“No, and I don’t know yours.”
“It’s oddly… nice? New? Something?”
“Uh-huh,” Josiah grunted and ran his fingers over Denny to chase down suds or maybe to just touch him.
“You ready?” Denny asked, not knowing if he meant the shower or what would come after.
The vulnerability in Jo’s eyes was a surprise and also not. “Are you?”
Denny smiled. “Of course.” In fact, he was pretty damn sure that on some level he was much more ready than Josiah. It humbled him, in a way. “I’ll finish getting the smoke off my skin and be right with you,” he said, sensing that Jo needed space.
“Okay.” Josiah kissed him and then stepped out of the shower.
Denny put some shower gel on a washcloth and ran it over his skin as efficiently as possible. The wood smoke was okay, better than cigarette smoke, but he still didn’t want it lingering in the bedding unless they were at the cabin. It struck him that it felt like ages ago when he was last washing smoke off himself, but it hadn’t been that long. At least the occasion had been nice now, a party rather than a tragedy.
Eventually he was clean and dry again, and went to the bedroom with a towel wrapped around his hips. He didn’t know what Josiah wanted right then, so when he laid his eyes on the man lounging on the bed with trepidation and excitement warring in his gaze, something inside Denny went a bit mushy.
“Hey, we don’t have to do anything now,” he said as he went to lean against his dresser, ready to pick out a pair of underwear and a T-shirt if that was what Josiah needed. That had been the attire they’d slept in whenever Josiah joined him in his bed. If he slept alone, he wouldn’t have bothered, and he looked forward to sleeping naked with Josiah in the future.
Jo had opted to go with boxers for the time being, and Denny wondered what it meant.
“N-no, it’s not that. I mean I want to, but it’s…. It’syou.” Josiah seemed frustrated and Denny understood. Close as they were, they still couldn’t peer into each other’s brains to make sense of what the other was feeling and sometimes conveying emotions was hard.
Denny opened the top drawer next to his hip and pulled out boxer shorts. He put them on, tossed the towel to the basket just inside the bathroom, and then climbed into bed.
“Okay, so, for some reason you’re more nervous about this than I am,” Denny started, hoping to sound reassuring and kind. “Which is fine. I just want to know what’s really bothering you here.”
They settled on the bed, heads on pillows as they faced each other.
Josiah took in a deep breath before quickly saying, “What if you decide that you can’t be with a man anyway?”
Denny hummed and thought for a moment. “That’s the same thought that made you suggest that I go and date other guys first. You wanted me to figure that out with someone else instead of you, because between us, the stakes are the highest.”
Jo glanced down and a hint of red colored his cheeks. “I guess. I mean… it’s got to be different with a guy.”
“Sure, but you keep forgetting that I’ve also been fucked before, just by a strap-on attached to a woman.” Denny shrugged. It wasn’t a big deal, really.
“We haven’t even had that talk yet, either.”
“I’m open to wherever the moment takes us, if I’m honest.”
“But what if it’s awkward? I don’t want anything like that coloring your view of what it’s like to have sex with a man!” Josiah’s tone went slightly high at the end.
Denny laughed, which made Jo shoot a glare at him.
“No, I’m not laughing at you. There’s clearly something I haven’t told you,” he said, still guffawing under his breath.
Josiah looked dubious. “Oh?”
“Yeah, this involves girl bits so, you know, beware,” he teased and made Josiah stick his tongue at him. “I was sixteen and I had such a crush on this girl. She was pretty, but more than that she seemed to like me and my jokes. You know, that’s catnip for a teenage boy.”
Josiah chuckled and nodded.
“So then I asked her out, we went to the movies and a few days later another one and so on. And couple of weeks in we’d held hands and made out and then one day at school she says that her parents aren’t going to be home that evening.”
“Ooh….” The sound came out like having about ten Os and Josiah smiled.
“Yeah, so of course, being a horny teenager I was, I, first of all, asked Dave what to do, and he gave me this lecture about what girls liked and stuff like that. Then fast forward to being in her bedroom and I was all about being a gentleman because that’s what Dave had said to be, you know?”
