Chapter 19 #2
I get his shirt off. One hand at the hem, dragging it over his shoulders, and then his chest is bare and the scar is there, pale against his tan, the puckered ridge from collarbone to deltoid.
My palm finds it. But not the way it did two nights ago — that was slow, reverent, a question I was asking with my hand.
Tonight it's quick, claiming, my thumb pressing the ridge once like I'm checking it's still there, still real, still his, before my hand moves on, because tonight isn't about the wound.
Tonight is about what's left after the wound, and what's left is in this room, and it's running out of time.
Trevor goes still under it. Just for a second.
A full-body pause, his breath catching, his eyes on mine in the dark with a focus that could cut glass, and then he's pulling me back in, his hand at the back of my neck, his mouth on mine, and the kiss is hungry in a way that has nothing to do with want and everything to do with two men who've run out of time to be careful.
We grapple. That's the only word for it.
Not making love, not fucking — grappling.
His back hits the wall, my knee between his thighs, his hand finding my cock and gripping hard, my teeth on his neck, his hips grinding up into mine with a pressure that blurs my vision.
We move off the wall to the bed in a stagger of mouths and hands, and then I've got his wrists pinned above his head and my mouth at his throat, sucking a mark into the skin below his jaw that'll be visible tomorrow, and neither of us gives a single fuck, because tomorrow is its own country and we are not its citizens.
Underneath the urgency, something else keeps surfacing.
In the way his hand cups the back of my skull when I'm between his legs, fingers gentle in my short hair, holding me there not with force but with a tenderness that feels both ancient and brand-new.
In the way I press my forehead to his sternum and just breathe for a moment, my face against his chest, his heartbeat hammering against my skin, the rhythm so familiar I could set a watch by it — and the familiarity is the thing that finally cracks something loose behind my ribs.
When he pushes into me it's slow, and then it isn't, the two of us finding the rhythm we always find, his cock stretching me open until my whole world narrows to a single point of white-hot pressure and his name is in my mouth and my hand is fisted in the sheets and his other hand is laced through mine against the mattress, knuckles white, holding on like the holding is the thing keeping us both in the bed and on the earth and inside the one night we've got before the morning takes it.
I come with his mouth on the back of my neck and his hand on my cock, and he follows a few strokes later, his body going rigid over mine, a sound torn out of him low and broken against my shoulder.
Neither of us says a word. Not "I love you.
" Not "come back." Not "don't get shot." The words sit right there, right at the surface, visible in the dark, close enough to taste, and neither of us reaches for them.
I don't reach because I don't know how to say it without it sounding like a goodbye, and goodbyes are the one thing I've spent my whole life refusing to practice.
Trevor doesn't reach because he's spent his whole life swallowing exactly this — the want, the need, the truth of what lives between us — and the habit's too deep to break in one night, even a night like this.
We end up tangled and wrecked on top of the covers, my arm thrown across his chest, both of us staring at the ceiling in the dark.
My breathing's ragged. His is slower, measured, a man consciously controlling something that wants to run wild.
Sweat cools on our skin. The room smells like sex and cheap soap and the musk of two bodies pressed together longer than either of them planned.
My breathing evens first. My body makes the decision my brain's been fighting — sleep comes like a closed fist, sudden and total, pulling me under before I can resist. The last thing I'm aware of is Trevor's hand finding my forearm where it lies across his chest, his fingers settling over my wrist, holding me there.
I don't dream. Or if I do, I don't remember it.
What I remember is surfacing sometime in the deep of the night to the quality of silence that means Trevor's still awake.
His hand hasn't moved from my forearm. His breathing's too measured, too controlled, a man counting his own heartbeats and finding the count unsatisfactory.
I don't open my eyes. Don't speak. Just lie there with my arm across his chest and his hand on my wrist and the dark around us and the weight of everything we haven't said pressing down on both of us like something that might, with time, become bearable.
His thumb moves once across my wrist. A slow, deliberate stroke, the pad of his finger against my pulse point, and the touch is so gentle it almost doesn't register, and then it's gone, and his hand is still.
Trevor doesn't sleep. I can feel it in the stillness of his body, a man who's decided sleep is a luxury he can't afford, not tonight, not with tomorrow waiting at the end of the driveway in two backpacks and a phone full of nothing yet and a town that's already decided how this ends.
His hand stays on my wrist. My arm stays across his chest. We lie there in the dark, not speaking, not moving, just existing in the same unbearable silence that's defined us since we were old enough to know what silence cost.
The alarm will go off at six. The backpacks will be shouldered.
The door will open. The day will begin. Whatever happens after that belongs to a future neither of us is brave enough to name, so we don't name it.
We lie here. We breathe. We hold. And for now, in this room, on this narrow bed with its military corners and its water-stained ceiling, holding is the thing we can do, so we do it.