized and good at telling people what to do and when to get it done.”

“Yeah, my control freak abilities are really coming through.”

Tad’s face falls. “I didn’t mean—”

Lewis grabs his hands. “I know you didn’t. Sorry. Old baggage. When Stace asked me to be her maid of honor, Jonah said—” He pauses. What Jonah said was that it was perfect for him—he was going to get a chance to be a control freak bridezilla before his own wedding. But why would he want to repeat that? Jonah was a cheating asshole. “You know what? It doesn’t matter what Jonah said.”

Tad’s watching him, looking worried, and Lewis wants to smooth away the grooves between his eyebrows. “I didn’t mean that,” Tad murmurs. Practically whispers. “I don’t think you’re a control freak.”

Now Lewis feels like a jerk for making such an unfunny joke. Obviously if he’d realized Tad would be so hard on himself, he wouldn’t have said it. “It’s okay, babe,” he says, squeezing Tad’s hands. “Hey, so—how do you feel about coming to the wedding?”

“What?” Surprise ripples over Tad’s face. “I’m invited?”

“Well, yeah. Of course.” Lewis drops Tad’s hands to wrap his arms around his back instead. He’s still all warm and soft from the shower, his skin a little pink from the hot water, and as Lewis pulls him closer he breathes in the clean, sharp scent of soap and the bright, citrusy shampoo Tad uses. The whole thing is so distracting that he forgets what he was saying and has to find the thread of conversation again. “Stacy was serious about the verbal invitation, but anyway, you’re my plus one.”

Tad wriggles closer and Lewis’s dick perks up. “Mm,” Tad says noncommittally.

“It’s going to be a big wedding,” Lewis admits. “So I’d understand if you didn’t want to come.”

“Do you want me there?” Tad asks. There’s something on his face Lewis can’t totally read that appeared when Lewis called himself a control freak and hasn’t gone away.

“Of course I do,” Lewis says. He presses a soft kiss to Tad’s shoulder, where the freckles spray and scatter over his skin. Tad’s sharp little intake of breath is like candy, or like a drug, and Lewis needs more of it. Slowly, he moves his lips along Tad’s collarbone until he gets to the hollow of Tad’s throat. Tad’s pulse throbs under Lewis’s mouth, and Lewis swirls his tongue there, licking into that warm dip of skin in a way that feels filthier than he intended it to be.

Tad’s hands come up to clutch at Lewis’s hair, and he makes this tiny groany sound that goes straight to Lewis’s dick. Really, he shouldn’t have tried to have any kind of mildly serious conversation when Tad was in nothing but briefs.

Now, in addition to the clean smell of freshly washed skin, there’s the distinct tang of arousal. Lewis drifts one hand from Tad’s back to his crotch, where he’s hot and hard and wet.

His brain goes straight to static. With a moan, Lewis rocks his hips up, wanting friction, dimly aware the angle isn’t right at all, and trusting that his body is going to figure it out without much input from his brain.

Tad tugs his hair and Lewis raises his face, where he’s immediately met with a hard, openmouthed kiss. Tad fucks his tongue into Lewis’s mouth and Lewis sucks at it. There’s something in the back of his mind poking him to actually talk about whether Tad’s going to come with him to the wedding or not, that they actually haven’t had many serious conversations about… well, anything, and that maybe they’re due to start. And that sex—fucking hot sex—is amazing, but can’t stand in for all the other stuff that a relationship needs to continue past the infatuation stage.

And Lewis knows this is more than infatuation.

So he really should pause the sex to talk about the wedding, which isn’t even that big of a conversation, but, guhhh Tad is grinding into him and pushing his shirt up and the skin-to-skin fuzzes out whatever remaining brain cells Lewis can devote to non-fucking related thoughts.

Tad’s phone jangles with an incoming call.

Tad tears himself away from Lewis’s mouth with a groan of the distinctly un-sexy variety. “Let it go to voicemail,” Lewis whines, sticking his hand down the back of Tad’s briefs to follow the curve of his ass.

“I have a needy author for our first quarter issue,” Tad says, not sounding happy about it. “She requires a lot of handholding.”

“Isn’t that what texting is for?”

