Mason cracked a smile. “Gotta watch your balance.”
Despite still being a little dizzy from being spun around, Mason’s face steadied in his vision. Chase focused on all those features that had once been so familiar to him. That angular jawline. His full, pouty bottom lip.
Mason’s expression turned serious again, and Chase wondered what had changed. He looked concerned.
But before he had a chance to question the expression much more, Mason moved in and kissed him so quickly, it caught him off-guard.
Chase didn’t fight—and couldn’t fight—his Mason.
He just kissed him back and nipped lightly at that bottom lip, missing the feel of it between his lips.
It was clear the moment their bodies met that they’d both been secretly conspiring for that kiss to happen—that somewhere in his mind, Chase knew he was working to bring his body as close to Mason’s as he could.
It didn’t matter that they shouldn’t, only that they could. He missed that touch and the feelings that swept through his body in an instant. The sensation of having Mason with him like that sent an eruption of energy moving through him swiftly.
It was like a fire sweeping through a forest. He grabbed the back of Mason’s head and pulled him close, strengthening their kiss.
Their passion was wild and frenzied, stirring chaotic thoughts that ran nearly as wild as the nerves Mason’s body excited within him.
With the bliss of the moment came the awareness that it had to end, but Chase would hold on to it for as long as he could.
He listened as his body awakened with the desire that Mason had stirred long before that moment. His dick hardened, and Mason stepped closer to him so that his thigh pressed up against it, and Chase could feel Mason’s impressive girth on him as well.
They didn’t hold back. They groped. Caressed. Fondled. They grasped at each other desperately—both of them in a frenzy as they tried to recapture the best feelings, the ones their bodies ached for. Between kisses, they took gasps for air as though they’d been underwater.
Chase lost track of his reason, and time seemed to stop—as though they existed in some space between the world they loved in and the world of their passion.
Chase wanted Mason inside him, deep within him like he’d been back when they were in that pond at sixteen years old.
“I want you, Mason,” Chase said as he broke their kiss for another breath of air.
He regretted the words as they escaped from his lips, but he wouldn’t take them back. He couldn’t take back how he felt in the moment.
He grabbed Mason’s ass as Mason slid his hand down Chase’s body to his hard girth.
“Mason!” a voice came from the woods.
They pulled apart and turned to the direction of the voice, which Chase recognized as Jasper’s.
“Fuck,” Mason muttered. “Bet he’s looking for those screws.”
It was so strange how, in such a short time, fire and passion could transform into guilt and regret. But Chase was relieved, too. They’d needed Jasper to come along before they went too far.
They glanced at each other and scrambled for the shore toward their clothes. They collected them before creeping back into the pond, carrying them over their heads as they went to their familiar hiding spot beside a drop-off that acted as a sort of barrier on the other side of the pond. It was the place they slipped away to whenever they thought they might get caught for more intimate moments—moments when things would move closer to something Chase would have regretted if they’d allowed it that day.
* * *
From the moment they hopped on the four-wheeler, Mason had every intention of pushing things further. And it’d been so worth it to feel Chase’s lips against his own again.
The sensations—like he’d felt with Chase when they were young—returned full-force. All the pain he’d experienced over the years—those dark moments when he questioned the life he lived and his reason for being—evaporated. In an instant, everything was right and good in the world, and every moment he and Chase had been apart was a nightmare, nothing more.
But that kiss, no matter how incredible it felt, couldn’t change who they’d become.
After Mason and Chase hid for some time behind the drop-off, they dried off and put on their clothes before Mason headed off to help Jasper with the tractor.
He tended to a few more errands before working his two remaining shifts in the milking parlor with Chase. Neither discussed what happened in the pond, and Chase avoided eye contact for the rest of the day, surely because he’d sobered up from the high of their passion and realized that they should have been more responsible than they were.
When suppertime came, they gathered around the table, as they had done the past few days. Chase hardly looked at Mason as he chatted with Emery about the new facilities they were building for the bottle calves.
