“I want you again,” Carver breathed against his mouth, riding Scott’s fingers.
“Carver, baby, I need a minute,” Scott said, and thebabysounded natural and not strange at all.
“I missed you.”
“I know.”
“You do something to me, you fuck with my head.”
“Me too,” Scott admitted, his voice husky. Carver could see now that he’d gotten at least a dozen tattoos since he’d last seen him naked; when Scott left for California the only ink he had was a sword-wielding Michael the Archangel in a woodcut style on his right upper thigh. He had gotten this the day he turned eighteen. Now he also had a moon, a knife, a scorpion, a yin-yang koi fish, an ouroboros around his left bicep, and several others that were currently obscured. Across his chest in lowercase script was one that readthe light gleams an instant.
Carver did not recognize the quote. He found his head was clearing a little. “Earlier,” he said, “did I say this was your pussy?”
Scott laughed, his breath warm against Carver’s cheek. “Yeah.”
“Christ.”
“It’s all good. At least we weren’t saying the kind of shit we said the first time.”
This comment pulled up no specific memory in Carver’s mind but inexplicably filled him with dread. “What did we say the first time?”
“Uh…” Scott drew his lip into his mouth and worried it with his teeth. “You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Seriously? I think you do.”
“I’m blanking.”
“We said I love you.”
Carver sat bolt upright on the couch. “What?”
Scott withdrew his fingers from Carver, looking like he regretted saying anything. “We agreed afterward that we just got caught up in the moment, that it wasn’t that deep. You seriously don’t remember this?”
There was a hazy, queasy familiarity in Carver, but he insisted: “No, I don’t. I feel like I’d remember that.”
“I don’t know, man, but I know I didn’t make that shit up.”
“How do you know?”
“‘Cause I keep journals.”
Carver stared at Scott where he lay on his side on the cum-splattered sofa, propped up on his elbow with his dark hair messy and his handsome face flushed and beatific. Then he rose from the couch and dropped to a squat on the floor so he could find his clothes, ignoring the dull ache inside him, possessed as he sometimes was by an intense restlessness.
“Carv,” Scott said, sitting up.
Carver found Scott’s Creeper Lagoon shirt and threw it to him. “What?”
“What’s up, what’s going on?”
“I need fresh air. And a cigarette.”
“Okay?”
“So let’s go outside.”
“So you’re not going back to the house?”