Tad makes a noise that Lewis is pretty confident in identifying as I tried and it didn’t take , and even though Tad is grabbing his phone, Lewis leaves his hand exactly where it is. He should’ve said he requires a lot of dick-holding.

When Tad picks up the phone, he says, “What the fuck does he want?”

Lewis catches a glimpse of the name on the screen as Tad answers: Walt.

The way Tad tenses is utterly mood-killing. Completely boner-deflating. It would be nice if Tad stayed where he was on Lewis’s lap, but he slides off and hunches on the sofa, a thin strip of empty air between them. It’s like his brother’s in the room with them instead of a couple hundred miles away.

His fingers are white as they clutch the sides of the phone and he’s pressing it to his ear so hard that Lewis isn’t sure how he can actually hear his brother talking. Sound needs air to travel through, right? It looks like Tad’s creating a vacuum between the phone and his ear drum.

“Yeah,” Tad says, his other hand on his leg, fingers worrying at some small, otherwise invisible blemish on his skin. He keeps picking at it, and Lewis wants to tell him to stop, that he’s going to make himself bleed—but he doesn’t want the brother to hear him. Not that he thinks Tad’s brother would think anything of a man being in Tad’s apartment, but Tad would freak out.

“Um,” Tad says. He’s pulling on his leg hair now, and Lewis can’t stand it. Silently, he puts his hand over Tad’s. Tad stills but doesn’t look at Lewis. But he stops picking at himself. Lewis will take it. “When?… I actually… no, I’m busy that weekend. I’m going to a wedding too, actually…. Yeah.”

There’s a pause and Tad’s jaw clenches. “Why is that so hard to believe?”

Now a muscle is twitching just below Tad’s temple. “Well, I do. Do you really think I’d make up that I’m going to a wedding just to get out of seeing you?” Another pause. Anger, then panic, then guilt flash across Tad’s face in succession. “I did not! I couldn’t leave New York for Christmas! I told Mom— yes , work! I know it’s shocking to you, but I actually really care about my job, and—”

Lewis can hear a tinny voice on the phone, but he’s only catching a word here and there—something something don’t want something something home, just grow something something tell the truth—

“Did you just call to tell me what a horrible son I am? I’m pretty sure we covered that last time I saw you,” Tad snaps.

The voice on the phone goes silent. Tad doesn’t speak. Lewis just… sits there, arm outstretched, hand resting on top of Tad’s, which is now fisted on his thigh. The skin of Tad’s hand feels stretched thin enough over his knuckles to break.

Tad must shift the phone a little, because Lewis hears his brother’s voice as he says, “ I just wanted to see if you wanted to hang out when I’m down there in a few weeks. If you think I just call you to fight, that’s your problem. ”

“Yeah well, like I said,” Tad replies tightly, “I have a wedding to go to. So I probably won’t have time to see you.”

“ Yeah. Okay. Maybe another time. Bye. ”

Even though Tad’s brother hung up, Tad keeps holding the phone to his ear for another half a minute, staring into space. Lewis bites his lip and squeezes Tad’s hand, trying to draw him back to the moment gently, without making him feel like he’s doing something wrong.

“Babe?” he asks softly.

Finally, Tad drops the phone away from his ear, tossing it to the side. It bounces off the sofa and to the floor, but Tad makes no effort to retrieve it. Instead, he climbs back into Lewis’s lap, shoves him back against the sofa, and kisses him bruisingly.

It’s hot, no doubt about it—Tad wearing nearly nothing, grinding against him, kissing hard and demandingly, his mouth scorching and his tongue slick and wet as it opens Lewis’s lips.

It’s also not about him. Not after that call. And maybe they started in a place where they had sex to forget something shitty. For Lewis, it was his loneliness and his humiliation, and for Tad, it was his shyness and the way he didn’t fit in with his brother and his brother’s friends.

But that’s not what they are anymore, at least Lewis doesn’t think so, and he doesn’t think it’s his sappy, romantic heart lying to him about the fact that Tad doesn’t think that’s what they are, either. They aren’t just a fling or convenient sex or a rebound. They’re special. They have something. Lewis wants to be there for Tad, but he wants to make sure Tad knows he can be there in ways other than sex.

