I suck in a breath like it’s my first and feel something that might very well be joy. I don’t know. It’s light and bright and more hopeful than anything I’ve ever known.
I nod, wondering if she’s waiting for me to kiss her. Wishing I knew how. But all my kisses are caught up in a net of memories so dark and confused and full of pain that it’s as opaque as trying to look into a nightmare. My mom probably kissed me when I was a kid, though I don’t remember it too well. I remember the feeling of being taken care of, being loved. I had five years of it before colon cancer took her away and left me with an angry, apathetic shell of a father.
That’s how it was when she died, just there one day and gone the next. Before and after. Love and…nothing. Or, no, other things. With dad, there was anger, pain, guilt, and eventually, with other people, I felt lust. A shit ton of lust.
“Goodnight, Zion.” Twyla twists into a new position, apparently as happy to ignore the hard cock pressed against her side as I am. Taking my insistent desire in stride. “I…” She sniffs. “Thank you. For telling me. For sharing and opening up. For everything.”
I wrap around her, feeling lighter and heavier all at once. “Goodnight, Twyla. Thank you for being you.”
Her sigh feels like pure light. “Sweet dreams.”
“Okay,” I say, sounding like a total fool. I want to kiss her, to lean in and show her my feelings with that one little move.
It’s just skin to skin, right? Just friction, nothing more. Not the moment Mama died and left me alone in this world. A stubborn little five-year-old boy living in a shack with nothing left but the responsibility to keep his dad alive. I think of the time when, as a teen—filthy and feral and mean as a snake—I somehow convinced twenty-two-year-old Donnie Rae Minton, who must have been hella hard up while her husband was locked up for armed robbery, to get frisky on her unmade bed in her trashy doublewide. I know now that it was statutory rape and should never have happened, but at the time, it was the most exciting thing in the world.
She let me squeeze her tits and touch her every which way, but when she leaned in and put her tongue in my mouth, I froze up.
It felt all wrong. Too close and intimate and not at all what I wanted.
I shoved her off me, told her to stay the hell away from my mouth.
It was a sign of Donnie Rae’s low self-esteem—or just the luck she’d had in life, I guess—that she didn’t blink before telling me to chill the hell out and fuck her.
I spanked her that first time. And every time after. We didn’t have a safe word or anything of the sort, but Donnie liked it rough and I liked it rougher. Right from the beginning, I needed the edgy stuff. I was hardwired that way from the start.
By the time her husband got out, I’d learned pretty much everything there was to know about sex and pain and pleasure. Today, I get that it should never have happened. That I was too young and unable to consent to any of it.
But it was defining, I guess.
From that moment on, there’s always been a clear divide between sex and love in my life. Love is about friendship and support. About being there for those who matter. Love was Liev taking me under his wing when I first showed up on the kink scene and Lamé seeing through my bullshit and accepting me the way I was. Love was the bottom falling out of my life when I thought we’d lost Liev after his wife died. Love was holding him in my arms while he shook through night after night after night.
I learned to disassociate when I kiss on screen. It’s easy to feel nothing when I’m playing a character.
But Twyla, well, she was a spoke in my wheel from the start. Just looking at her feels intimate. The way she looks back, her eyes burning straight through, seeing a whole lot more than I’ve ever wanted to share.
Until now.
I ease slightly away from her and listen as she passes out fast, her breathing deep and slow and, though I should get some sleep, I take the time to enjoy every second of this.
So many firsts for me tonight. My first time being told to have sweet dreams—that I can remember, at least. My first time sleeping with another person. My first time agreeing to a relationship.
My first time wanting romance or intimacy or maybe love with a partner.
“I’d like to kiss you, sometime,” I whisper, half-hoping she’s not awake to hear it.
With a tired hum, she says, “I’d like that.” And then, “Whenever you’re ready.”
“That’s… Yeah. When I’m ready.”
I think back on the time I kissed Twyla to help her out on the red carpet, the way I justified it to myself by saying it was for her benefit and it wasn’t real anyway. Red carpets are basically improv performances, complete with cameras and costumes.
Those were lies, I realize now. Just bullshit I told myself when my brain was too shocked for honesty.
I need to tell her all this. And I will. I want her to understand why I’m like this, even if I don’t always get it myself.
She’s definitely under when I scrape up the nerve to lean in and press my mouth to hers—just to see. Just to know how broken I really am.
But maybe she knows or feels it in her sleep or dreams it or something, because though it barely lasts a second, I swear her lips turn up into a smile.
