“I’m sorry, baby,” Perrin said against my ear after a while. We were laying on the rug in front of the fire, because we hadn’t made it to the bedroom, and somehow blankets and pillows from the sofa had found their way to the floor. I was too spent to think about such things, so it must have been Perrin.
“Pfft. For what?” I asked. “If that’s any indication of what makeup sex would be like, we need to start fighting.” I rolled so I was facing him, my back to the fire. I watched the light of the flames play out over his gold hair in the late afternoon light. It wasn’t really cool enough to need it, but I liked it anyway. “What pisses you off?” I asked, waggling my eyebrows.
Perrin was up on an elbow, looking down at me. “Well, other men calling you their boyfriend does the trick, apparently. I shouldn’t have acted like that. I was an ass.” There was genuine regret in his eyes, but his gaze was tender.
I put a hand to his face. “Stop. I think you handled it perfectly. He would totally make a scene if he could,” I told him.
A smile ghosted his lips. “Still,” he said, shaking his head and looking off into the flames for a minute.
I could tell the conversation was going to happen, no matter how much I just wanted to lay there in his arms. Still, it didn’t feel right to me for us to talk about other lovers while naked against each other. So, I pulled him to the shower and by the time I stumbled into some clothes afterward, I found him in the kitchen, pouring two glasses of some top-shelf scotch we had brought with us for the weekend.
While I had expected him to slide the glass over to me and create some kind of distance, he surprised me by pulling me to him at my hips with an intense gaze. I had never seen him this quiet, but he just brushed his lips against mine and I looped my hands around his neck. Perrin pressed his lips to mine and I opened for him, feeling that he needed that vulnerability.
“Beautiful Jack,” he said, putting his hands on my face and just looking at me.
“What’s the Bryan story?” Perrin finally asked, moving to the sofa by the fire. He folded one long leg under himself, angling toward me where I followed him.
“There’s not one. I wanted to try a relationship, and it failed to the point of driving him to cheat on me with another guy.” I looked off in the fire, taking a drink of the scotch.
“I wanted to see what it was like, something like a relationship. But, I didn’t know I couldn’t force that kind of thing,” I said. “I thought people just stopped looking, settled for someone companionable enough and made it work. I should have been able to look at Rita and Ellen and see that wasn’t it, but . . ..” I trailed off.
I caught Perrin’s eyes and took a deep breath. “I didn’t know,” I confessed.
“Didn’t know what?”
“What it felt like to feel that connection with someone, like finally having answers to questions you never even asked yourself. I felt that with you immediately, Perrin. But, Bryan? No, he was just a guy I tried to make fit a role and he ended up hurt.” I said. “So did I.”
Perrin was quiet for a while.
“He made a big scene at Maxine’s coffee house about a week after I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. He cheated on me, leaving me to have to figure it all out, but still caused a scene,” I said, threading my fingers through Perrin’s. “He told me in Maxine’s that I hated commitment, that no one would ever satisfy me. I think that might be why he reacted so strongly to you.”
“I satisfy you?” He asked, and I knew he didn’t just mean sexually, although my ass was deliciously sore when I moved.
“Yeah, P. Your my best friend, lover, teammate. I don’t want to do any of this without you.”
Perrin looked surprised at my words, so I sealed them with a hard kiss to his mouth.
“Come on, Perrin. You got to have some crazy ex’s in the woodwork somewhere. You are too confident not to.”
A shadow hooded Perrin’s eyes for a minute, and he seemed to be carefully picking his words.
“Don’t get me wrong, I had fun in college, but, I wasn’t the casual sex kind of guy. I was too afraid of what would get back to my family or some kind of gossip. On the one hand, I craved the freedom of boarding school and college, but on the other, I was terrified to do anything with it,” Perrin said.
His face looked shadowed now, more than just from the flame of the fire. “Then I met someone I thought I liked. He was a surgeon, older than me - accomplished. It was an honor to work with him - anyone would tell you that. And when he showed an interest in me beyond being his go-to in the OR, I was flattered. I felt like I could do a lot worse than a world-class surgeon.”
“What happened?”
Perrin looked at me like he had almost forgotten I was there. “He took it slow, understanding my reluctance to get into anything with a colleague. He had a way of making me believe that I wanted him. I mean at the time, if you had asked me, I would have without a doubt said I wanted to be with him, wantedmorewith him. But, after?” Perrin shook his head. “After, I couldn’t think of one single thing Iactuallyliked about him as a person. Honestly, at times, he scared me more than anything. He was intensein a way I never understood. Anyway, I still got sucked in, for whatever reason, but it never progressed as far as I wanted it to. . . then . . ..” Perrin took a sip from his glass, lost in his thoughts and the fire.
I thought he might be done, that he simply wasn’t going to speak again, but he did.
“A patient died in our OR one day. It was the first time it happened to me, and I took it pretty hard,” Perrin said quietly. “I thought he would be there to help me get through something like that, but . . .” he trailed off again. “He wasn’t.”
Perrin’s eyes found mine. “Eventually, the patient’s family sued. I was named, but I was dropped from the case.”
“Because there was no evidence it had anything to do with anesthesia?” I asked.
“Right. They named everyone in the OR that day, and I was the first one dismissed. It actually went pretty quickly for a malpractice case.”