“Hey, hey, babe, slow down,” Lewis murmurs, drawing back from Tad’s urgent kiss. Tad’s face is pale and he’s breathing hard. Lewis smoothes a thumb over his collarbone and traces the line of his pec. “Hey,” he says softly, cradling the back of Tad’s head with his other hand.

“Your family is so perfect, and mine sucks so much,” Tad finally says. Where Lewis expected anger, all he hears is weariness. “You’re probably already tired of dealing with it.”

Stroking the back of Tad’s head, Lewis says, “I don’t like how they make you feel. What it does to you when you talk to them.” He wants to kiss away the tightness in Tad’s jaw, in the tendons of his neck, which are taut, practically vibrating with stress. He wants to kiss all along Tad’s freckly shoulders and rub away all his tension and worries and everything bad he’s feeling.

He also kind of wants to hit Tad’s brother, but that’s probably a less healthy impulse. Not just because violence isn’t the answer, blah blah blah, but also because Lewis is pretty sure he wouldn’t come out ahead in a fight. The one time he tried to throw a punch (in high school, at some guys who were being dicks to his friend Lee, who was campy and refused to be any other way), it hurt so much he was convinced his hand was broken.

The tightness locking Tad up goes nowhere. If anything, it gets worse. Lewis massages his shoulders. “What do you need from me right now?”

“Your dick up my ass,” Tad says bluntly.

Lewis remembers the night Tad drove back from Watertown, a crying mess who walked in the door and threw himself on Lewis. And he remembers the way they fucked, and this is definitely a pattern now, isn’t it? Tad wants to fuck away his feelings. Lewis, though, Lewis likes to talk. He needs to talk things out. It drove his exes crazy. It will probably drive Tad crazy, too.

“You don’t want to talk about it?” Lewis asks. When Tad just stares, Lewis adds, “I mean… maybe it would help to get it off your chest?”

“Talking about it is the last thing I want to do.” Tad blows a hard breath out through his nose. “I just want to—I don’t want to think about it.” He puts his hand on Lewis’s chest and rubs a slow circle around a nipple.

Lewis wants to do what will help Tad the most. But maybe Tad isn’t right that this will help him? If he never talks about it, then none of it will ever get better. You can’t just keep pushing everything down forever.

Also, he’s like, really not turned on right now.

The hesitation doesn’t go unnoticed. Tad’s face shutters and he slides off Lewis’s lap. “Okay, so, what do you want to do.”

It’s not even a question. Tad’s voice has gone flat and it makes Lewis’s stomach sink. He hates fighting, and he especially hates fighting with boyfriends. This isn’t a fight yet, but it sure feels like it’s headed that way. “It’s not about what I want to do.” Lewis tries to make his voice soothing. “It’s about what you want to do. Whatever would make you feel better.”

Tad folds his arms over his chest. “I told you want would make me feel better. You obviously don’t want to.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to.”

“You didn’t have to. I can take a hint.” Tad disappears into the bedroom and when he returns, he’s dressed in a sweatshirt and flannel pants. He flops down on the sofa, a good foot of empty space between them, and turns the TV on.

They’ve been watching one of those gay K-dramas and the next episode starts playing, but Lewis can’t concentrate on it. Every ounce of his attention is fixated on the space between Tad and him. It feels like a physical presence, a yawning gulf that keeps getting wider. It feels like Tad’s on the other side of the room, like there’s a chasm growing between them and soon Tad will be unreachable.

And now Lewis’s chest is tight, and he shoves his hands under his legs and tries to breathe mindfully. It doesn’t help. His chest gets tighter. He can’t breathe.

He forces himself to take deep breaths. In through the nose, hold for a few seconds, out through the mouth. Again. And again. His heart is jackhammering at his rib cage, the skin and bone and muscle feeling too flimsy to keep it where it’s supposed to be. It doesn’t matter how many anxiety attacks he has, he always thinks, this is it. This is the time my heart explodes out of my chest. Every time he holds his breath, his heart strains harder to break free.

