“Yes, you.” I gently squeezed his hands, feeling immensely lighter as if a huge boulder had been lifted from my chest. “I’ve always known I was gay, but learning that I was falling for my best friend, that’s what really threw me off course. When you shut me out this past year, it hurt so fucking much not to have you in my life.”
I moved forward on the coffee table so that my ass barely stayed on the edge. His legs were sandwiched in between mine, and I moved my hands up to rest on his forearms, the light dusting of hair feeling foreign under my fingertips. He kept his eyes glued to my fingers as they traveled farther up his arms, gripping his muscled biceps and shoulders.
When he finally looked up at me, I saw so much emotion swirling in his hazel eyes – fear, uncertainty, nervousness, and what I hoped was a touch of excited anticipation. He swallowed hard, causing his Adam’s apple to bob in his throat. As I moved my hand from his arm to his face, gently stroking his hard jawline, his pupils dilated.
Inching closer to him, I felt his hot breath bathe over my lips in heated puffs. His tongue darted out to lick his full bottom lip – a lip I had fantasized about kissing for far too long. I didn’t know anything about this first kiss business – was it supposed to be slow and sweet or hard and fast?
All I knew in that moment was that Ineededhis lips against mine.
When our lips touched, my world changed forever. He didn’t kiss back at first; the shock took a second to wash away, I was sure. When he tilted his head to the side, I slid my hand up to his neck and into his hair, shocked by how soft it was.
I moved slowly at first, tentatively, unsure of how to measure his reaction – mine was throbbing wildly behind the zipper of my jeans. I pulled back, certain I had overstepped a line.
My breathing labored and my heart racing, I stared into his eyes once more. Shane brushed his thumb across his bottom lip before gracing mine with the same, soft touch. “Do that again?” he asked, his voice trembling.
This time, it wasnota kiss filled with uncertainty. His lips met mine with the perfect combination of tenderness and force, hunger and need. When he opened his mouth, sliding his tongue against mine, a low groan rumbled from deep in my chest. Moving closer to the edge of the couch, he wrapped his arms around my waist, letting them travel up and down my back, before diving into the too long strands of hair at the nape of my neck.
In what seemed like a split second, our hands were everywhere – necks, hair, chests. After months of denying my feelings, hell, my own fucking identity, I couldn’t touch enough of him. It was like I was afraid he would vanish if my hands weren’t on him.
We kissed in cycles, slow and erotic before changing gears to hard and passionate, threating to devour each other.
Before we went further, I had to know something, so I pulled away from him. With our foreheads pressed together, the space between us was filled with our laced-with-lust breath. “How do you feel?” I managed to choke out through my staggered breathing.
He took a moment to answer, but when he did, his single-word-response cemented my world. “Alive.”
My face split into a huge grin, unable to contain my own happiness. “So do I.”
But before we could say all of the stuff that obviously needed to be said, before we could even begin to figure out what this all meant, we heard a group of people approaching the pool house and a few others splashing into the pool.
Fear laced through me as my heart pounded in my chest. We both shot up from where we were sitting so quickly, that we almost knocked each other out, banging our heads together.
“Shit!” I cursed, looking around the room as Shane made his way to the other side. There was no way for us to leave the pool house and go unnoticed.
“The bar,” Shane suggested as he started loading up his arms with booze.
Joining him, I loaded up with a few bottles and tried to calm my frenzied thoughts.
When we stepped outside, we were greeted with a huge group of drunken partiers swimming in the pool. Definitely not the smartest move on their parts. Reid was perched on the edge of the same lounge chair on which Shane and I sat earlier, a goofy grin splitting his face. He tipped his beer at us, smiling conspiratorially at us as we made our secret escape.
Oddly enough, Reid was the one person I figured would already know about my secret. I might venture even to say Shane’s secret. I guessed we were all just that close, or maybe he was just that intuitive. We’d never spoken about it. It wasn’t something that was necessarily up for conversation, but I could just tell. So his smug smile didn’t bother me one bit.
I was unsure when it happened, maybe it was because I was lost watching Shane laugh with a few of our friends. God, it had been so long since he’d laughed and smiled. It made me feel a bit lighter, more hopeful, but I caught myself smiling like a fool.
The volleyball net was strung up in minutes and we were all jumping in the pool, splashing around like the crazy teenagers we were. A group of girls cheered from the side, scantily clad in nothing more than their underwear – why, I had no clue. It wasn’t like they were in the water or anything like that.
Even though all of the guys in the pool were more than distracted by the sideline T&A display, my eyes were focused on Shane as he moved effortlessly through the water next to me. Everyone else was too drunk to notice how we brushed up against one another with every chance we were afforded.
His thigh lightly grazing mine.
My arms gripping his waist below the water line.
His fingers trailing lightly across the small of my back when no one was looking.
We continued like that for as long as the game went on. Before long, the rest of the guys wanted more alcohol and the girls were more than happy to serve everyone from the pool’s edge, jumping in with their own fruity concoctions as the music continued to blare from inside the house.
Hours after the party had started, the loud and unruly party noises subdued into a quiet calm. We’d all dried off from the impromptu volleyball game and made our way back inside. I couldn’t remember feeling both happier and more confused in my entire life.
As I swallowed back my first beer of the night, I tried to sort out what happened hours ago.
