I drift in a sort of almost-sleep and his hand goes back to my hair, making me even more sleepy than I was before.
We doze there together in a post-sex haze that seems to fill the room.
I never want this to end. I don’t want to go back to California. I don’t want to go back on a long tour.
What I want is that Bear Valley life I once could never see myself as part of.
Sleep and sex drowsed, I pull myself up to his lips, kissing him with deep, claiming kisses he answers, wrapping us together.
“I love you, Baylor.”
I’ve never said that to someone until I started saying it to him. Literally no one, since it wasn’t something my parents said. It was a construct, they argued. Words used to convey what actions should, they said. Sometimes it would have been nice to hear anyway.
Words matter. God knows they matter to Baylor.
They matter to me too, especially these words.
Maybe that is because I have had to figure out for myself what they meant. There was no pre-packaged meaning I grew up with and was given in church or home.
Baylor is love. He’s my definition. This feeling I have when I touch him, hell, when I glance at him.
That has to be love.
Because if love is the sort of thing people fight for, or live and die for, or realign their lives for — then yeah, I know what that feels like, and it’s this. Right here.
Waking up with him and wanting to go to bed with him. And wanting to do it again tomorrow.
This is also the thing that deep down made it possible for me to leave when LA came calling thirteen years ago. I would have loved for Baylor to be there, right along-side me, but when he said that wasn’t the direction his dreams lay, I could accept that.
Because I loved him.
This primal urge I have to make him mine. I don’t understand how I can feel so attracted to him, so eager and horny at its base, and yet. . .and yet I never feel more human than when I am with Baylor. I never feel more in touch with who I really am. Connected with the world.
Orgasms with Baylor are the closest thing I will ever have to a spiritual path.
And the truth is that the timing thirteen years ago was off. He would have tried to please me, and I would have tried to please him. And I would have held back from this feeling because the overwhelming, borderline obsessive need I have for him, makes all the drugs I have been accused of doing pale in comparison.
I’m in love.
I always have been.
Baylor once told me that love is both an action, a verb, and a thing, a noun.
I’ve had thethingkind of love. I’ve felt it and been moved by it. And had known it was real for over a decade.
Now, I have the action kind of love. Thedoingfor each other. The taking care of someone — not just sexually, although there is that, but also their heart, their dreams. Their dislocated shoulder, and muscle-torn arm.
Seeing Baylor with his niece Piper, Liam, who may as well be his nephew, and his new nephew, Morrison, tells me he wants a family. A bigger family than what he already has, although that thought makes me snicker.
I grew up around a lot of people in a communal life-style. Maybe that’s why I fit in here, because Bear Valley and Baylor’s family is all-for-one-and-one-for-all. They share responsibilities, love, hurt, even anger when things happen.
I saw it with Baylor’s injuries. His rehab has been a group effort.
I see it with family.
As much as I need Baylor to know I love him — the action kind and the thing kind, I need his brothers to know as well.
There should be no doubts that I’m in this with him. For life.