The world narrows and blackens around him, so there’s only the space he’s occupying, and way over there, far away, on the other side of the gulf he just created, is Tad, who’s unreachable. Lewis can feel the distance like a physical thing, and even though intellectually he knows Tad is close enough to touch, he also knows that if he reached out, his arm couldn’t possibly stretch across the empty space.

Something warm touches his hand. “Lewis?”

Lewis opens his eyes—he didn’t even realize they were closed—and can’t make sense of what he’s seeing. Tad is leaning close to him, his hand resting on Lewis’s, and his lip is caught between his teeth so hard that the skin looks broken. “Lewis, hey. It’s fine. It’s okay.”

There’s a vise around Lewis’s throat, but he tries to speak anyway. “No—it’s not—I’m sorry. Making this about me.”

“Oh Lew,” Tad whispers, and he wraps his arms around Lewis, pulling their bodies together. “Breathe, sweetheart. Breathe.”

This isn’t right, this isn’t right at all . Tad’s the one who’s in a bad place; he’s not the one who should be comforting Lewis. It should be the other way around. But Tad is comforting him, and it’s working, because gradually, breathing gets easier, and Lewis’s heart doesn’t feel like it’s going to burst out of his chest like the xenomorph in Alien , and his brain’s off-kilter perception of distance fades away until the room is normal-sized and Tad is holding him and the idea that there was any kind of insurmountable space between them seems like a hallucination.

Lewis buries his face in Tad’s sweatshirt, breathing in the scent of laundry detergent and soap. “Fuck,” he mumbles. “I’m so sorry. This is backwards.”

Rubbing Lewis’s back slowly, Tad says, “It’s not backwards to help your boyfriend when he’s having a panic attack.”

“I shouldn’t have a panic attack when you’re the one who had something to deal with. Fuck. ” Lewis wants to cry, but that would make this even more about him, so he bites down on the inside of his cheek to stop the urge. “I fucked this up, and—Jesus. I’m sorry. Do you want me to go home and leave you alone?”

Tad presses a gentle kiss to Lewis’s forehead. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

Tad holds him tighter, his fingers combing through Lewis’s hair. “Of course I’m sure.”

“I’m sorry,” Lewis mumbles, his mouth full of sweatshirt.

Fingers rub slow circles on the back of his neck. “You can stop saying you’re sorry.” Tad lets out a little laugh. “I like taking care of you, anyway. I don’t usually feel like I’m very good at taking care of people.”

There’s something about Tad saying this that makes Lewis look up at him. “But that’s not true. You’ve taken care of me since we met.”

Tad’s mouth twitches. “I definitely took care of you the night we met.”

Despite the tightness in his chest, Lewis laughs. “You know what I mean.”

Shaking his head, Tad says, “Not really. I don’t take care of people. People take care of me.” His smile gets bitter. “John said that was one of the reasons I wouldn’t come out to my family. He said I couldn’t stand the thought of them not taking care of me anymore.”

“Fuck him,” Lewis says.

Tad blinks.

So Lewis says it again. “Fuck him. Fuck your ex. John? What’s his last name?”

“Um, Cooper?”

“Fuck John Cooper,” Lewis says. Then, he leans back and yells at the top of his lungs, “FUCK JOHN COOPER!”

There’s a banging from the ceiling, and someone shouts from the apartment above Tad’s, “Fuck him yourself!”

Lewis and Tad meet each other’s eyes and burst into undignified snorts and giggles. When they quiet, Tad says, “I have some baggage, if you haven’t noticed.”

“Same.”

Is this the moment to tell Tad he loves him? Staring into his eyes that are the same blue as the water and the sky at Humboldt-Toiyabe, clear and bright, beautiful and endless?

Something loud and clearly climactic happens in the K-drama, which is still playing, and they both turn to look at the screen. “I have no idea what’s happening,” Lewis admits.

“Yeah, me either. We might need to start the episode over.”

Lewis snuggles closer while Tad restarts the episode. Now isn’t the right moment to say those three words to Tad. “I love yous” aren’t for post-panic attack snuggling or nights where your family calls and makes you feel like shit. They aren’t for starting episodes over because you were freaking out the first time it played. When Lewis tells Tad he loves him, it’s going to be the right time. He’s going to make his Grand Gesture, and it’s going to be perfect.